Daniele Cuneo | Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (original) (raw)

Books by Daniele Cuneo

Pensare l'attore: Le fonti sanscrite, 2023

A tutte le latitudini e in ogni cultura, attori provetti sbalordiscono e coinvolgono il loro pubb... more A tutte le latitudini e in ogni cultura, attori provetti sbalordiscono e coinvolgono il loro pubblico con la condivisione delle emozioni, che di volta in volta si fanno pianto, brivido, rossore: stato che dalla coscienza si diffonde sul corpo. Le fonti sanscrite sulla vita emotiva degli attori, raramente percorse dagli studiosi e qui diffusamente scandagliate, offrono importanti spunti di riflessione sul loro dispositivo nascosto, la studiata capa cità, cioè, di emozionare mostrando sul proprio corpo l'intera sin tomatologia di emozioni che i performer potrebbero anche non provare. Alcuni autori, tuttavia, sembrano accettare che gli attori possano provare essi stessi delle emozioni sul palcoscenico, anche se mai in forma identica alle emozioni della vita reale, al fine di non compromettere il controllo delle tecniche di recitazione. Pensare l'attore traccia l'identikit dell'attore indiano, simulacro in cui si fondono e confondono la persona e il personaggio.

KERVAN - International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies, vol. 21, Turin 2017

Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 2017

This collection of essays explores the history of the book in pre-modern South Asia looking at th... more This collection of essays explores the history of the book in pre-modern South Asia looking at the production, circulation, fruition and preservation of manuscripts in different areas and across time. Edited by the team of the Cambridge-based Sanskrit Manuscripts Project and including contributions of the researchers who collaborated with it, it covers a wide range of topics related to South Asian manuscript culture: from the material dimension (palaeography, layout, decoration) and the complicated interactions of manuscripts with printing in late medieval Tibet and in modern Tamil Nadu, to reading, writing, editing and educational practices, from manuscripts as sources for the study of religious, literary and intellectual traditions, to the creation of collections in medieval India and Cambodia (one major centre of the so-called Sanskrit cosmopolis), and the formation of the Cambridge collections in the colonial period. The contributions reflect the variety of idioms, literary genres, religious movements, and social actors (intellectuals, scribes, patrons) of ancient South Asia, as well as the variety of approaches, interests and specialisms of the authors, and their impassionate engagement with manuscripts.

Proceedings of the first Coffee Break Conference. Published on a special issue of the Rivista di ... more Proceedings of the first Coffee Break Conference. Published on a special issue of the Rivista di Studi Orientali (LXXXIV, 1.4, 2011). Edited by me (general editor) with Matilde Adduci, Cristina Bignami, Daniele Cuneo, Camillo Formigatti, Artemij Keidan, Elena Mucciarelli.
TOC:
Elisa Freschi, General Introduction;

Camillo Formigatti, Manuscript Studies: Crisis on Infinite Methods; Michela Clemente, From manuscript to block printing: in the search of stylistic models for the identification of tibetan xylographs;
Mark Schneider, The Difference Engine: Manuscripts, Media Change and Transmission of Knowledge in Premodern Japan;
Kengo Harimoto, In search of the oldest Nepalese manuscript;
Alessandro Graheli, The choice of the best reading in Bhatta Jayanta's Nyayamanjari;

Daniele Cuneo, Thinking literature: Emic and ethic approaches;
Elisabetta Benigni, Encounters between Arabic and Western literatures: emic translations and the etic formation of literary canons;
Elisa Ganser, Thinking Dance Literature from Bharata to Bharatanatyam;
Luca Milasi, History as it is or history ignored? The search for a "new" Historical Fiction in Meiji Japan;

Matilde Adduci, The Development Question in Asia: Policies and Processes;
Claudia Castiglioni, Economic Development and Political Authoritarianism: The Pahlavi Iran Path to Modernisation in the Framework of the Cold War;
Valentina Prosperi, Doing research among construction workers in Delhi;
Francesca Congiu, Taiwan: the Organized Labour Movement and its Obstacles;

Artemij Keidan, Language and linguistics as an analytic tool for the study of (oriental) cultures;
Luca Alfieri, A Radical Construction Grammar Approach To Vedic Adjective;
Carlo Vessella, Reconstructing Phonologies of Dead Languages. The Case of Late Greek ‹n›;
Artemij Keidan, The karaka-vibhakti device as a heuristic tool for the compositional history of Panini's Astadhyayi;
Leonid Kulikov, The Proto-Indo-European case system and its reflexes in a diachronic typological perspective: evidence for the linguistic prehistory of Eurasia;

Elena Mucciarelli, Earliest texts. How to interpret them;
Frank Kohler, Rgveda 1.160: The enigma of revealing and concealing identities;
Rosa Ronzitti, Sakti: Indo-European Horizons and Indian Peculiarities;
Paola Maria Rossi, Interpreting the term Rakti in the Vedic context;
Rosaria Compagnone, The Padmasamhita in the Pancaratra tradition: How texts and tradition are linked one to another?;

Cristina Bignami, Sources and artistic representation;
Elena Preda, The Sirohi Ragamalas: an Important Discovery;
Cristina Bignami, The Indian Huntresses: Nymphs or Goddesses?

The history of South Asian studies at the University of Cambridge goes hand in hand with the hist... more The history of South Asian studies at the University of Cambridge goes hand in hand with the history of its collections of South Asian manuscripts. In the late 19th century the Library began to acquire Sanskrit manuscripts collected in Nepal and India on the initiative of the Cambridge Sanskritist Edward B. Cowell and his successor Cecil Bendall. The collaboration of other scholars such as William Rhys-Davids and Georg Bühler, as well as of other professionals, enriched the collections with manuscripts hailing from different regions of the South Asian subcontinent and written in a wide range of languages, from Middle Indian (Pali and Prakrit) to Dravidian (such as Tamil and Malayalam).

While the greater part of collection had thus been constituted by 1900, the acquisitions continued through donation or purchase throughout the 20th century. In 1883 Bendall published a catalogue of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts in the University Library that included 248 items, and in 1906 Louis de la Vallée Poussin and Caroline Mary Ridding recorded basic descriptions of the remaining manuscripts on paper index cards. However, despite these early efforts, until now the collections have still not been fully catalogued and therefore remain not easily accessible to scholars of premodern South Asia and little known to the general public.

Now the AHRC-funded project “The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia as seen through the Sanskrit manuscript collections of the University Library, Cambridge” has begun a systematic investigation aiming to produce a full catalogue of the manuscripts and to digitise a substantial proportion of them. These comprise more than 1,600 works in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Tamil and other ancient and medieval South Asian languages, produced over a time-span of more than 1,000 years, and written in over a dozen scripts and on different writing materials, such as paper, palm leaf and birch bark.

The project has provided further information on the conventions used in these manuscript descriptions.

Along with doctrinal, exegetical and ritual works issued from the many religious traditions of South Asia—from the Vedic religion to devotional Hinduism and Tantrism, from Theravāda to Mahāyāna and Tantric Buddhism, to Jainism—the Library’s holdings also include texts on a variety of “secular” topics, ranging from works of poetry and drama to treatises on philosophy, mathematics, grammar, astronomy, law, eroticism, medicine, archery, horse breeding, etc.

There is, in other words, a wealth here of cultural and historical information on South Asia of great potential significance for contemporary scholarship.

Papers by Daniele Cuneo

Comme une qui entra dans la forêt bruissante / Like One Who Entered the Rustling Forest. Hommage à Marie-Claude Porcher. Sous la direction de Lyne Bansat-Boudon et de Sylvain Brocquet. Bulletin d’études indiennes no 36 (2023-2024). Paris : Association française pour les études indiennes, 2024

This article examines an unpublished commentary on Vāmana’s Kāvyālaṅkārasūtra (early 9th century)... more This article examines an unpublished commentary on Vāmana’s Kāvyālaṅkārasūtra (early 9th century), known as ṭippaṇa or simply vivṛti, composed by a certain Sahadeva and preserved in a single paper transcript from Trivandrum, currently being edited by the present author. After an introductory section investigating Vāmana’s significance and his pioneering innovations, the second section discusses the introductory and concluding verses of Sahadeva’s work in order to assess all the available evidence on his scholarly activity’s time and place. The main part of the article explores various sections of the Ṭippana, offering an initial assessment of both Sahadeva’s exegetical style and theoretical insights. Besides his importance as the first commentator on one of the foundational figures of the discipline of alaṅkāraśāstra, his direct contributions lie in the very updating and defense of Vāmana’s system, particularly his theory-driven identification of simile (upamā) as the underlying master-ornament of all poetic ornaments of sense (arthālaṅkāra). For instance, Sahadeva enhances Vāmana’s theory by incorporating new conceptual tools from different disciplines and recent thinkers, such as the theory of lakṣaṇā by Bhaṭṭa Mukula (probably his direct teacher) and Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s theory of tātparyaśākti. This preliminary analysis of Sahadeva’s work aims to reintroduce this neglected figure into the history of alaṅkāraśāstra and to reassess and reorient the debates raging in the field of Kashmiri Poetics in the centuries before and after the turn of the first millennium.

Literary commentaries and the intellectual life of South Asia, Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, vol. 76, no. 3, 2022

Commentaries on literary texts, be they Kāvyas or Nāṭyas, are a prolific though still much unders... more Commentaries on literary texts, be they Kāvyas or Nāṭyas, are a prolific though still much understudied genre in South Asia. The stress on the literary text as the achieved and circumscribed “work of art” has undermined studies on the reception history, transmission, and composing and staging of literary texts, where the poem or drama in its entirety is not always the main unit to be considered. Along these lines, literary commentaries are crucial for understanding the relation between theoretical prescriptions and compositional/performative practices, as they often put these two dimensions of literature (the theoretical and the practical) into dialogue. Moreover, a host of knowledge systems ( nāṭyaśāstra, alaṃkāraśāstra, vyākaraṇa , mīmāṃsā , etc.), along with their philosophical insights, technical vocabulary, and hermeneutical techniques, are employed, combined, and creatively refunctionalized in literary commentaries, which therefore represent a liminal genre of śāstra that crosses the seemingly well-established boundaries among disciplines and offers to the modern scholar a unique window into the intellectual life of premodern South Asia.

Italian Scholars on India General Editor: Raffaele Torella, 2022

'Verità e bellezza' Essays in Honour of Raffaele Torella Series Minor, 2022

This paper is the fruit of a close and lasting collaboration between the two authors, elisa Ganse... more This paper is the fruit of a close and lasting collaboration between the two authors, elisa Ganser and Daniele Cuneo, the former being responsible for the first half, and the latter, the second. elisa Ganser wishes to express her gratitude to the swiss national science Foundation, whose generous contribution made the research for the paper possible within the framework of the project 'Performing arts and religious Practices in Classical and Medieval sanskrit literature' (Department of indian studies, university of Zurich). The Emotional and Aesthetic Experience of the Actor. Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien in Sanskrit Dramaturgy * Daniele Cuneo anD elisa Ganser (sorbonne nouvelle, university of Zurich) 'Moins on sent, plus on fait sentir' Diderot, Le paradoxe sur le comédien 'everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. only the dead have no sensations.' Konstantin stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

A. Graheli (ed.) The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language, Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 396-422., 2020

Implicature, loosely defined, is the capacity of human language to express a sense that is not ac... more Implicature, loosely defined, is the capacity of human language to express a sense that is not accounted for by the lexical meanings of words. Although it is often considered the least paradigmatic and the most refined use of linguistic communication, implicature in this broad understanding is a widely common phenomenon in human interaction, most apparent in instances such as ironic statements, satirical remarks, allegorical language or even frozen figurative usage, as in dead metaphors such as 'falling in love, ' 'time is running out' or 'the hands of a clock. ' However, it is the case of poetical language that presents the most evident and salient illustration of the capacity of human language to push signification far beyond the letter of the word and the limits of the allegedly strict and conventional relation between one single word and one single meaning. This semantic hypertrophy of poetical language became a heated topic of discussion in the history of Sanskrit poetics (Alaṅkāraśāstra). This discipline stands out among the śāstric traditions that focus on many topics of what one might currently call 'philosophy of language, ' because of its relative marginality in the larger philosophical scenario of the Sanskrit culture. In particular, it never was and never became a full-fledged darśana, a systematic philosophical viewpoint on reality, unlike Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā or even Vyākaraṇa, and as such it does not feature in the Sanskrit doxographies or even in the English-language introductions to Indian philosophy that all too rarely populate the shelves of contemporary bookshops. Nevertheless, this very marginality is arguably one of the reasons that allowed and maybe prompted authors of Alaṃkāraśāstra to freely borrow and reinterpret concepts from different philosophical traditions and to normally imply and sometimes openly assert the trans-sectarian attitude of their enterprise. 2 Such trans-disciplinarily is particularly manifest in the treatment of the indirect usages of language, which are often discussed by consciously crossing the lines drawn by the available theories of linguistic significations proposed by the other philosophical schools. 3 Crucial in the historical development of Sanskrit poetics is the fertile Himalayan valley of Kaśmīr. Crucial in this Kashmirian history are the ninth and the tenth cen

This short introduction focuses on the historical and constructed nature of sexuality, on the nor... more This short introduction focuses on the historical and constructed nature of sexuality, on the normative aspects of the discourses that develop around it, as well as on its inevitable entanglements with issues of societal control, power relations, and violence. It aims to show how the papers in the present panel converge in highlighting the multifaceted and polymorphic role of various South Asian discourses on sexuality in their attempted 'construction' of a normed individual as the basic building block of the society envisioned by the authors of those very discourses.

in Elliot, M., Diemberger, H., Clemente, M. (eds.) Buddha’s Word: The Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond, Cambridge, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, pp. 129-134., 2014

Cracow Indological Studies vol. XIV