Books by Salvatore Pappalardo
Bloomsbury Academic, 2021
When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder ques... more When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste.
Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Modernism in Trieste seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.
Papers by Salvatore Pappalardo
The Comparatist, 2013
329 cratic values. In fact, not only is the term not mentioned in the book, there is very little ... more 329 cratic values. In fact, not only is the term not mentioned in the book, there is very little acknowledgement as to the role of the market in determining value and reshaping educational practice. While it may be true that liberal arts education can produce both a democratic culture and economic development, students now tend to look to higher education as a means to increase their profitmaking capacities rather than their political ones. And universities that are focused on promoting democratic culture rather than profitable jobs for their graduates are becoming more the exception than the norm. If Nussbaum’s argument is the best that liberal humanism can give to the neoliberal onslaught, then liberal education in America should be worried. The days of arguing that the arts and the humanities should be supported because they produce good citizens have been swept away by the tsunami of global capital. Moreover, trying to beat neoliberal education at the “profit” game is a losing endeavor. While Nussbaum presents a compelling case why democracy needs the humanities, she does not present a convincing case as to how public goods such as health, education, equality, and liberty can be protected in the age of neoliberalism. Twentyfive years ago, at the height of the age of multiculturalism, Nussbaum’s arguments might have held more sway than they do today. However, by trying argue that the humanities is good both for democracy and the bottomline, Nussbaum has failed to address the major challenge of the day: namely, why be a liberal humanist when neoliberalism appears to have a much more profitable upside? Nussbaum opens the door for this criticism by trying to argue for profit in a book entitled Not for Profit.
Italian Culture, Jul 2, 2016
Routledge eBooks, Oct 1, 2021
Journal of Modern Literature, 2015
T.S. Eliot’s 1948 essay, Notes toward the Definition of Culture, gives voice to modernist anxieti... more T.S. Eliot’s 1948 essay, Notes toward the Definition of Culture, gives voice to modernist anxieties about culture in its regional, national, and international settings. Local affiliations, a regionally inflected patriotism, and European cosmopolitanism compose Eliot’s heterogeneous and porous cultures of modernism. The text exemplifies the intellectual history of the early twentieth century, as recent scholarly contributions suggest. In Regional Modernisms, editors Neal Alexander and James Moran explore local allegiances and regional loyalties in the British context. The essays in the collection shift the attention away from the cosmopolitan perspectives of metropolitan centers to local concerns, showing how this regionalism did not necessarily mean a retreat to a provincial outlook. Eric Aronoff’s Composing Cultures contends that the notion of culture was central to American modernism, and that an interdisciplinary debate surrounding the definition of culture informed the emergence of American Studies as an academic field of inquiry. Modernism and Melancholia by Sanja Bahun is a comparative study of Andrei Bely, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf that describes melancholia as a sort of transnational culture of modernism. Examining a multilingual canon of writers, Bahun argues that modernist fiction engages in what she calls “countermourning,” an aesthetic performance that resists the therapeutic settlement of Freud’s concept of mourning. This body of scholarship studies the ideological complexities surrounding conceptions of culture, illustrating the aesthetic and political strategies of literary modernism.
The European Legacy, Jul 28, 2022
Claudio Magris’s revisitation of the idea of Mitteleuropa in the essay-novel Danubio is often rea... more Claudio Magris’s revisitation of the idea of Mitteleuropa in the essay-novel Danubio is often read as a contribution to the imperial nostalgia inherent in the Habsburg myth, the process of transfiguration of Austrian history that Magris himself observed and theorized. This reading, however, suggests that in the context of the Cold War, Magris’s emphasis on the non-national legacy of Mitteleuropa, conceived as a strategy of resistance against the totalitarian reaches of authoritarian regimes, resists the allure of a straightforward and easy nostalgia. The narrator of Magris’s extended travelogue takes the reader on a textual journey through local narratives and literatures along the Danube, where a palimpsest of discarded and overwritten histories reveals neglected and almost forgotten paradigms. These rhetorical dockings on the banks of the Danube, located at the intersection of fiction and essayism, reflect upon the legacy of Mitteleuropa and attempt to chart a possible postnational future for Europe.
Brill | Fink eBooks, Oct 15, 2019
When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder ques... more When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste. Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Modernism in Trieste seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2011
Italian Culture, May 2, 2017
The German Quarterly, Apr 1, 2016
The Habsburg port city of Trieste has long fascinated German‐Austrian writers. Robert Musil's... more The Habsburg port city of Trieste has long fascinated German‐Austrian writers. Robert Musil's travels in Italy and his military service during World War I acquainted him with the political tensions in the city. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Musil portrays the city of Trieste as the ultimate repository of an allegedly pre‐modern Habsburg Landespatriotismus that constituted a challenge to the rise of nationalism. In the characters of the aristocrat Count Leinsdorf and the Jewish banker Leo Fischel, Musil illustrates respectively the city's dwindling dynastic patriotism and the supranational mentality of its mercantile bourgeoisie. By depicting the Adriatic city as the last, crumbling bastion of non‐national allegiances, Musil models Trieste as a synecdoche for the empire's fate, making the city a microcosm for the Habsburg state.
Journal of Austrian Studies, Jun 1, 2023
Todomodo: Rivista internazionale di studi sciasciani / A Journal of Sciascia Studies, 2023
Journal of Austrian Studies
The Journal of Austrian Studies , 2023
The European Legacy
Claudio Magris’s revisitation of the idea of Mitteleuropa in the essay-novel Danubio is often rea... more Claudio Magris’s revisitation of the idea of Mitteleuropa in the essay-novel Danubio is often read as a contribution to the imperial nostalgia inherent in the Habsburg myth, the process of transfiguration of Austrian history that Magris himself observed and theorized. This reading, however, suggests that in the context of the Cold War, Magris’s emphasis on the non-national legacy of Mitteleuropa, conceived as a strategy of resistance against the totalitarian reaches of authoritarian regimes, resists the allure of a straightforward and easy nostalgia. The narrator of Magris’s extended travelogue takes the reader on a textual journey through local narratives and literatures along the Danube, where a palimpsest of discarded and overwritten histories reveals neglected and almost forgotten paradigms. These rhetorical dockings on the banks of the Danube, located at the intersection of fiction and essayism, reflect upon the legacy of Mitteleuropa and attempt to chart a possible postnational future for Europe.
The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 2022
Claudio Magris’s revisitation of the idea of Mitteleuropa in the essay-novel Danubio is often rea... more Claudio Magris’s revisitation of the idea of Mitteleuropa in the essay-novel Danubio is often read as a contribution to the imperial nostalgia inherent in the Habsburg myth, the process of transfiguration of Austrian history that Magris himself observed and theorized. This reading, however, suggests that in the context of the Cold War, Magris’s emphasis on the non-national legacy of Mitteleuropa, conceived as a strategy of resistance against the totalitarian reaches of authoritarian regimes, resists the allure of a straightforward and easy nostalgia. The narrator of Magris’s extended travelogue takes the reader on a textual journey through local narratives and literatures along the Danube, where a palimpsest of discarded and overwritten histories reveals neglected and almost forgotten paradigms. These rhetorical dockings on the banks of the Danube, located at the intersection of fiction and essayism, reflect upon the legacy of Mitteleuropa and attempt to chart a possible postnational future for Europe.
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Books by Salvatore Pappalardo
Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Modernism in Trieste seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.
Papers by Salvatore Pappalardo
Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Modernism in Trieste seeks to fill a critical gap in the extant scholarship, securing the literary history of Trieste within the context of current research on Habsburg and Austrian literature.