Rebuilding Post-Revolutionary Italy: Leopardi and Vico's "New Science" (original) (raw)
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The prize is one of eighteen awards that will be presented on 11 January 2020, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in Seattle. The members of the selection committee were Paola Bonifazio (Univ. of Texas, Austin); Sabrina Ferri (Univ. of Notre Dame); and Armando Maggi (Univ. of Chicago), chair. The selection committee’s citation for Piperno’s book reads: Martina Piperno’s extremely well-researched volume leads readers to a significantly new and exciting approach to a poorly appreciated period of Italian modern cultural history: Bourbon Restoration Italy. Piperno convincingly shows how in postrevolutionary Italy Vico’s New Science became “a powerfully diffractive object” that helped Italian intellectuals process the deeply disturbing cultural shock that had undermined their most basic ideals. Piperno brings to the fore significant points of connection between Vico’s philosophical thought and Giacomo Leopardi’s poetics and especially his immense Zibaldone. Rebuilding Post-revolutionary Italy: Leopardi and Vico’s New Science is a truly engaging and innovative work that will become an indispensable point of reference for future scholars of Italian cultural history.
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The 1998 publication of Carla Benedetti’s Pasolini contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura [Pasolini vs. Calvino: For An 'Impure' Literature] provoked a series of attacks in the Italian press, mostly aimed at its polemical contraposition between authors and author-functions: One the one hand, Pasolini the activist, who took on personal risk to speak truth to power through the medium of his art; and on the other hand Calvino the aesthete, darling of the international postmodern literary establishment. Debates in Italy today about the cultural legacy of the twentieth century, the state of postmodernism, and the future of Italian literary culture are still haunted by the opposition of these two figures. The debates are often compounded by a perceived opposition in the field of criticism between Benedetti’s radical supporters and conservative critics. My essay compares Benedetti’s provocative call for an impure literature alla Pasolini with one of the foundational histories of Italian literature, that of Francesco De Sanctis, where in particular the sixteenth-century figures of Machiavelli and Ariosto are opposed and the former championed. Through this double comparison, I argue that Benedetti and De Sanctis are “Machiavellian” literary critics whose future-oriented strategies of expression represent one of multiple ways that the unprecedented challenges Italian culture faces today are being confronted with tools from its past.
Vico's "Constructive" language and its post-Revolutionary readers
Reprinted in 1801, Vico's New Science (originally published 1744) had a profound impact on Bourbon Restoration culture, particularly in Italy and France, where it touched post-revolutionary readers profoundly. The reasons for Vico's revival in the early nineteenth century relate closely to the trauma of the political and social changes of that era. Vico's readership seems to have had significant peaks during periods of rapid social transformation: nineteenth-century readers reread the New Science in an attempt to find the reasons for revolutionary failure, and to relate the terror, the sense of displacement, failure and trauma to recognizable laws, promising that, after a crisis, a period of renaissance must necessarily follow. This article analyses the hermeneutic practices of some post-revolutionary readers of Vico (Carlo Cattaneo, Vincenzo Cuoco, Giuseppe Ferrari, Ugo Foscolo, Francesco Lomonaco) and suggests a comparison with the practices of readers during the Second World War (Eric Auerbach, Carlo Levi, Mario Fubini). By doing so, I propose an interpretation of Vico's New Science as a ‘posthumous’ book, acquiring special shades of significance when its readers experience the feeling that nothing will ever be like before, and meditate upon it in isolation, in fear, in exile, upon return from the front, and in prison.
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Back in vogue today is the tendency of Italian philosophy toward reflection on itself that has always characterized an important part of our historiographical tradition. The present essay firstly analyzes the various interpretative positions in respect to the legitimacy, the risks, and the benefits of such a discourse, which intends to distinguish the different traditions of thought by resorting to a criterion of territorial or national kind. Secondly, the essay examines diverse paradigms that identify – in “precursory genius”; in ethical and civil vocation; and in “living thought” – the distinctive hallmark of the Italian philosophical tradition from the Renaissance to today.
Review, F.Favino, Donne e scienza nella Roma dell’Ottocento, in 'Modern Italy',
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Federica Favino's book on science and society in nineteenth-century Rome opens with commentary on two iconographic representations. The first is a photograph of Elisabetta Fiorini Mazzanti (1799-1879) which, as Favino notes, was taken as if the botanist were posing in a diorama. Mazzanti is the only woman among the 99 subjects in a collection of photographs put together by the botanist Giuseppe De Notaris (1805-77). The second image depicts astronomer Caterina Scarpellini (1808-73), apparently the only woman in Italy at that time to have had a public (funerary) monument dedicated to her. In a country eager to erect a statuepreferably equestrianfor practically anyone (monumentomania is discussed in Chapter 4), Italy's lack of iconographic images of (non-saintly) women points to a selective omission that historians can turn around and useas Favino doesas a powerful historiographical tool. Reconstructing the lives and work of Fiorini Mazzanti and Scarpellini in context, Favino offers an unprecedented cultural, social, and institutional cross-section of Rome between the end of the papal state and the early Liberal Age. Her book is brimming with information, food for thought and historiographical theses of which this brief review can offer only partial snapshots. Fiorini Mazzanti and Scarpellini have previously been addressed in the biographical papers of the late Gabriella Berti Logan (1947-2009), a scholar who dug deeply into sources on women and science in Italy between the Renaissance and the Liberal Age. Favino's book investigates the lives of Scarpellini (Chapter 2) and Fiorini Mazzanti (Chapter 3) in depth, examining the familial and friendship-based, institutional and scientific, political and religious networks in which the two women acted and managed to cultivate their passion for science and desire for self-affirmation. These networks unfolded throughout Italy, and at times internationally, but in particular in Rome, a provincial capital where education (schooling for women in particular, Chapter 1) and industrial markets lagged far behind those of northern European capitals. The professionalisation of the figure of the scientist that was happening in other parts of Europe in those decades was based in part on socially shared values of masculinity. Modern scientists, first and foremost male, excluded women from the universities, academies, and professional societies of Britain, Germany, and France, even resorting to legal measures to do so. South of the Alps women were never legally barred from universities, and this book sheds light on their presence in science in the decades between the professional accomplishments of 'exceptions' such as Laura Bassi (1711-78) or Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-74), and the point at the end of the nineteenth century when the first generations of female graduates began entering scientific professions. In these central decades of the nineteenth century, the category of 'exception' was still pertinent for Fiorini Mazzanti and Scarpellini, but in what we might consider a more evolved form. This exceptionality allowed Fiorini Mazzanti, a widow and devout Catholic from a noble family, to be appointed a member of the Accademia dei Linceithe only woman to hold this honour until the late twentieth century. Scarpellini, who was also devoutly Catholic and married but who hailed from the artisan and craftsman class, was likewise able to earn a living working at the Vatican astronomical observatory on a regular basis by operating through an intermediary. Between popes and
"On March 29, 1969, Pier Paolo Pasolini asks: “Do Novelistic Lives Still Exist?” In this article, Pasolini wonders whether the novel is still a contemporary literary form or if it is rather something which belongs to the past. He concludes that, as long as the real retains its novelistic structure, the novel will not become outdated. But why did Pasolini pose the question of the novelistic in such a time in Italian history? Pasolini was compelled by the understanding that the bourgeois consumerism dominating Italy in the 1960s tended to eliminate the novelistic from reality, forcing pre-molded destinies upon the lives of the people. It is this very homologation that puts the novel at risk: If lives are no longer novelistic, then the novel cannot be the literary device which can best tell their stories. Yet, can those who write years after Piazza Fontana still agree with Pasolini’s historicalnarratological thesis regarding the obsoleteness of the novel? After the discovery of State terrorism, can we still believe that the bourgeois State enforces its dominion over the present by inducing an ordered standardization and repressing the novelistic structure of the real? The spectacular series of detonations which bloodied a winter market day forces us to admit that the “Italian boom” ultimately led not to the triumph of order, but to a chaos that was all too novelistic. The Italy born out of Christmas ’69, the Italy of the 1970s, must then be understood as a noir, viscous as oil and populated by a multitude of characters worthy of the best crime novels. But if Italy truly is all of this, it would be a matter of denouncing the epos of a new governmental monster: a monster whose threat lies not in repressing the novelistic and producing disciplined uniformity, but in using lives and events that are strategically novelized to annihilate any possibility of resistance. A monster, therefore, with a “literary côté.” In this article, I argue that Giancarlo De Cataldo’s "Romanzo criminale" is one of the most ambitious attempts to denounce exactly such a new governmental literary monster. Novelizing the deeds of the Magliana Gang – from its seizing power in the 1970s to its withering in the 1980s – is, for De Cataldo, an opportunity to chart the State’s strategies to ward off any radical change and keep Italy stuck at the gates of history."
When Leonardo Fioravanti arrived in Venice in December 1558, he wasn't much different from the legion of other barbers, surgeons, and empirical healers who had come to the lagoon city to set up practice and vend their wares. Every morning they crowded onto the Piazza San Marco, ciarlatani with their secrets, sanpaolini brandishing serpents like broadswords and selling antidotes against their venom, distillers concocting remedies for the French Pox, empirics vending powders for scab and itch. Venice, an entrepot of Mediterranean and world trade and a place where the exotic and novel were constantly on display, had a wide and colorful variety of healers, had hundreds of them. What chance did Leonardo Fioravanti have of standing out among this raucous and eccentric crowd? What chance of succeeding where so many others had obviously failed?