Books by Nicoletta Pireddu
Routledge, 2022
_Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-edited by Didier Coste,... more _Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu; winner of the 2023 American Comparative Literature Association 'René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Collection") is a collection of innovative interdisciplinary essays on cosmopolitanism, written by leading scholars from different continents who engage with paramount aesthetic, ethical, political, historical, and pedagogical issues.
As the title implies, the volume discusses cosmopolitanism as an attitude and a thought process, but also as an object of fictional, documentary, and social representations, trying to move away from the divisive premise of radical difference, and implying, instead, that all communities are traversed by differentiations, oppositions and contradictions. Authors propose a solidarity of reason, able to craft interpretive norms and teaching methods that transcend exclusive localisms.
This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory” and the current ... more This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory” and the current post-theoretical condition, arguing that the “finitude” of theoretical projects does not mean “end”, but rather contingency and transformation of thinking, beyond irreconcilable doctrines. Contributors from different cultural and scholarly backgrounds and based in three different continents propose new areas of investigation and interpretive possibilities, reopening dialogues with past and present discourses from a plurality of perspectives and locations. After a first section that reassesses the status and scopes of critique, theory, and literature, the book foregrounds new or neglected critical vocabulary, literary paradigms, and narrative patterns to reread texts at the intersection with other branches of the humanities—history, philosophy, religion, and pedagogy. It then explores geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological domains that have been historically and ideologically overdetermined (such as postsocialist, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan spaces), recodifying them as unstable sites of both conflicts and convergences. By acknowledging the spatio-temporal and cultural delimitations of any intellectual practice, the book creates awareness of our own partiality and incompleteness, but treats boundaries as zones of contact, exchange, and conceptual mobility that promote crossings and connections.
Table of Contents
Introduction: “Recoding the Past, Re-situating the “Post-” (Nicoletta Pireddu, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, Georgetown University)
Part I Theoretical Indisciplinarities
"Meta-Critiquing: Critique, Hermeneutics, Theory," (Ming Xie, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)
"Illegitimacy as Norm: On the Temporal Structure of Science and Theory” (Kirk Wetters, Professor and Chair of Germanic Literature, Yale University)
“The Scope of Literary Theory" (Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, U of Connecticut)
“The Empirical Turn of Literary Studies” (Alexandre Gefen, Directeur de recherche, Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne nouvelle and CNRS)
"Unstable Literature" (Sébastien Doubinsky, novelist; Professor of French, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part II Unruly Rereadings
"Reading Aristocratically" (Peter Y. Paik, HK Research Professor of the Humanities at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea)
“The Function of Criticism in a ‘Post-Secular’ Age” (Vincent Pecora, Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Endowed Chair in British Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City)
“Literary Ciceronianism and the Novel” (Sandra Gustafson, Professor of English and Political Sciences, University of Notre Dame)
“Taliban Poetry for Veterans. On Critical Pedagogy” (Robert Cowan, Acting Assistant Dean for Program Development, Assessment, & Review, Hunter College; Professor of English, The City University of New York).
Part III Critical Resettlements
“Space, Mobility and Materiality: Rethinking Notions of Geographic Coherence” (Diana Sorensen, Harvard University, Dean of Arts and Humanities, and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and of Comparative Literature)
“Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent” (Neda Atanasoki, Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz; Erin McElroy, Graduate Program in Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Outsourcing Post-colonialism” (Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Professor of Linguistics and English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; Senior Professorial Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies)
"Experimental Cosmopolitanism" (Didier Coste, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne/ JNIAS-JNU, Delhi)
The first English book on contemporary Italian writer Claudio Magris, this study examines the con... more The first English book on contemporary Italian writer Claudio Magris, this study examines the connections between space and individual, national and European identity in his works. Magris invites us to cross the borders that enclose private and public spheres in order to discover the otherness within ourselves and reject the fanaticism of self-sameness. Through the recurring image of temporary homes, the book explores Magris’s ceaseless search for meaning and values, aiming at a habitable life, where diversity and tolerance can prevail over all fundamentalisms. With a sophisticated theoretical framework, this innovative analysis involves Magris’s entire fiction and non-fiction writings, down to his most recent, still untranslated collections. With what Pireddu calls “geography of domesticity,” Magris addresses the crucial question of the return to humanism that is moving literature and theory beyond the alleged death of the subject, and confirms the enduring value of the humanities as a critical and constructive tool.
Scipio Sighele, _The Criminal Crowd And Other Writings on Mass Society_
Edited, with Introductio... more Scipio Sighele, _The Criminal Crowd And Other Writings on Mass Society_
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Nicoletta Pireddu
Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins
Foreword by Tom Huhn
The so-called “age of crowds” still evokes primarily the late nineteenth-century French context, with the fearful popular uprising leading to the Paris Commune, the numerous disturbing images of masses in novels by Balzac, Sue, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, and Adam among others, and Gustave Le Bon’s renowned volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).
Yet, four years before Le Bon, Italian jurist, sociologist, cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) had published La folla delinquente. Saggio di psicologia collettiva [The Criminal Crowd. An Essay on Collective Psychology], to be followed by other pioneering explorations of group behavior and of the power of suggestion upon collective crime.
This volume offers the first English translation of Sighele’s seminal book and of excerpts from his subsequent works in the domains of sociology, psychology, law, politics, and literary criticism: La coppia criminale [The Criminal Couple], La delinquenza settaria [Sectarian Delinquency]; L’intelligenza della folla [The Intelligence of the Crowd]; La donna nova [The New Woman]; Eva moderna [Modern Eve]; Letteratura tragica [Tragic Literature]; Nell’arte e nella scienza [In Art and in Science]. An extensive introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu contextualizes Sighele’s overall contribution as a public intellectual negotiating between tradition and modernity in the European fin de siècle, able to grasp both the destructive and the constructive power of masses.
This collection draws the multifaceted portrait of a provocative and problematic thinker who, by participating in crucial international debates, brings to post-unification Italy a new outlook on paramount issues like the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, the unstable borders between individual and collective accountability in mass society, the legal and ideological constraints in the education and emancipation of women, the social and institutional challenges to the care and upbringing of children, and the responsibility of literary representation in the relationship between aesthetic standards and ethical norms.
This volume on the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and e... more This volume on the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe studies the unnoticed connection between, on the one hand, a purposeless and ephemeral beauty, and, on the other hand, the disinterestedness and the spontaneity ascribed by anthropologists to the ceremonial expenditure of “primitive” civilizations. The book highlights how, in those two apparently opposed discourses, prodigality and uselessness challenge the Western cult of profit by working in two directions: beauty is a form of lavishness, and lavishness is a source of beauty. An innovative theoretical and cultural framework at the crossroads of aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy allows me to reexamine the works of O. Wilde, G. D’Annunzio, and J.-K. Huysmans, and to claim the crucial role of neglected authors like Paolo Mantegazza and Vernon Lee in what I trace as the emergence of a proto-theorization of gift-exchange in the European fin de siècle culture. The pervasiveness of symbolic economy in those writers establishes a new dynamic relationship between decadence and modernism, and also exposes the limits of the allegedly disinterested forms of expenditure that will soon lure the modernists to go “primitive”.
_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegaz... more _The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation
Journal Issues by Nicoletta Pireddu
Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism, 2024
Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2024) of the open-access, peer-reviewed, online scholarly journal _Migrat... more Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2024) of the open-access, peer-reviewed, online scholarly journal _Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-founded and co-edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu) is available at https://migratingminds.georgetown.edu/issues/spring-2024/
Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism, 2023
The inaugural issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed, online scholarly journal _Migrating Minds:... more The inaugural issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed, online scholarly journal _Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-founded and co-edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu) is available at https://migratingminds.georgetown.edu/issues/2023-fall/
_The European Legacy. Towards New Paradigms_ 27 (7-8), 2022
As one of the foremost European writers and intellectuals of our time, Claudio Magris has consist... more As one of the foremost European writers and intellectuals of our time, Claudio Magris has consistently kept Europe at the center of his work. In addition to numerous volumes of literary criticism spanning over four decades, Italian translations of German masterpieces, and contributions to European journals and public debates, Magris has gained international recognition for his literary works—among them, the award-winning Danube (1989) and Microcosms (1999), Blindly (2008), Blameless (2017), and his most recent Tempo curvo a Krems (2019).
This special issue of _The European Legacy_ aims to connect Magris's thought and poetics to the broader European discourse from a variety of methodological, cultural, and comparative perspectives. We explore the complexities of the European idea in and through Claudio Magris’s oeuvre, with a particular focus on the role of literature and the humanities as creative and critical tools to engage with community building and human values.
Parallax 28 (1), 2022
How does the coexistence of different linguistic codes redefine speakers’ collective allegiances?... more How does the coexistence of different linguistic codes redefine speakers’ collective allegiances? How do literary and aesthetic representations symbolise the multiple identification mechanisms enabled by linguistic diversity and what do they entail for our understanding of community formation outside the frame of nationhood, which historically has relied upon geopolitical and linguistic delimitation?
The essays in this special issue engage with a wide range of geographies and localities, art works, and historical periods, tracing continuously how these works, in their attention to language(s), imagine issues of belonging, identity, and living together. The various contributors pursue both a critique and an elaboration of Anderson’s work from the perspective of literary, artistic, and societal multilingualism. Focusing on non-conventional corpora, each of them interrogates the representation of communities by paying attention to multilingualism, matters of migration and integration, and peripheral identities.
The essays look at novels, travelogues, poetry, video art, and oral history from all around the world, and centrally investigate the legacies of enforced monolingualism and language standardisation in different continents and epochs. In the process, they show the importance of bringing marginalised voices into mainstream discussions on identity and belonging to undermine the nation-state’s ideological apparatus in the twinned issues of the multilingual imagination of community and the imagination of multilingual community.
Journal Articles by Nicoletta Pireddu
Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism, 2024
_The European Legacy. Towards New Paradigms," Special Issue "Claudio Magris and the Quest for Europe," Guest Editor Nicoletta Pireddu, 2022
Comparative Literature, 2015
Within the context of the divisive intellectual debate on the cultural legacy of ancient Greece i... more Within the context of the divisive intellectual debate on the cultural legacy of ancient Greece in the development of Europeanness, this essay focuses on three contemporary writers—Magris, Kundera, and Schmitt—who engage with a seminal European humanistic text, Homer's Odyssey, to challenge the cohesiveness of the idea of Europe. The authors' responses to the treatment of exile, return, homeland, and identity in Ulysses' voyage problematize not only the boundary between belonging and not belonging to Europe but also the distinction between center and periphery within the European space. Approaching the European question from borderline areas, Magris, Kundera, and Schmitt elaborate a politics of home transcending fanatic closure and absolute drifting. Their odysseys enact what I call critical nóstoi, ironic homecomings that undermine Husserl's “spiritual telos of European man” but place a wager, nonetheless, on a European cultural and political project founded upon th...
Abstracts Issue 10 – Fall/Winter 2017 in the Cold War era. The play, in fact, assaults the US cha... more Abstracts Issue 10 – Fall/Winter 2017 in the Cold War era. The play, in fact, assaults the US chauvinist and anti-communist ideology of the 1950s, and displays its consequences upon individuals and society. The post-war paranoia is acted out in the hidden corpse of Mr. Rosepettle, which Mme. Rosepettle preserves in her closet. The corpse, as a fetishistic object (for Mme. Rosepettle) and a source of fear and anxiety (for Jonathan), signals the impossibility, for the US of the time, to identify with tangible models and positive values (despite the materialistic ethos of the culture of the 1950s, as witness Mme. Rosepettle's obsessive need for fun and self-gratification). On the contrary, only death and loss, as overhanging threats and macabre horizon of collective expectation, paradoxically provide the nation with a unifying sense of identification. The Cold War, as a conflict that was never directly waged or fought, but nevertheless informed American identity, politics and cultu...
Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto At a moment when free circulation within the European Union is hampe... more Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto At a moment when free circulation within the European Union is hampered by particularisms and populisms, and the European project seems increasingly endangered by the non-European «other» inside and outside its geopolitical confines, this essay investigates Europeanness shaped by the joint action of travel and translation, as forms of transit and border crossing promoting exchange and difference. Focusing on Christine Brooke-Rose and Diego Marani, the essay explores the act of «carrying across» common to geographic dislocation and linguistic transfer as an agent of transformation able to regenerate the European power of symbolization through linguistic and cultural grafts. The two authors undermine eurocentrism from within by presenting language and identity as unstable spaces of multiple interactions. Their practice of spatial and cultural transfer situates Europeanness between national singularity and the levelling indistinction of globalism, redefinin...
Abstract Pireddu begins our discussion of transcendence and art as critical principle. The plural... more Abstract Pireddu begins our discussion of transcendence and art as critical principle. The plurality of standpoints vis-a-vis the sublime--which contemporary reality invokes at the levels of both form and content--suggest a far more articulated overview than the one ...
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Books by Nicoletta Pireddu
As the title implies, the volume discusses cosmopolitanism as an attitude and a thought process, but also as an object of fictional, documentary, and social representations, trying to move away from the divisive premise of radical difference, and implying, instead, that all communities are traversed by differentiations, oppositions and contradictions. Authors propose a solidarity of reason, able to craft interpretive norms and teaching methods that transcend exclusive localisms.
Table of Contents
Introduction: “Recoding the Past, Re-situating the “Post-” (Nicoletta Pireddu, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, Georgetown University)
Part I Theoretical Indisciplinarities
"Meta-Critiquing: Critique, Hermeneutics, Theory," (Ming Xie, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)
"Illegitimacy as Norm: On the Temporal Structure of Science and Theory” (Kirk Wetters, Professor and Chair of Germanic Literature, Yale University)
“The Scope of Literary Theory" (Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, U of Connecticut)
“The Empirical Turn of Literary Studies” (Alexandre Gefen, Directeur de recherche, Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne nouvelle and CNRS)
"Unstable Literature" (Sébastien Doubinsky, novelist; Professor of French, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part II Unruly Rereadings
"Reading Aristocratically" (Peter Y. Paik, HK Research Professor of the Humanities at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea)
“The Function of Criticism in a ‘Post-Secular’ Age” (Vincent Pecora, Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Endowed Chair in British Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City)
“Literary Ciceronianism and the Novel” (Sandra Gustafson, Professor of English and Political Sciences, University of Notre Dame)
“Taliban Poetry for Veterans. On Critical Pedagogy” (Robert Cowan, Acting Assistant Dean for Program Development, Assessment, & Review, Hunter College; Professor of English, The City University of New York).
Part III Critical Resettlements
“Space, Mobility and Materiality: Rethinking Notions of Geographic Coherence” (Diana Sorensen, Harvard University, Dean of Arts and Humanities, and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and of Comparative Literature)
“Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent” (Neda Atanasoki, Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz; Erin McElroy, Graduate Program in Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Outsourcing Post-colonialism” (Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Professor of Linguistics and English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; Senior Professorial Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies)
"Experimental Cosmopolitanism" (Didier Coste, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne/ JNIAS-JNU, Delhi)
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Nicoletta Pireddu
Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins
Foreword by Tom Huhn
The so-called “age of crowds” still evokes primarily the late nineteenth-century French context, with the fearful popular uprising leading to the Paris Commune, the numerous disturbing images of masses in novels by Balzac, Sue, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, and Adam among others, and Gustave Le Bon’s renowned volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).
Yet, four years before Le Bon, Italian jurist, sociologist, cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) had published La folla delinquente. Saggio di psicologia collettiva [The Criminal Crowd. An Essay on Collective Psychology], to be followed by other pioneering explorations of group behavior and of the power of suggestion upon collective crime.
This volume offers the first English translation of Sighele’s seminal book and of excerpts from his subsequent works in the domains of sociology, psychology, law, politics, and literary criticism: La coppia criminale [The Criminal Couple], La delinquenza settaria [Sectarian Delinquency]; L’intelligenza della folla [The Intelligence of the Crowd]; La donna nova [The New Woman]; Eva moderna [Modern Eve]; Letteratura tragica [Tragic Literature]; Nell’arte e nella scienza [In Art and in Science]. An extensive introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu contextualizes Sighele’s overall contribution as a public intellectual negotiating between tradition and modernity in the European fin de siècle, able to grasp both the destructive and the constructive power of masses.
This collection draws the multifaceted portrait of a provocative and problematic thinker who, by participating in crucial international debates, brings to post-unification Italy a new outlook on paramount issues like the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, the unstable borders between individual and collective accountability in mass society, the legal and ideological constraints in the education and emancipation of women, the social and institutional challenges to the care and upbringing of children, and the responsibility of literary representation in the relationship between aesthetic standards and ethical norms.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation
Journal Issues by Nicoletta Pireddu
This special issue of _The European Legacy_ aims to connect Magris's thought and poetics to the broader European discourse from a variety of methodological, cultural, and comparative perspectives. We explore the complexities of the European idea in and through Claudio Magris’s oeuvre, with a particular focus on the role of literature and the humanities as creative and critical tools to engage with community building and human values.
The essays in this special issue engage with a wide range of geographies and localities, art works, and historical periods, tracing continuously how these works, in their attention to language(s), imagine issues of belonging, identity, and living together. The various contributors pursue both a critique and an elaboration of Anderson’s work from the perspective of literary, artistic, and societal multilingualism. Focusing on non-conventional corpora, each of them interrogates the representation of communities by paying attention to multilingualism, matters of migration and integration, and peripheral identities.
The essays look at novels, travelogues, poetry, video art, and oral history from all around the world, and centrally investigate the legacies of enforced monolingualism and language standardisation in different continents and epochs. In the process, they show the importance of bringing marginalised voices into mainstream discussions on identity and belonging to undermine the nation-state’s ideological apparatus in the twinned issues of the multilingual imagination of community and the imagination of multilingual community.
Journal Articles by Nicoletta Pireddu
As the title implies, the volume discusses cosmopolitanism as an attitude and a thought process, but also as an object of fictional, documentary, and social representations, trying to move away from the divisive premise of radical difference, and implying, instead, that all communities are traversed by differentiations, oppositions and contradictions. Authors propose a solidarity of reason, able to craft interpretive norms and teaching methods that transcend exclusive localisms.
Table of Contents
Introduction: “Recoding the Past, Re-situating the “Post-” (Nicoletta Pireddu, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, Georgetown University)
Part I Theoretical Indisciplinarities
"Meta-Critiquing: Critique, Hermeneutics, Theory," (Ming Xie, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)
"Illegitimacy as Norm: On the Temporal Structure of Science and Theory” (Kirk Wetters, Professor and Chair of Germanic Literature, Yale University)
“The Scope of Literary Theory" (Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, U of Connecticut)
“The Empirical Turn of Literary Studies” (Alexandre Gefen, Directeur de recherche, Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne nouvelle and CNRS)
"Unstable Literature" (Sébastien Doubinsky, novelist; Professor of French, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part II Unruly Rereadings
"Reading Aristocratically" (Peter Y. Paik, HK Research Professor of the Humanities at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea)
“The Function of Criticism in a ‘Post-Secular’ Age” (Vincent Pecora, Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Endowed Chair in British Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City)
“Literary Ciceronianism and the Novel” (Sandra Gustafson, Professor of English and Political Sciences, University of Notre Dame)
“Taliban Poetry for Veterans. On Critical Pedagogy” (Robert Cowan, Acting Assistant Dean for Program Development, Assessment, & Review, Hunter College; Professor of English, The City University of New York).
Part III Critical Resettlements
“Space, Mobility and Materiality: Rethinking Notions of Geographic Coherence” (Diana Sorensen, Harvard University, Dean of Arts and Humanities, and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and of Comparative Literature)
“Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent” (Neda Atanasoki, Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz; Erin McElroy, Graduate Program in Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Outsourcing Post-colonialism” (Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Professor of Linguistics and English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; Senior Professorial Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies)
"Experimental Cosmopolitanism" (Didier Coste, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne/ JNIAS-JNU, Delhi)
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Nicoletta Pireddu
Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins
Foreword by Tom Huhn
The so-called “age of crowds” still evokes primarily the late nineteenth-century French context, with the fearful popular uprising leading to the Paris Commune, the numerous disturbing images of masses in novels by Balzac, Sue, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, and Adam among others, and Gustave Le Bon’s renowned volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).
Yet, four years before Le Bon, Italian jurist, sociologist, cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) had published La folla delinquente. Saggio di psicologia collettiva [The Criminal Crowd. An Essay on Collective Psychology], to be followed by other pioneering explorations of group behavior and of the power of suggestion upon collective crime.
This volume offers the first English translation of Sighele’s seminal book and of excerpts from his subsequent works in the domains of sociology, psychology, law, politics, and literary criticism: La coppia criminale [The Criminal Couple], La delinquenza settaria [Sectarian Delinquency]; L’intelligenza della folla [The Intelligence of the Crowd]; La donna nova [The New Woman]; Eva moderna [Modern Eve]; Letteratura tragica [Tragic Literature]; Nell’arte e nella scienza [In Art and in Science]. An extensive introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu contextualizes Sighele’s overall contribution as a public intellectual negotiating between tradition and modernity in the European fin de siècle, able to grasp both the destructive and the constructive power of masses.
This collection draws the multifaceted portrait of a provocative and problematic thinker who, by participating in crucial international debates, brings to post-unification Italy a new outlook on paramount issues like the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, the unstable borders between individual and collective accountability in mass society, the legal and ideological constraints in the education and emancipation of women, the social and institutional challenges to the care and upbringing of children, and the responsibility of literary representation in the relationship between aesthetic standards and ethical norms.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation
This special issue of _The European Legacy_ aims to connect Magris's thought and poetics to the broader European discourse from a variety of methodological, cultural, and comparative perspectives. We explore the complexities of the European idea in and through Claudio Magris’s oeuvre, with a particular focus on the role of literature and the humanities as creative and critical tools to engage with community building and human values.
The essays in this special issue engage with a wide range of geographies and localities, art works, and historical periods, tracing continuously how these works, in their attention to language(s), imagine issues of belonging, identity, and living together. The various contributors pursue both a critique and an elaboration of Anderson’s work from the perspective of literary, artistic, and societal multilingualism. Focusing on non-conventional corpora, each of them interrogates the representation of communities by paying attention to multilingualism, matters of migration and integration, and peripheral identities.
The essays look at novels, travelogues, poetry, video art, and oral history from all around the world, and centrally investigate the legacies of enforced monolingualism and language standardisation in different continents and epochs. In the process, they show the importance of bringing marginalised voices into mainstream discussions on identity and belonging to undermine the nation-state’s ideological apparatus in the twinned issues of the multilingual imagination of community and the imagination of multilingual community.
Focusing on the nexus of art, giving and temporality, this essay addresses the intuitions and the contradictions of unconditional expenditure in D’Annunzio’s works, analyzing the leitmotif of the hand as an ambivalent carrier of lavishness and power. From Trionfo della morte to Il Fuoco, from Le vergini delle rocce to his autobiographical writings, the implications of D’Annunzio’s argument contribute to an extended theoretical debate that interrogates the role of value in aesthetic and social practices—from Nietzsche, Mauss, and Bataille to Heidegger and Derrida. Can art’s luxurious dissipation truly break the circle of speculation and restitution?
See call for papers in "Announcements" section.
It is now accepting contributions for its Vol.3, Issue 2 (Fall 2025).
Deadline for proposals: October 31, 2024
Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2025
The journal provides a unique, international forum for innovative critical approaches to cosmopolitanism emerging from literatures, cultures, media, and the arts in dialogue with other areas of the humanities and social sciences, across temporal, spatial, and linguistic boundaries. By placing creative expressions at the center of a wide range of contemporary and historical intercultural relationships, the journal explores forms of belonging and spaces of difference and dissidence that challenge both universalist and exclusionary paradigms.
Within this framework, seminar contributors are invited to address instances of glocal cosmopolitanism in theory, literature, and culture, engaging with their ideological, aesthetic, and ethical implications.
_Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ is hosted by Georgetown University, Washington D.C., and co-supported by the “Plurielles” Research Group, Bordeaux Montaigne University, France.
The Inaugural Issue is scheduled to appear in Fall 2023.
The journal invites submissions for its first regular issue, Vol. 1 (1), Spring 2024.
For inquiries about proposals, please contact the editors-in-chief at migratingminds@georgetown.edu by October 13, 2023.
Submission deadlines:
December 15, 2023 for full-text articles;
January 19, 2024 for book reviews and review articles.
Please visit: migratingminds.georgetown.edu
Twitter @MigratingMinds_
“Picturing Displacement: Tania Bruguera and Fazal Sheikh in Conversation.”
The Georgetown Humanities Initiative cordially invites you to the second event in the Global Humanities Seminars "Understanding and Including Forced Migrants and Refugees: Responses from the Humanities."
Two internationally renowned visual and media artists will discuss their work on borders, migration, and refugees.
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban installation and performance artist who engages with the role of emotions in politics and explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change. Her main concerns are institutional power, borders, migration, and human rights. Her work spans events, action, film, sculpture, writing and teaching alongside site-specific works.
Fazal Sheikh has spent his career photographing individuals and communities displaced by conflict and environmental change around the world. His principal form is the portrait, although his projects also encompass personal narratives, found photographs, sound recordings, archival material, academic essays, and his own written texts.
The event will take place via Zoom and you can register here: https://georgetown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9VH9AqjCTMSxDLyddcDwyA
Since antiquity, cities have been pivotal elements in collective and personal histories. As physical and imagined spaces, they have fostered narratives of grandeur and downfall, center and periphery, democracy and imperialism, temporality and spirituality.
The conception and depiction of the city have evolved across time and space, providing different models of social and cultural relations, influencing aesthetic conventions, and generating particular emotions and values, often in contrast with other geographic settings or forms of communal living.
This seminar invites submissions from **undergraduate students** addressing the relation between cities and aesthetic representation (in literature, visual arts, film and other medias, literary, cultural, and critical theories) in any historical period or area of the world. How has the city helped define civilization? In what ways does the urban framework shape characters and events? How are the form and genre of a work of art influenced by the city? What social, political, ethical issues does the representation of the city raise? What contradictions emerge from the depiction of urban life?
Comparative papers may engage with ways in which the city as an image, setting, or subject enables an investigation of the following or similar topics (but not exclusively):
Community vs society
Real and ideal cities
Ancient and modern cities
The city in detective fiction, thrillers, noirs
Languages, genres, and narrative perspectives shaped by cities
Utopias and dystopias
The city and the countryside
Nature and culture
Tradition and modernity
The “civilized”/”primitive” dichotomy
Progress, industrialization, technology, and their discontents
Social order and disorder
Urban crowds and revolutions
Gangs, protest, and violence
Class struggle, gender, racial, and economic disparities
Slums, banlieues, and other sites of social and spatial marginalization
Freedom vs alienation
Work and capitalism
Cities and avant-gardes
Capital cities
Port cities
Imperial cities
Colonial and postcolonial legacies
Monuments, ruins, and collective memory
Travel narratives
Wars and natural catastrophes
Environmental challenges
East and West, North and South
Local, national, and transnational identities
Metropolises, megalopolises, globalization, and cosmopolitanism
Migration, borders, multiculturalism
Paper proposals should be submitted through the ACLA portal at the following link:
https://acla.org/22-23-undergrad-seminar-paper-submit
For information please contact Prof. Nicoletta Pireddu, ACLA Program Committee Chair, pireddun@georgetown.edu
Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with twenty innovative essays by
humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of
perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures,
Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the
necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations.
The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary
propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices
in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to
appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres
and media, under different modes of production and reception.
In the de-territorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key
to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.
https://iicwashington.esteri.it/iic_washington/en/gli_eventi/calendario/2021/11/meet-the-author-gianrico-carofiglio.html
To celebrate the release of Three O' Clock in the Morning, join us for a talk with international bestselling writer Gianrico Carofiglio, in conversation with Nicoletta Pireddu.
The discussion will focus on Carofiglio's novels, his career path from an anti-Mafia prosecutor to a full-time writer, his inspiration, his thoughts about the passing of time, and his ideas of truth and justice as well as the role of humanities in personal and professional education.
Gianrico Carofiglio - a former prosecutor specialized in organized crime, who served as Senator from 2008 to 2013 - is a multi-award winning author with bestselling books translated into 27 languages worldwide.
Nicoletta Pireddu is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Georgetown University and Inaugural Director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative.
WHEN: November 3rd, 2021 at 3.00pm (ET)
WHERE: Zoom webinar
EVENT LANGUAGE: English
National Taiwan Normal University, June 15-18, 2022
CALL FOR PAPERS
ACLA Undergraduate Seminar (online)
“Representing Crisis”
Since ancient times, literature and other aesthetic forms have engaged with various manifestations of crisis, from social revolutions and wars, personal and family struggles, economic recessions and political turmoil to natural disasters and disease outbreaks.
From the narrative point of view, crisis also defines the decisive turning point in a story, when emotions reach the peak of intensity and the protagonist finds the courage and strength to lead events toward the conclusion.
Crisis can bring about a change in the order of things, by exposing the faults in a society or community and allowing new political, ethical, philosophical, and artistic forms to emerge.
This seminar invites undergraduate students to explore the modalities with which literary works and/or productions from other expressive media have addressed crises and their literary and extra-literary implications.
We welcome comparative analyses that focus on representations of crises in various genres, time periods, and geographical settings, in connection with (but not exclusively):
Conflict between tradition and innovation
Heroes and anti-heroes
Emotional and mental breakdowns
Trauma
Grief and resilience
Community and ethical responsibility
Political upheavals
Cultural and ideological clashes
Past and present pandemics
Environmental and climate issues
Racial justice
Globalization
Migration and refugees
The Undergraduate Seminar will take place entirely online.
Abstracts are accepted through October 31, 2021 and should be submitted at the following link:
https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper
Submitting a paper does NOT guarantee acceptance. The organizer of the seminar will contact you after the selection process is completed.
For more information about the conference, visit the ACLA website at https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting-2022.
Submission deadline: February 12, 2021. Seminar description attached.
Paper proposals will undergo the same vetting process adopted for faculty's submissions.
If you would like to contribute towards the ACLA general operating costs or contribute towards the Travel Grant fund, please go the following link:
https://www.acla.org/acla-donation
Click the appropriate option and follow the directions.
We thank you for your support.
Please see attached Call for Papers.
"Island Stories"
Seminar Organizer: Nicoletta Pireddu, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University
Edenic getaways and utopian elsewheres, or dystopian spaces of exile and segregation; marginalized, exploited, self-referential appendages of nations, but also fertile spaces of multicultural exchanges, and microcosms of pluralism; real destinations or existential metaphors… Islands evoke a vast array of topoi, conditions, and ideologies which have been abundantly depicted, shaped, and problematized by literature, cinema, and the visual arts. Furthermore, in the last two decades theory has developed concepts and methodologies to examine islands as a specific area of intellectual inquiry from a literary, cultural, and geopolitical perspectives, starting from the notion of “nissology” that Grant McCall introduced in the 90s.
This seminar aims to contribute to the expanding field of island studies, bringing together voices and approaches that engage with the remarkable richness of “island-ness.” How does the aesthetic production of islands in their own terms relate to representation about them? How has discourse used islands as geographic spaces and tropes? Papers will explore islands as critical, ex-centric vantage points from which to engage with (but not exclusively) questions of globalism vs localism; communities and societies; minor and ultra- minor status; liquidity and border studies; the global South; colonialism and post-colonialism; primitivism and exoticism; subalternity vs micro-nationalism; environmental studies and cli-fi; utopia studies; theories of space and place; autochtony vs. cosmopolitanism and migration; odoeporics and tourism; ethnography; literature of port-cities; Mediterranean and oceanic studies.
Comparative theoretical investigations and applied readings are equally welcome, also in view of a future publication (essay collection or special journal issue).
Paper submissions opens August 31 and closes September 23, 2019, through the ACLA portal: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting
For inquiries please contact Prof. Nicoletta Pireddu at pireddun@georgetown.edu
particular schools of thought or ideologies.
At Sixth and I, Washington DC. May 26, 2022