Italian

La ciociara’s juxtaposition of urban and country lifestyles, brought to the fore by the wartime food crisis, exposes a central theme in Moravia’s narrative: private property in its alienating and constructive functions for the development of human agency in its creative and moral potentiality. I examine the Marxist underpinnings of Moravia’s humanism and its representation through the most immediate form of private property, which is food. I argue that the gastronomic lifestyles of various social classes described in La ciociara illustrate the Marxist dialectic of property’s use and exchange value. In the course of this dialectic the human agent moves from immediate to more mediated objects of appropriation, to their negation as fetishes of identity, and eventually to the qualitative reaffirmation of their use value, thus prompting the petty bourgeois protagonist to find the more profound roots of her humanity.

This project, undertaken by a group of scholars and technology specialists at Princeton University, aims to construct a research platform based on a hypertextual edition of the Zibaldone encoded in TEI5. In this edition, internal references are activated as hyperlinks and individual paragraphs are linked to the themes from the author’s indexes. The platform will allow users to rearrange and annotate the text, to collate, export as a Word file and visualize graphically its semantic and chronological networks, thus facilitating its systematic exploration and giving insight into the nature of its fragmentary discourse. Expected site publication is May 2013.

Native scholarly hypertext is a rare genre which issues from a particular cognitive experience that is difficult to translate in expository academic writing. The fragmentary form of some research note collections of eminent unconventional intellectuals from the pre-digital age exhibits the groundwork of hypertext. Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone is one such text comprised of ca. 10,000 internal and external references, and thematic indexes with ca. 11,000 referenced fragments. The TEI encoding of the manuscript and its hypertext rendition, undertaken by a group of scholars and technologists at Princeton University, provide insight into the genesis of dialectical thought, grapple with the inadequacy of current technology to represent its hypertextuality, and raise questions about hypertext’s potentialities for being adopted by scholars today.

The project of remediating Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone addresses the manuscript’s hypertextual dimension of cross-references between related passages and their allocation to thematic indexes, which Leopardi wrote with the intention to mediate his research notes into scholarly publications. The project objective is to actualize the author’s design for harvesting the Zibaldone’s intra-textual semantic networks and reconstruct its inter-textual bibliographic networks by building a digital research platform, which would enable users to comprehensively mine the text’s structural complexity. The XML encoding in TEI P5 allows to process the Zibaldone in custom-selected layers of its encoded elements for the exploration of their interrelations through statistical charts, histograms, network visualizations. In its future development, the platform would expand to an interactive space, where users could add their own annotations to the text and contribute to the site’s editorial apparatus. The project has been a collaboration between Princeton University and the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. The website is in the process of being transferred to www.digitalzibaldone.net

In his reflections on the reading process, Leopardi juxtaposes the experience of pastime readers with that of scholarly readers, articulating a dialectics between their different modes of intentionality in the act of reading. Whereas the pursuit of pleasure promptly leads pastime readers to boredom, scholarly readers are able to gain lasting pleasure from their utilitarian interest in reading, and therefore pastime readers are encouraged to adopt the productive scholarly approach to reading. On the other hand, the studious mode of reading confronts a cognitive impasse which is dispelled by reverting the reader's intentionality to reading simply to pass the time. I present a close reading of Leopardi's argumentation in the context of several theoretical frameworks for interpreting the affective and cognitive blocks which he observes in the reading process, namely: reader reception theory, the psychological theory of flow, Jon Elster's study on the subversion of instrumental rationality, Seneca's recommendations on how to read, and Heidegger's notion of boredom. I suggest that Leopardi's phenomenological analysis of the act of reading exposes the reader's instrumental intentionality as the main factor responsible for its breakdown; yet, at the same time, the occasional failures to engage in this common everyday activity foster the release of the agent from the instrumental modes of validating experience. 2

The Digital Zibaldone project proposes to remediate Giacomo
Leopardi’s miscellaneous collection of thoughts as a digital editing environment
for the organization of research fragments into hermeneutic discourse
by implementing models for interactive digital scholarly editions,
the representation of knowledge on the semantic web, and the design of
augmented interfaces for humanities scholarship.

La ciociara's juxtaposition of urban and country lifestyles, brought to the fore by the wartime food crisis, exposes a central theme in Moravia's narrative: private property in its alienating and constructive functions for the develop-ment of human agency in its creative and moral potentiality. I ...