Yvonne Bezrucka

Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britain's self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a Southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a 'Northern' aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and its newly created past. In highlighting the oftenforgotten link between so-thought 'harmless' aesthetics and politics, the invention of a Northern aesthetics is shown to be the rhetorical and eristic premise for direct political change. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening, all contributed to the creation of this national, 'enlightened', Northern cultural environment. With its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights-interpreted as a prophetic precursor of Constitutional Monarchy-the invention of Northern aesthetics was set against the Southern aesthetics of order, harmony, and beauty. Challenging the European Grand Tour, the new aesthetics championed the Domestic and Picturesque Anti-Grand-Tour, the English garden, Hogarth's new 'line of beauty' and his 'shell-aesthetics', Francis Grose's revolutionary 'aesthetic regionalism', and a, both old and new, more consonant 'Gothic' and rough, aesthetics of sublimity. This last there to defy the constant resurgence of an a-historical metaphysics of beauty. Intellectuals privileged thus the autochthonous tradition of British authors and British empiricism, against continental religion and superstition that sanctioned an authoritarian politics which they disclaim and which the Gothic Novel mocks. However, if empiricism, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and common law were vital to this emerging tradition, so too was the other driving force of Britain's medieval inheritance, the fantasy world of mythic heroes, magic creatures, and a celebration of what would come to be known as the 'fairy way of writing', institutionalised by the creation of the first literary university canon of 'English' poets and authors (T. Warton). The mythological "invention" of an autochthonous past, nevertheless, produced a sort of "amnesia of the processes of ethnogenesis and migrations" (P.J. Geary p. 153) which, in the end, is what creates that engrafting of peoples on peoples that produce a new people (182). E. Brontë will, soon later, address exactly this topic and react to it, incisively speaking of the "North wind" that preoccupied her (see ch. 5.4: Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights': "This North Wind that Chills Me" pp. 205-24).

Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britain’s self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a Southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a ‘Northern’ aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and its newly created past. In highlighting the often-forgotten link between so-thought 'harmless' aesthetics and politics, the invention of a Northern aesthetics is shown to be the rhetorical and eristic premise for direct political change. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening, all contributed to the creation of this national, ‘enlightened’, Northern cultural environment. With its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights – interpreted as a prophetic precursor of Constitutional Monarchy – the invention of Northern aesthetics was set against the Southern aesthetics of order, harmony, and beauty. Challenging the European Grand Tour, the new aesthetics championed the Domestic and Picturesque Anti-Grand-Tour, the English garden, Hogarth’s new ‘line of beauty' and his 'shell-aesthetics', Francis Grose's revolutionary ‘aesthetic regionalism', and a, both old and new, more consonant 'Gothic' and rough, aesthetics of sublimity. This last there to defy the constant resurgence of an a-historical metaphysics of beauty. Intellectuals privileged thus the autochthonous tradition of British authors and British empiricism, against continental religion and superstition that sanctioned an authoritarian politics which they disclaim and which the Gothic Novel mocks.
    However, if empiricism, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and common law were vital to this emerging tradition, so too was the other driving force of Britain’s medieval inheritance, the fantasy world of mythic heroes, magic creatures, and a celebration of what would come to be known as the ‘fairy way of writing', institutionalised by the creation of the first literary university canon of ‘English’ poets and authors (T. Warton).
  The mythological "invention" of an autochthonous past, nevertheless, produced  a sort of  “amnesia of the processes of ethnogenesis and migrations” (P.J. Geary p. 153) which, in the end, is what creates that engrafting of peoples on peoples that produce a new people (182). E. Brontë will, soon later, address exactly this topic and react to it, incisively speaking of the "North wind" that preoccupied her (see ch. 5.4:  Emily Brontë’s 'Wuthering Heights': “This North Wind that Chills Me” pp. 205-24).
First chapter for free download from the Editor's page, at Cambridge Scholars.

Lo studio rinviene nel concetto di genio lo snodo fondamentale che permette il passaggio da un paradigma epistemico olistico ad un paradigma epistemico particolarista. Questo capovolgimento filosofico - la rivoluzione della percezione che si manifesta nel Settecento - viene coadiuvato sia dalla nuova filosofia empirica che dall'autorità anti-classica, ma 'geniale', di William Shakespeare. Shakespeare fornirà, infatti, per il campo estetico e letterario il tramite per la contestazione delle regole degli antichi attraverso la convalida dell'originalità e dell'autorevolezza anche dei moderni. L'altro caposaldo è la centralità dei sensi dell'empirismo di Locke e Hume, ripreso da "The Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712) di Addison, che contesterà l'innatismo e il concetto di genio precedente, attraverso la difesa della capacita immaginativa, ora vista come presente in tutti gli esseri umani.  La nuova percezione del mondo, che contesta l'operatività del sistema analogico rinascimentale proponendo un universo che la nuova scienza rende sempre più complesso e ricco di dati reali, richiederà nuovi codici mimetici adatti ad una realtà sempre più parcellizzata e molteplice. Ciò permetterà la nascita di un'estetica del tutto nuova ed anti-universale. L'unità della varietà dovrà fare spazio alla varietà 'tout court'; pertanto si cercherà un registro di rappresentazione diverso, realistico più che ideale, che si tradurrà in una nuova estetica - un'estetica regionalista - limitata a tempi e luoghi ben precisi e non più riferibile all'antica metafisica del bello, il che comporterà la caduta dell'idea di perfezione. I nuovi princìpi saranno la varietà, il sublime, il pittoresco, il gotico, il giardino inglese, il caratteristico, capaci di rispecchiare le più varie sensibilità e che si declineranno, nel Settecento inglese, in un orgoglioso recupero di prerogative indigene. La ricerca individua i nuovi princìpi di questo processo in autori quali W. Duff, W. Shakespeare, J. Addison, M. Akenside, W. Hogarth, W. Gilpin, U. Price, R.P. Knight. Enfasi è posta anche sulla nascita di un'estetica regionalista ad opera di Francis Grose. The book examines the paradigmatic change which took place in the 18th century when the exclusive concept of ingeniousness was progressively undermined by the rise of the imagination, a non-exclusive faculty present in each and all. This marks also the passage from an aesthetics of the beautiful to an aesthetics of the sublime, and furthermore the passage from holism to particularism, from unity and authority to variety and individualism. Examined authors and critics are: W. Duff, W. Shakespeare, J. Addison, M. Akenside, W. Hogarth, W. Gilpin, U. Price. Great emphasis is set on Francis Grose's formulation and recognition of an avant la lettre regional conception of aesthetics.

"Oggetti e collezioni nella letteratura inglese dell'Ottocento" indaga lo statuto dell'oggetto nel periodo del massimo espansionismo britannico, quando nelle case vittoriane proliferano oggetti eterogenei, tra i quali, numerosi, appaiono gli objets d'art, gli oggetti coloniali e quelli antropologici. Il periodo coincide con la celebrazione del capitalismo e mercantilismo borghese che, dal Settecento in poi, si era vieppiù affermato. Gli oggetti della cultura materiale ottocentesca sono, a Londra, un segno miniaturizzato e tangibile dell'Impero. Gli 'oggetti' tradiscono l'essenza ostensiva sia della nazione che dei loro proprietari e rivelano che la società vittoriana è ormai una palese società dello spettacolo. Le 'collezioni' degli oggetti sembrano, invece, ancora motivate dall'ansia tassonomica che già nel Settecento si era espressa nelle catalogazioni del sistema natura e che, ora, anche nel microcosmo soggettivo, paiono voler rassicurare che tutto è ordinabile e che varietà ed eclettismo non regnino ancora.
Inquietanti in Dickens e Wilde, le collezioni si fanno eversive in Conan Doyle e in Bram Stoker dove appaiono funzionali a significazioni sia estetiche che culturali discriminatorie, che, si dimostra, è valso la pena indagare. La ricerca ha inoltre evidenziato la centralità della filosofia dell'arte di Walter Pater che si fa, nell'Ottocento, il campione del 'regionalismo' estetico, nato cento anni prima con Francis Grose (cf. 'Genio ed immaginazione nel Settecento inglese', qui). Objects, at their worst, substitute people, and this particularly so in the fully affirmed commodity culture of the 19th century: if Dickens and Wilde exemplify and challenge this outcome, Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker rather use objects in a downright ideological and, often fully racist, way.

A Synopsis of English Literature provides a summary of English Literature meant for Students who want to have both an overview and some insights on the topic. It is a study-aid meant to be used in connection with other more formal works on English Literature such as, e.g., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, David Daiches' A Critical History of English Literature, and, last but not least, Mario Praz's Storia della letteratura inglese. All the aforementioned works have been used as reference books to create this outline in the first place. They are therefore mentioned here with the gratitude necessary for the help they have provided and as an aid to Students as the necessary further step to be taken in studying this rewarding topic more deeply. A Synopsis of English Literature has therefore been conceived in an experimental basic visual form so to provide Students with blank space enough to write down and complete it with those pieces of information they believe to be needed as to render this book a personal, visually more effective, mnemonic tool.

My Ph.D thesis examines the development of the concept of form in the light of the Post-Impressionist aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. While it is often assumed that Virginia Woolf works in their wake, their influence has not been examined in detail before. The dissertation draws attention to the polarity of the views on art which Roger Fry and Clive Bell as art critics pursued, and to the consequences these imply. Fry's and Bell's aesthetics are tested against Virginia Woolf's concern for art in general, and in particular against her statements on the artist in her novels and essays. After an introduction in which the general development of aesthetic criticism in the nineteenth century is traced, the critical ideas of Fry, his influence on Woolf, and the theories of Bell are explored in Chapters 2 to 4. Chapters 5 to 7 examine Woolf's use of their aesthetic ideas in the following novels: To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts. Fryian concepts such as beauty, design, rhythm, texture, unity and vision are shown to play a crucial role in her fiction, which, if unacknowledged, limits our understanding of her artistic universe. These concepts represent the background on which all her experimental writing, her study of the re-presentation of reality through the medium of the novel, is based. Woolf's concern for form is thus shown to be a development from the rejection of the mimetic conventions towards abstraction. The extremity of this solution, however, proved its limitation. The predicament in which Bernard, the artist of The Waves, is entrapped directed Woolf away from Bell's decontextualized universe towards the equipoised vision of reality championed by Roger Fry in his work on Cézanne; this constituted the basis for her new concept of beauty, not as truth but as "pied beauty". La tesi esamina la ricezione di Virginia Woolf delle due estetiche che si diramano dal Bloomsbury Group: quella di Roger Fry e quella di Clive Bell e analizza il loro influsso sulla poetica della scrittrice. Fondamentali interlocutori di Woolf, i due critici d'arte la ingaggiano in una meditazione critica sul potere mimetico del codice semiotico verbale che si concluderà in una presa di posizione postimpressionista e antiolistica anticipatoria di quanto il posmodernismo adotterà come suo tratto caratterizzante.

My essay, "Regionalismo e antiregionalismo: Thomas Hardy e V.S. Naipaul", pp. 99-116, in the book I have edited: "Regionalismo e antiregionalismo "(Y. Bezrucka ed., contributors: Franco De Faveri, Elio Franzini, Sergio Giovanazzi, Antonio Scaglia) examines the two different standpoints that Thomas Hardy and V.S Naipaul  have on identity politics. Hardy analyses the issue of identity as a necessary mediation-process between the clash of inside/outside cultural values of minority-communities and regions – typical of regional contact-zones – privileging and safeguarding only the points of contact that might be found and that need to be protected. Naipaul downplays and refuses all notions of borders and geopolitical identifications of people with specific 'spatial' homelands altogether, because these, according to him, cause to postcolonial subjects who live in an already fully globalised world, only disorientation and disquiet. He therefore champions the notion of  a cultural, country-of-the-mind identity politics. For the postcolonial subject 'home' is thus identified with a spatial, geopolitical location of origin that one carries everywhere  one goes. These  countries of origin – often places one has been forced to leave – have then a chance to become countries of the mind, but only in the "spatial new intercultural globalised places and nations" where one can live and work accepted and unheeded by one’s fellow citizens. Only in these cosmopolitan metropolis, like London, as Naipaul points out – the fully globalised and multicultural 'places' where differences of identity are not only welcomed but, eventually, also overseen as being irrelevant – one can just be oneself, being accepted simply as a member of the a-geographical 'extended' and multicultural homes of the human family.

My essay, in my edited book, "Prodromi inglesi di un'estetica regionalista", pp. 105-125, examines how eighteenth-century Platonic aesthetics, based on universal conceptions of perfection and beauty, was dismantled in favour of an aesthetics of 'particularity', based on single specimens. The result was the appraisal and the increasing importance of various and competing styles, leading, eventually, to the recovery of the gothic and the picturesque, and derived from these, also the new garden aesthetics, Italian, French, and English, that will represent a symbolic outline of the natural and the political outlooks of their relative countries. Connected to this there is also  the progressive affirmation of both regional and national types - not yet played out as unique individuals - but still, types that will be outlined at the expense of those notions that upheld the ideal of a  'universal' humankind.
Il libro presenta contributi di autori vari sui temi indicati dal titolo (Y. Bezrucka, Franco De Faveri, Sergio Giovanazzi, Giovanna Massari, Vittorio Ugo),

My essay,: "Letteratura e canone: le ragioni dell'identità culturale. Jeanette Winterson e J.M. Coetzee", 95-104, in my edited collection, examines how choices linked to the creation of a literary 'canon' –the adoption of any universal and essentialist notions of identity, history, and values – tend to erase notions of both cultural and gendered difference. The essay aims at showing why marginal and minority identities (those based on gender, or postcolonial, regionalist ones ) are often 'forced' to assume a defensive 'strategic essentialism' (C. Spivak) simply to make themselves heard and to dismantle the authoritarian stance of the majority 'essentialist' positions. These last are often at work in the academia due to its privileged position of being 'the' canon-creation place. Works of both authors are thus examined from a critical, cultural-studies standpoint. The essay furthermore aims to show why 'critical regionalism' as a form of strategic essentialism, has to be considered an important instance of the many and possible strains of the cultural-studies school of criticism. See also my essay on opium and J. Conrad's Almayer's Folly, present here, to see issues from another point of view.

My essay, Y. Bezrucka (1995)  “Il postmodernismo: l’accettazione ironica del doppio senso”, in my edited collection, addresses important points of the aesthetics and philosophy of postmodernism, drawing attention on the formalistic features of both postmodernist literature and architecture. The summary is a synthetic but relevant read for an understanding of this literary and architectural school of criticism in that Postmodernism sees the subject as a relational entity, rather than an autonomous source, a product of the interrelation of subject and culture, a code made of a corpus of codes, a subject immanent and relational to the world where humankind lives (see p. 102). Indeed, it is exactly the alleged distance between subject and object, fixed by Descartes, that postmodernism thoroughly deconstructs (see p. 105). The postmodernist attitude is thus detected in Baudelaire's modernist flâneur, but with differences. If the 19th-century modernist flâneur is enticed by the seductions of the metropolis – whose paratactical relations are the paradigmatic element of both modernity and postmodernity – the difference of the 20th-century is that one is confronted with ungraspable seductions that are subject to a constant renewal process, but this continuous change is accepted with an ironic (postmodern) rather than tragic (modernist) spirit. Irony becomes thus the dividing demarcation line between the tragic modernist attitude towards the triumph of variety, compared to its postmodern ironic acceptance. Postmodern art is therefore difficult, in that it - programmatically - rejects holistic 'once and for all solutions', or, in a metaphor, cathartic beauty. On the contrary, postmodernism creates catachrestic works, which, at the same time, contain their principle and its negation, powerfully claiming a constant collaboration of the viewer, reader, observer, the interpretative process being an ongoing one, and due to find only provisional solutions. Reality, being in constant evolution, makes this 'forced accountability' the real ethical goal of the works themselves and by extension of postmodernist art. (Bezrucka 92-93). For regionalist beauties, see my essay on Naipaul and Hardy, present amongst my essays here, in Academia.edu.

The essay examines the typical issues regional communities are confronted with when new ideas, coming from different environments, challenge their traditional culture. Communities are seen and studied by Hardy as Darwinian organisms that uncritically react to different ideas by devaluing and adapting themselves to the "new", but not necessarily "better", values. This is portrayed metaphorically in Giles's death. Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders" points to cultural memory and \u2018critical regionalism\u2019, that Hardy uses and defends beign this the vehicle for a constant openness to \u2018the new\u2019 mitigated by a conscious \u2018strategic essentialism\u2019 \u2013 as a possible protection of the old but positive values of marginal cultural environments. If organisms easily die, as Hardy points out, culture needs ethically to interpose as a mechanism to prevent, from a Darwinian point of view, the extinction of values of these threatened \u2...

L'invenzione del paesaggio nordico tra Settecento e Ottocento esamina l'operazione ideologico-culturale che ha luogo nel Settecento e che culmina nella creazione di un'estetica propriamente inglese, nonch\ue9 nordica in senso lato. Avvalorando le proprie prerogative interne e attraverso la geniale creazione di uno stilema interpretativo nuovo il pittoresco gli intellettuali inglesi procedono ad una vera e propria invenzione' di un'estetica nordica, che autorizzer\ue0, da un punto di vista teorico, l'affrancamento dell'Inghilterra dall'estetica greco-romana e dal suo giogo classicista. L'amore per la natura nordica' e il conseguente fiorire dei Domestic Tours o Picturesque Travels, \ue0 la Gilpin in contrapposizione all'imperante Grand Tour continentale nobiliter\ue0 ideologicamente l'Inghilterra quale paese dall'identit\ue0 unica e peculiare e degno di una sua propria estetica. Tali viaggi autorizzeranno la ricezione positiva della...

The article examines Albert Wendt\u2019s "Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree" and argues that this short story (1974) expresses views compatible with two characteristic concerns of postcolonial aesthetics: on the one hand, an identity politics which undermines the ideological and strategic use of Western canonical and hierarchical versions of beauty in order to champion an alternative aesthetic, on the other hand a meditation about the necessary, though extremely painful, abandonment of an oral culture in favour of a chirographic one. Both beauty and ethnicity are epitomized and symbolized by the tattoo art forms used in this region: 'tatau' and 'malu' serve as political signifiers and testify the use of a textual body-politics using a 'dissenting bodies' aesthetics. This is the new aesthetics of a besieged colonial identity, threatened by Western conformism, the aesthetics of people who want rather to assert themselves as 'soga'imiti', bodies proclaiming their irreducible, unique, personal identity

\u201cRepresentation and Truth: Law and Equity in Robert Browning's \u2018The Ring and the Book\u2019\u201d argues for Browning's ability to engage himself with contextual Victorian legal matters (continuing debates about the limitations of Equity, divorce, murder and capital punishment), issues central to the Victorian period (see S. Petch), whilst recurring to a historiographic poem which is apparently both temporally and geographically removed but clearly linked to Browning\u2019s England. Specifically, the paper draws a parallel between the Courts of conscience (Equity Courts presided by the Lord Chancellor) and the Catholic Canon Law courts of Italy presided by the Pope and their common forms of \u2018discretionary justice\u2019. Equity\u2019s right of adjudication, based on its \u2018arbitrariness\u2019, had already been heavily disputed (J. Bentham) and still was heavily disputed (by J.S. Mill, and in many Parliamentary debates) in Browning\u2019s times. All this brought in what has been called the \u201cBentham and Austin\u2019s positivist legal agenda\u201d, which led to the union of the two courts (Common Law and Equity Courts) ordered by the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875. Browning engages himself though indirectly with these issues, by demonstrating the provisional i.e. cultural, gender, regional, and historically determined notions of truth rather than referring to a putative truth\u2019s essentialism which, as he points out, could, at that point, be found in fideistic terms only. Accordingly, Browning takes thus sides with the rational party. This standpoint is also applied both stylistically and formalistically to the poem itself: issues such as representation and truth \u2013 the structure of the poem as a juxtaposition of nine relativistic versions of the selfsame facts (the murder) which all vie and contend their plausibility \u2013 make 'The Ring' and the Book a prototype model work and an implicit statement for what has become a truism in much contemporary postmodernist fiction

La tesi esamina l'utilizzo di tecniche pittoriche nei romanzi di Virginia Woolf. La teoria estetica del Bloomsbury Group che si dirama in linee antitetiche, nella fattispecia quella di Roger Fry, teorizzatore del postimpressionismo, e quella di Clive Bell, teorizzatore dell'astrattismo, viene da Woolf rielaborata nei termini di una mimesi letteraria che testimonia l'originalit\\ue0 della scrittrice sia in ambito modernista che postmodernista ante litteram. Fondamentali interlocutori di Woolf, i due critici d'arte la ingaggiano infatti in una meditazione teorica sul potere mimetico del codice semiotico verbale che si concluder\\ue0 in una presa di posizione postimpressionista e antiolistica anticipatoria di quanto il posmodernismo adotter\\ue0 come suo tratto caratterizzante.My Ph.D thesis examines the development of the concept of form in the light of the Post-Impressionist aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. While it is often assumed that Virginia Woolf works in their wake, their influence has not been examined in detail before. The dissertation draws attention to the polarity of the views on art which Roger Fry and Clive Bell as art critics pursued, and to the consequences these imply. Fry's and Bell's aesthetics are tested against Virginia Woolf's concern for art in general, and in particular against her statements on the artist in her novels and essays. After an introduction in which the general development of aesthetic criticism in the nineteenth century is traced, the critical ideas of Fry, his influence on Woolf, and the theories of Bell are explored in Chapters 2 to 4. Chapters 5 to 7 examine Woolf's use of their aesthetic ideas in the following novels: To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts. Fryian concepts such as beauty, design, rhythm, texture, unity and vision are shown to play a crucial role in her fiction, which, if unacknowledged, limits our understanding of her artistic universe. These concepts represent the background on which all her experimental writing, her study of the re-presentation of reality through the medium of the novel, is based. Woolf's concern for form is thus shown to be a development from the rejection of the mimetic conventions towards abstraction. The extremity of this solution, however, proved its limitation. The predicament in which Bernard, the artist of The Waves, is entrapped directed Woolf away from Bell's decontextualized universe towards the equipoised vision of reality championed by Roger Fry in his work on C\\ue9zanne; this constituted the basis for her new concept of beauty, not as truth but as "pied beauty"

The article examines Dickens\u2019s indictment of those extreme forms of violence, \u201cwithin the law\u201d, i.e. forms of \u201clegalised violence\u201d which transform force into right, and produce, in their extreme form, what Dickens considers to be the \u2018scandal\u2019 of the law, the death penalty or capital punishment. Accordingly, we see in A Tale of Two Cities the degeneration of authority into authoritarianism. Indeed, both Paris and London tell the same \u2018tale\u2019, they both resort to \u2018Bia\u2019 (violence) in order, so it is paradoxically maintained, to safeguard \u2018Dike\u2019 (justice). This, Dickens points out, produces coercion rather than persuasion, which, besides renovating the circle of injustice and violence, puts the legitimacy of the law into question. Dickens not only oppugns patent sites of authority; he also shows how established structures of micro-power and authority continue to function unperceived and unquestioned, fostered by the uncritical, domestic and social, acts of acquiescence and conformism to its unquestioned rules as, for example, Jarvis Lorry's adherence to the gospel of duty demonstrates. Dickens shows to his countrymen that, notwithstanding their belief in the law, in adopting capital punishment they are as \u2018violent\u2019 as they contest the French are, putting thus the legitimacy of the Law itself into question. L'articolo pone l'attenzione sullo 'scandalo' della legge che, paradossalmente, per evitare la violenza, usa la stessa violenza finanche nella sua forma estrema: la pena capitale. Dickens pertanto mostra ai suoi connazionali, indignati dagli estremismi della Rivoluzione Francese, che le due forme di violenza hanno in realt\ue0 esiti analoghi in quanto entrambe decostruiscono la liceit\ue0 della legge stessa. In tal modo Dickens, oltre a criticare fortemente (potremmo dire in termini beccariani) l'utilizzo della pena capitale, richiama l'attenzione del suo pubblico sull'effettiva efficacia di un meccanismo penale coercitivo che, basato sulla paura della pena, non cambia per\uf2 l'interiorit\ue0 della persona

The entry deals with the history of the Performing Arts as an engag\\ue9 art form which claims the collaboration of the audience and whose characteristic is a live performance in front of the presence of an implicated public. In its specificity it is therefore called Performance Arts whereas Performing Arts is a more general term which comprises various art forms which rely on the tekne of the artists and thus do not, necessarily, present an ideological committment. Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture Dale Southerton University of Manchester, UK November 2011 1664 pages SAGE Publications, Inc Lecturers Individual Purchasers Hardcover ISBN: 9780872896017 \\ua3385.00 Pre Publication Price \\ua3325.00 The three-volume Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture covers consuming societies around the world, from the Age of Enlightenment to the present, and shows how consumption has become intrinsic to the world\\u2019s social, economic, political, and cultural landscapes. Offering an invaluable interdisciplinary approach, this reference work is a useful resource for researchers in sociology, political science, consumer science, global studies, comparative studies, business and management, human geography, economics, history, anthropology, and psychology. The first encyclopedia to outline the parameters of consumer culture, the Encyclopedia provides a critical, scholarly resource on consumption and consumerism over time. Key topics: Theories and concepts Socio-economic change Socio-demographic change Identity and social differentiation Media Style and taste Mass consumptions Ethical Consumption Civil society Environment Domestic consumption Leisure Technology Work Production Markets Institutions Welfare Urban life

My article, in Abrams's book, examines how the performance of The Man in Gold allows the pragmatist philosopher Richard Shusterman to actively and deeply engage his public via his self-fashioning performance. In line with a pragmatist aesthetics, he is thus able to provoke people’s reaction so as to make them discover their own unexpected and impromptu deep and unexpressed thoughts, in line with the core aim of the performing arts’ spirit.

The article examines the transposition of postmodern philosophy into the stylistic and formal choices of postmodern fiction. A characteristic trait of postmodernism is shown to be the ironic, rather than the tragic, modernist reception of variety, and the consequent absence of ultimate, once and for all, answers.
Il mio articolo: "Il postmodernismo: l';accettazione ironica del doppio senso",
pp. 85-111, traccia i tratti formali e l'influsso della filosofia del postmodernismo in letteratura. Esamina pertanto i paradigmi filosofici del postmodernismo (relativismo strategico, smantellamento della gerarchia binaria, difesa delle identità marginali, trionfo della varietà sull'unità con  eclettismo, egualitarismo) mettendo in enfasi la ricezione ironica, postmoderna per l'appunto, e non tragica (tipica del modernismo letterario) della varietà degli stili e delle interpretazioni del reale. Si esaminano quindi alcuni assunti filosofici della filosofia del postmodernismo

My article proposes a revision of the periodization and the canon of Romanticism by going back to the roots of key elements of this literary period, in linking together the imagination to the pivotal assumption of the Enlightenment, i.e. the debunking of innatism, as Locke had proposed it. Joseph Addison reworks his theory of the imagination accordingly, in particular, in his Journal «The Spectator», with a series of essays called 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' (1712). Here he affirms that the tabula rasa of the mind is modelled by the sensations we acquire via the senses, which write on the ‘blank slate’, producing our distinguished and unique understanding of the world. The faculty of the imagination is thus revolutionarily seen not as an innate gift of the gods to geniuses, but simply as a faculty each human being possesses. Each and every human being could, from then on, imagine a different world, fostering thus what I consider the major asset of all Romanticisms of the world: romantic individualism. Therefore, I propose to link these two, only seemingly different, cultural periods of time, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, together, to give their due both to the empiricists and to the romantics, who jointly permitted an evolution of humankind, in ‘authorising’ all human beings in the use of their imagination, just as artists, scientists, and so-thought geniuses had done in the past. In doing this they became ‘artists’ themselves, assuming upon them the accountability towards reality. ‘Enlightened Romanticism’ synthesizes this revolutionary synergy created by the dismissal of innatism and the rise of the imagination.

The article aims to focus on the rhetoric of TV-series. Utopia, Homeland, and Occupied, are thus examined in their characterizing traits, being all constructed via the epistemic filter of a fear-eristics that often produces an oversimplified propaganda jargon linked to a racist imagology. How these digital, but ontologically guided, rhetorical strategies then work with populism is made clear in the essay.

Opium starts to appear insistently in some masterpieces of nineteenth-century English literature and this essay aims to examine the metaphoric relevance this drug has in the literature of the period. The works I am going to take into consideration are Thomas De Quincey’s 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' (1821), Wilkie Collins’s 'The Moonstone' (1868), Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel 'Edwin Drood' (1870), Rudyard Kipling’s 'The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows' (1884), Arthur Conan Doyle’s 'The Sign of the Four' (1890), and Joseph Conrad’s most relevant first novel 'Almayer’s Folly' (1895). In all these literary works, and in various ways, opium assumes a distinguished significance, being often used as a material evidence of 'otherness' in Victorian Culture and Literature, where it becomes a primary means for a rich in consequences reading of reverse colonization.

The essay deals with the Victorian Opium Literature, seen from the standpoints of Reverse Colonization and Darwinian Adaptation in various authors: Thomas De Quincey, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and in Joseph Conrad's very first novel  Almayer’s Folly.
A similar English Version is present in "Rivista Studi Vittoriani RSV" present here in academia.edu:
https://www.academia.edu/37186722/Y._Bezrucka_2018_Food_for_Dreams_and_an_Appetite_for_Nations_Opium_and_Darwinian_Metaphors_in_Victorian_Literature_RSV_44_31-53

Thomas Hardy's novel 'The Well-Beloved' is seen as the summa of his poetics and as the aesthetic manifesto of his 'critical regionalism'. This salvage-operation safeguards the regional cultural memory from the Darwinian fossil-like 'dead branches' demise of those environments that an uncritical aesthetics of the canonic and 'the new' belittles or renders obsolete and outdated. The essay shows how Hardy's conception of time and history is thus based on a cycle logic rather than an arrow of time one, exactly as the one Darwin himself had adopted in his works.
The article has been inserted in the selection of Hardy’s critical articles for the year 2008 by The Year’s Work of English Studies, Oxford UP, Oxford 2010, pp. 53-54,
http://ywes.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/maq004v1. 
and is also quoted in Rosemarie Morgan (President of the Thomas Hardy Society), in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, Ashgate, 2010.
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754662457

The essay examines the diachronic use of beehive-images and their politics. The essay demonstrates why De Mandeville's extraordinary metaphor, in 'The Fable of the Bees', derives directly from Bosse's icon of Hobbes's 'The Leviathan'. It also reads De Mandeville as one of the great Fathers of the Enlightenment, backing them up in their fight against medieval innatism.

Il mio saggio esamina come l'ecocritica sia a tutto diritto una della possibili scuole interpretative critiche della letteratura. Nata come scuola critica negli anni Novanta del 900 è concentrata, al suo apparire, su problematiche ambientali relative soprattutto all'inquinamento del pianeta e ai cambiamenti climatici e volta alla ricerca di una politica della sostenibilità. La scuola si è rapidamente però evoluta a comprendere vasti temi quali: la relazione natura/cultura, umano non umano, letteratura ed ecologia, fino ad arrivare anche ad una forma di bioetica volta alla salvaguardia dei diritti umani, animali e vegetali. L'ecocritica si interessa soprattutto a come questi temi vengono svolti, dibattuti e veicolati all'interno delle opere letterarie. Esamino quindi la nascita di tali studi in Inghilterra che, fin dal loro apparire, con il libro di Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology, si concentrano soprattutto sulla poesia della natura, e in particolare sul poeta William Wordsworth. Su proposta di Bate tale scuola riattualizza il discorso di Wordsworth a partire dal suo implicito messaggio ecologista. A partire dalle concettualizzazioni della natura in ambito britannico esamino i grandi cambiamenti climatici e le conseguenti concettualizzazioni del sistema natura che, da un ambiente del tutto negativo nella letteratura antico-anglosassone passa ad essere percepito nel Medioevo, con la diffusione della visione giudaico cristiana, come un sistema unitario, secondo il modello biblico. La ricezione dell'antichità classica nel Rinascimento porterà sì all'enfasi sul nuovo sapere scientifico, ma attraverso il filtro della scolastica passerà anche alla teologia naturale il modello e il sistema ordinato di una Natura codex Dei basato sul modello analogico della scala natura. Con la spinta della filosofia di F. Bacon e l'attacco all'innatismo della scuola empirica britannica di Locke e Hume, l'enfasi sarà quindi sull'ambiente natura come luogo di fenomeni naturali dalle manifestazioni anche più crudeli, che vieppiù diventa difficile contenere in un sistema olistico che solo la Teodicea di Leibniz riesce ancora agevolmente a sostenere. È questo il modello che il neoclassicista Pope ad inizio Settecento icasticamente così sottoscrive: "whatever is is right". L'enfasi è ormai però volta alla Natura e ai suoi vari dati e alle sue varie manifestazioni e soprattutto alla mente che la recepisce. L'osservazione diretta porta quindi alla constatazione della diversa Natura dell'isola britannica. I nuovi paradigmi sono ora volti alle caratteristiche precipue della specifica Natura nordica, un filtro epistemico finalizzato all'emancipazione dai modelli greco-latini e i suoi sistemi di bellezza votati all'idea del bello quale esempio di perfezione 'universale' che mal si aggrada al pittoresco e gotico paesaggio britannico. Addison, Hogarth, Gilpin e Burke diventeranno quindi i fautori dell'invenzione del paesaggio nordico e della sua estetica, che culminerà storicamente nel pittoresco, nel sublime paesaggistico, e nelle atmosfere di un gotico definito 'sassone', paradigmi che costituiranno i capisaldi dell'estetica nordica. Promossi tramite l'enfasi posta sul 'democratico' viaggio turistico volto alla ricerca del pittoresco – che è paesaggio libero –  e che nella sua declinazione in giardino 'inglese' è anche paesaggio politicamente cifrato della monarchia costituzionale, esso è anche viaggio domestico  (interno alla nazione) alla ricerca di ideali estetici in pieno contrasto con l'estetica classica e l'aristocratico e continentale 'Grand Tour'. È questa un'estetica che anche il romantico Wordsworth con la sua celebrazione della natura britannica contribuirà a veicolare e promuovere. Prendo quindi in esame l'interesse di tale autore per l'ambiente e il paesaggio naturale sottolineando come la sua richiesta di salvaguardia paesaggistico-ambientale abbia promosso l'istituzione dei parchi naturali e di leggi e fondazioni a tutela dell'ambiente naturale e culturale, il 'cultural and natural heritage' che ancor oggi è in essere, protetto, ad esempio, da istituzioni quali quella del National Trust.

L'invenzione del paesaggio nordico tra Settecento e Ottocento esamina l'operazione ideologico-culturale che ha luogo nel Settecento e che culmina nella creazione di un'estetica propriamente inglese, nonché nordica in senso lato. Avvalorando le proprie prerogative interne e attraverso la geniale creazione di uno stilema interpretativo nuovo  - il pittoresco -  gli intellettuali inglesi procedono ad una vera e propria invenzione' di un'estetica nordica, che autorizzerà, da un punto di vista teorico, l'affrancamento dell'Inghilterra dall'estetica greco-romana e dal suo giogo classicista. L'amore per la natura 'nordica' e il conseguente fiorire dei Domestic Tours  o Picturesque Travels, à la Gilpin,  in contrapposizione all'imperante Grand Tour continentale  nobiliterà ideologicamente l'Inghilterra quale paese dall'identità unica e peculiare e degno di una sua propria estetica. Tali viaggi autorizzeranno la ricezione positiva della 'barrenness' del Nord, cioè dell'asprezza di un mondo desolato e crudo, poco favorevole all'uomo, in contrapposizione all'armonica solarità del Sud. Tutti questi elementi passeranno, di lì a poco, nella teorizzazione del sublime burkiano che, a sua volta, aprirà alla ricezione positiva della non catartica disarmonia, del bello 'particolare', e del sentimentale 'taste', il gusto del tutto soggettivo. La natura Nordica si farà poi coincidere con la libertà politica espressa dalla mixed constitution, la monarchia costituzionale, che diverrà cifra, attraverso una vera e propria landscape politics presente nell'iconografia semiologica delle planimetrie del giardino inglese contrapposte alla rigida formalità del giardino francese, del nuovo assetto politico inglese.  A conferma della distinta identità della nazione si procederà ad una mitizzazione delle origini celtiche dell'isola e alla valorizzazione di modelli artistici autoctoni, tramite la creazione di un canone' indigeno sorretto da un ripescaggio archeologico di autori o nativi' e dimenticati (Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare) o creati tout-court (Ossian). Fondamentale a tal fine sarà la rivalutazione del gotico britannico, definito Saxon-gothic, che, attraverso un falso storico, sarà interpretato come stile nordico e non francese. Sono queste operazioni culturali che provano come la storia letteraria del Settecento partecipi alla creazione ideologico-culturale e alla propagazione di un'idea di nazione dall'identità unica e peculiare  creata cioè come fosse essenzialisticamente nordica'  che favorirà, da una parte, lo sbocco imperialista dell'Ottocento e che, dall'altra, con la difesa del particolarismo estetico, dichiarato in modo inequivocabile dal teorico della caricatura Francis Grose (1788), sfocerà nella ricezione personale, sentimentale e finanche idealistica, dell'io romantico.

The article examines the growing relevance objects assume in the Victorian fully utilitarian society so as to become the tangible symbol of the substitution of "being" into "having". The confusion between being and having is an early and significant instance of a "society of the spectacle", which measures the worth of people through the objects they possess and put on display via fashion and cult material goods, in order to reach thus their ideal level of 'distinction' (Bourdieu). This is masterfully portrayed and displayed  in 'Little Dorrit'. Dickens shows how commodities serve as the means of a self-fashioning 'being' which is nevertheless, and unfortunately, not just a mask but sometimes the only, and acquisitive,  "subjectivity" left. This is all there is and remains in the new capitalistic society of the, on-show, dandies, where objects and possessions substitute the essence of one's being. In the article I argue that Dickens foresaw this development and reacted strongly against it, particularly in his book ‘Little Dorrit’. In my book 'Oggetti e collezioni' (available here) I examine the theorists of the society of the spectacle: Veblen, Barthes, Bourdieu, and others.
L'articolo esamina l'utilizzo precoce di un codice di cultura materiale che diventa cifra, per Dickens, di una 'malaise' culturale dove sono gli oggetti a determinare l'essere, piuttosto che il contrario. La crematistica dell'epoca e la sparizione dell'io in un universo oggettuale è pertanto fortemente criticato come asservimento dell'individualità ad un io sociale conformista ed eterodiretto.

Intervista a Sia Figiel, autorevole voce femminile delle Isole del Pacifico, sulla sua concezione di 'regionalismo critico' e 'strategic essentialism'. Interview to Sia Figiel about the South Pacific body-politics aesthetics of tattoo and malu and the South Pacific conception of history and critical regionalism from a woman artist's point of view.

Il problema dell'equità, della giustizia, e del suo ruolo è, in quest'opera, il catalizzatore della 'plot' che funge da supporto al tema privilegiato del macrotesto shakespeariano, cioè la gestione del potere e dell'autorità esercitata in suo nome, nonché l'esame della sua specifica fenomenologia, da considerarsi già una psicologia 'ante litteram'. L'autoritarismo è decostruito attraverso l'argomento della sessualità che, nel 'play', è sinonimo di autonomia, autocoscienza e libertà. Liceità, autorità e autorevolezza sono quindi indagate in 'Measure for Measure' sottoponendo ad esame il simbolo primo del potere: il re, quale capo gerarchico, e il potere incarnato nella legge e nella sua declinazione in pena.

The article examines Woolf's consciousness of the necessity of a female identity and body politics in order to dismantle the discrimination of women from a man's world. Lily the artist, and Woolf the writer, will both be united in their engagé decision to became relevant in the constestation of the symbolic order in which they are forced to live. In this they both, on different levels and with different media, testify to the necessity to intervene directly in life, through an 'anti litteram' sort of Arendtian vita-activa type of engagement, taking on the responsibility of becoming accountable for the identity politics of one's being in the world and its happenings. They thus transfer personal action into social transaction, inscribing memory and desire into collective history.

The article examines the use of  'visual rhetoric', i.e. the translation of literary images, activated in the mind of artists and readers by the reading of texts, and by them then translated into mental images, or into representations given through other artistic media of the mind. Aesthetic representation, often thought to be a neutral temple of Truth, devoted to atemporal and universal values such as Beauty and Goodness, reveals in Othello its epistemic limits: far from being a privileged vehicle for final cognition, it is rather a laden and culture specific cognitive mechanism like many others. The article aims to show that it is limited, as all forms of knowledge are, by its own'rhetoric', in this case a 'visual' one, invalidated by the eristic aim, the ideological appropriative  and ideological moves, it entails. Aesthetic representation is thus uncovered as being limited to peculiar times and spaces, forbidding its claims to its universal value. Othello, in its changing visual culture, provides a good example of this results. Othello is, as needs dictate, the Moor enacted by white actors, the Arab, the sub-Saharian, or simply the immigrant, according to specific cultural and ideological imperatives.  Othello witnesses the birth of discourses of race and discrimination and provides an extraordinary example of these dynamics, besides demonstrating  Shakespeare's 'avant la lettre' deconstruction of racial typologisations which had, by then, started to appear (and continue to reappear), in particular against the chosen 'other': the Black, the Jew, and the Muslim.

Representation and Truth: Law and Equity in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book' argues for Browning's ability to engage himself with contextual Victorian legal matters (continuing debates about the limitations of Equity, issues about divorce, murder, and capital punishment), issues central to the Victorian period (see S. Petch), whilst recurring to a historiographic poem which is apparently both temporally and geographically removed but clearly linked to England. In particular the paper draws a parallel between the Courts of conscience (Equity Courts presided by the Lord Chancellor) and the canonic courts of Italy presided by the Pope and their common forms of discretionary justice. Equity's right of adjudicature on the basis of its arbitrariness' had already been heavily disputed (J. Bentham) and still was heavily disputed (by J.S. Mill, and in many Parliamentary debates) in Browning's times. All this brought in what has been called the Bentham and Austin's positivist legal agenda, which led to the union of the two courts (Common Law and Equity Courts) ordered by the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875. Browning engages himself though indirectly with these issues, by demonstrating the provisional i.e. cultural, gender, regional, and historically determined notions of truth rather than referring to a putative truth's essentialism which, as he points out, could, at that point, be found in fideistic terms only. Accordingly Browning takes thus sides with the rational party. This standpoint is also applied both stylistically and formalistically to the poem itself: issues such as representation and truth  the structure of the poem as a juxtaposition of nine relativistic versions of the selfsame facts (the murder) which all vie and contend their plausibility  make 'The Ring' and the Book a prototype model work and an implicit statement for what has become a truism in much contemporary postmodernist fiction.

This article has been quoted in  Rosemarie Morgan's, President of the Thomas Hardy Society, in 'The Ashgate Companion to Thomas Hardy', Ashgate, 2010.
The essay examines how regional communities react when confronted with new ideas, brought in by the arrival of people that immigrate from different environments. Often, the new ideas represent a challenge to the regional  'traditional' culture. Communities are thus seen and studied by Hardy as complex Darwinian organisms that are both attracted to the new  but that also fear losing what they see as their specific cultural heritage and identity. This is portrayed metaphorically in Giles's death. Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders" points thus to the necessity of an adaptation process and  to cultural memory and the adoption of a 'critical regionalism' - the constant openness to the new' mitigated by a conscious strategic essentialism'  as a possible protection of the old but positive values of marginal, minority-culture environments. If organisms easily die, as Hardy points out, culture needs ethically to interpose as a mechanism to prevent, from a Darwinian point of view, the extinction of values of these threatened minority cultures.

My article examines Woolf's concern for mimesis. Fryian concepts such as beauty, design, rhythm, texture, unity and vision are shown to play a crucial role in "To the Lighthouse", which, if unacknowledged, limit our understanding of her novel. These concepts represent the background on which all her experimental fiction: her study of how the re-presentation of reality through the verbal, semiotic code and medium of the novel, is achieved. Furthermore, it is a gift to the sister arts, and to the arts of the Stephen's sisters, Lily's painting becoming Woolf's book, in the end of the novel, Crucial differences between the aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, are here highlighted.
Il saggio definisce l'influenza dell'estetica post-impressionista di Roger Fry e dell'astrattismo di Clive Bell sul romanzo 'To the Lighthouse' di Virginia Woolf (1927) rilevando come Woolf ben distingua tra tali opposte visioni dell'arte e scelga quella a lei più consona. Codice semiotico e stile, e relative visioni in essi veicolati, vengono indagati a partire dalla messa in questione della scelta mimetica che l'artista Lily si pone.

Esame dell'estetica woolfiana e degli influssi di Clive Bell (astrazione) e Roger Fry (postimpressionismo) nell'ultimo romanzo della scrittrice. L'unità dell'opera d'arte è qui, ironicamente, decostruita a mero artificio formale, e pertanto metaforicamente cifrato nel concetto fryiano di cornice, il fittizio contenimento per la varietà del reale. Il libro rappresenta quindi l'atto finale della caduta del paradigma mimetico che Woolf nella sua narrativa aveva provveduto a smantellare quale mero stile. The essay examines the last work by Virginia Woolf and its aesthetics which is devoted to variety rather than unity. Unity is, in fact, deconstructed and downplayed, in this last novel of hers, as a merely formal, nostalgic, and thoroughly artificial 'framing' device. The work can be considered Woolf's paradigmatic demise of the mimetic style.

The article examines the contrast between law and equity and analyses Dickens's poetical indictments against the failures of the Court of Chancery. In order to develop his critique of the delays of the English Common Law judicial system Dickens uses the figure of Crook as his intermediary developing a series of dense metaphors related to vision and visuality and their shortcomings. L'articolo indaga il libro di Dickens e ne esamina le metafore e i simboli che vengono desunti dalla sfera della visibilità e delle sue ametropie. L'organo massimo di giustizia, la Court of Chancery, votata alla difesa della 'equity' (nella malleabilità della common law da parte del Lord Chancellor che può creare di fatto la nuova legge attraverso l'istituzione di un precedente che egli stesso emette) in realtà disattende le aspettative che su tale organo di giustizia si concentrano. Dickens è feroce nel mostrare come la malattia della Chancery, che in cause infinite brucia i patrimoni di coloro che alla legge si rivolgono, sia in realtà la malaise della casa metaforica, l'Inghilterra, che disattende i diritti dei più poveri e degli emarginati rischiando una rivoluzione essa stessa, magistralmente metaforizzata nella 'self-combustion' di Mr Crook.

The article examines Dickens's indictement of those extreme forms of violence, within the law, i.e. forms of legalized violence which transform force into right, and produce, in their extreme form, what Dickens considers to be the scandal of the law, the death penalty: capital punishment. Accordingly we see in A Tale of Two Cities the degeneration of authority into authoritarianism: indeed both Paris and London tell the same tale', they both resort to Bia' (violence) in order, so it is paradoxically maintained, to safeguarde Dike' (justice). This, Dickens points out, produces coercion rather than persuasion and, besides renovating the circle of injustice and violence, it puts the legitimacy of the law into question. But Dickens not only oppugns patent sites of authority; he also shows us how established structures of micropower and authority can continue to function unperceived and unquestioned, fostered by the unconscious and uncritical, domestic and social, acts of acquiescence and conformism to its often unquestioned and silent rules as, for example, Jarvis Lorry's adherence to the gospel of duty demonstrates. L'articolo pone l'attenzione sullo 'scandalo' della legge che, paradossalmente, per evitare la violenza, usa la stessa violenza finanche nella sua forma estrema: la pena capitale. Dickens pertanto mostra ai suoi connazionali, indignati dagli estremismi della Rivoluzione Francese, che le due forme di violenza hanno in realtà esiti analoghi in quanto entrambe decostruiscono la liceità della legge stessa. In tal modo Dickens, oltre a criticare fortemente (potremmo dire in termini beccariani) l'utilizzo della pena capitale, richiama l'attenzione del suo pubblico sull'effettiva efficacia di un meccanismo penale coercitivo che, basato sulla paura della pena, non cambia però l'interiorità della persona.

The article examines Albert Wendt's role in the creation of South Pacific Literature and its crucial passage from an oral to a chirographic medium. Albert Wendt is seen as one of the most outstanding voices of Pacific literature for his choice of a critical regionalism or, in other terms, a 'strategic essentialism'. This is also the aesthetic and cultural choice of a people testifying to the defence of their 'regionalist' but thus, not necessarily, minority culture, which, in the past, without a chirographic codification, would have risked cultural disappearance and exclusion from the wider panorama of the world cultures. Albert Wendt, who has felt the danger for his culture to become one those dead, extinct branches of the Darwinian 'tree' of cultures, has thus chosen to protect the memory and heritage of his autochthonous culture using the novel and its privileged medium (writing), for his own ends. The use of untranslated Samoan words in the text are highlighted as to refer to a precise stance referring to a cultural heritage protection.

The essay examines the relevance ethics assumed in the 1890s due to the rise of eugenics and other dangerous pseudosciences. These were the result of a misinterpretation and a misreading of central Darwinian issues. Literature and philosophy reacted strongly. The intelligentsia of the time underlined the peril such pseudosciences posed. The indignation shown by philosophers and literati is thus read as a 19th-century early instance of what would later be termed 'bioethics'.

The entry deals with the history of the Performing Arts as an engagé art form which claims the collaboration of the audience and whose characteristic is a live performance in front of the presence of an implicated public. In its specificity it is therefore called Performance Arts whereas Performing Arts is a more general term which comprises various art forms which rely on the tekne of the artists and thus do not, necessarily, present an ideological committment. Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture Dale Southerton University of Manchester, UK November 2011 1664 pages SAGE Publications, Inc Lecturers Individual Purchasers Hardcover ISBN: 9780872896017 £385.00 Pre Publication Price £325.00 The three-volume Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture covers consuming societies around the world, from the Age of Enlightenment to the present, and shows how consumption has become intrinsic to the world's social, economic, political, and cultural landscapes. Offering an invaluable interdisciplinary approach, this reference work is a useful resource for researchers in sociology, political science, consumer science, global studies, comparative studies, business and management, human geography, economics, history, anthropology, and psychology. The first encyclopedia to outline the parameters of consumer culture, the Encyclopedia provides a critical, scholarly resource on consumption and consumerism over time. Key topics: Theories and concepts Socio-economic change Socio-demographic change Identity and social differentiation Media Style and taste Mass consumptions Ethical Consumption Civil society Environment Domestic consumption Leisure Technology Work Production Markets Institutions Welfare Urban life.

Both Italo Calvino and Virginia Woolf, respectively, in the collection of short stories "Palomar" (1983), and in "To the Lighthouse" (1927), investigate the reliability of 'truth' implicit in the mimetic 'representation' of reality, mediated by the verbal and iconic filters. In 'Palomar', Calvino adopts the archi-semantic metaphor of the different  foci of the various lenses of vision and their relative and thus always specific epistemic perspective. Woolf, in her turn, in 'To the Lighthouse",  muses and ponders on the truth value of the iconographic representation of Lily's picture (a symbol of her own book). Both of them come to the conclusion that the medium is already the message (McLuhan), and both testify the crucial passage of mimesis from the old idea of mimesis as a non-problematic medium for reality which conceded to art an undue statute of truthfulness, testifying rather their move towards  a 'visual culture' attitude now aimed at highlighting the eristic strategies of signification, and their 'reality 'effects'. Both authors examine thus the visual practices which determine art's plural signification(s) and their possible ideologic manipulations.

Sia Italo Calvino che Virginia Woolf, rispettivamente nella raccolta 'Palomar' e in 'To the Lighthouse' indagano lo statuto di verità implicito nella rappresentazione del reale così come veicolato nei codici verbale e iconico. 'Palomar', la raccolta di Calvino, adotta l'archisemica metafora della visione e della sua relativa e limitata prospettiva epistemica. Virginia Woolf a sua volta riflette sulla rappresentazione iconografica a e verbale nel suo romanzo 'To the Lighthouse'. Woolf e Calvino sanno che il medium è già il messaggio, ed entrambi testimoniano il capitale passaggio da un'estetica votata alla metafisica del bello e del vero - che concedeva all'arte uno statuto di verità privilegiato - a una 'cultura visuale' che mira invece, sottilmente, ad indagare le strategie eristiche della significazione e i suoi, discutibili, 'effetti' di realtà. Entrambi gli autori esaminano quindi le pratiche visuali e la loro possibile manipolazione ideologica.

Il saggio appare nella pubblicazione in forma incompleta rispetto alla relazione effettivamente presentata al Convegno: la 'full version', che esplicita lo stato dell'arte della teoria critica di questo genere letterario e il punto di vista utilizzato per l'esame dei lavori woolfiani trattati, può essere richiesta all'autrice che la metterà a disposizione gratuitamente. Nella sua versione originale trattasi di un'analisi formale delle opere biografiche e autobiografiche di V. Woolf analizzate attraverso l'estetica e il formalismo teorizzato dal Bloomsbury Group (R. Fry e C. Bell in modo particolare) e la 'traduzione' verbale che ne dà Virginia Woolf. The essay examines, from a formal standpoint, the biographical and autobiographical works by V. Woolf, but it appears, alas, only in an incomplete form in this publication and not as effectively presented by the author at the conference. The full version, which presents the theoretical premises of this genre and the stance adopted here, can be requested to the author. The essay examines the Bloomsbury Group concerns for form and aesthetics (R. Fry and C. Bell's in particular) and their 'verbal' transcodification in Woolf's style.

The article examines Albert Wendt's "Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree" and argues that this short story (1974) expresses views compatible with two characteristic concerns of postcolonial aesthetics: on the one hand, an identity politics which undermines the ideological and strategic use of Western canonical and hierarchical versions of beauty in order to champion an alternative aesthetics, and, on the other hand, a meditation about the necessary, though extremely painful, abandonment of an oral culture in favour of a chirographic one.
Both beauty and ethnicity are epitomized and symbolized by the tattoo art forms used in this region: indeed, 'tatau' and 'malu' serve as political signifiers and testify the use of a textual body-politics using a 'dissenting-bodies' aesthetics. This is the new aesthetics of a besieged colonial identity, threatened by Western conformism, the regionalist aesthetics of people who want to assert themselves as 'soga'imiti', bodies proclaiming their irreducible, unique, personal and cultural identity.

Esame formale ed estetico della nuova facciata del Teatro Sociale di Trento, opera dell'architetto Sergio Giovanazzi, esemplificazione di un'estetica per la postmodernità. Formalistic analysis of a postmodernist work and its aesthetic standpoints.

"Regionalism and Antiregionalism: Thomas Hardy e V.S. Naipaul" examines Thomas Hardy and V.S. Naipaul's different attitudes towards the issues of identity politics. Hardy sees identity as the necessary outcome of the mediation between a clash of inside/outside cultural values, whereas Naipaul downplays all notions of a geopolitical identification of people with spatial homelands, which in postcolonial subjects would cause only disorientation and disquiet. He therefore champions a notion of a cultural 'country of the mind' identity-politics which cannot find space in geopolitical locations.
Regionalismo e antiregionalismo: Thomas Hardy e V.S. Naipaul, pp. 99-116, esamina questioni legate all'identità e al regionalismo critico nei due autori che assumono l'uno un regionalismo critico, aperto alle influenze esterne pur, tuttavia, assumendo un atteggiamento di salvaguardia culturale del passato storico del luogo, mentre Naipaul rigetta in toto il radicamento geopolitico optando per una identità apolide.

Il mio saggio: "Prodromi inglesi di un'estetica regionalista, pp. 105-125 sottopone ad esame i tratti caratterizzanti dell'estetica antica (unitaria e olistica) e quelli dell'estetica moderna (particolarista). This essay examines how the still Platonist, eighteenth-century aesthetics, based on universal conceptions of perfection and beauty, was dismantled in favour of an aesthetics of the particular. What emerged instead were various and competing styles, leading eventually to the recovery of the gothic, the emergence of the picturesque, of garden aesthetics (Italian, French, English), and the progressive affirmation of regional and national types - not yet unique or individual - at the expense of 'universal' man. It can thus be considered as an analysis of the passage from a holistic theory of aesthetics to the modern conception of beauty as a relativistic, regional and space-specific 'style'.

The article "Letteratura e canone: le ragioni dell'identità culturale. Jeanette Winterson e J.M. Coetzee", pp. 95-104, examines how the choice of a literary 'canon', by adopting universal and essentialist notions of identity, history, and values, tends to erase notions of cultural difference. The essay aims at showing why marginal identities (gendered, postcolonial, regionalist ones) are often forced to assume a 'strategic essentialism' in order to simply make themselves heard and thus dismantle the authoritarian stance of those cultural policies often at work in the academia and in its priviledged establishment of 'the' canon. Some works of both authors are thus examined from the point of view of these critical standpoints. The essay furthermore aims at showing why 'critical regionalism' has to be considered one important instance of the many and possible strains of cultural studies. Il saggio prende in esame la 'costruzione' di un canone letterario e contesta tale operazione essenzialista che, fatalmente, tende ad oscurare ciò che il canone non prevede e che, di fatto, silenzia ed esclude: le identità marginali o, semplicemente, non conformi e diverse. Jeanette Winterson, per quanto riguarda il gender, l'identità sessuale non biologica, e J.M. Coetzee, per quanto attiene alla difesa delle identità postcoloniali, sono due voci forti e dissenzienti di tali operazioni letterarie.

The article examines the transposition of postmodern philosophy into the stylistic and formal choices of postmodern fiction. Characteristic trait of postmodernism is shown to be the ironic, rather than the tragic, modernist reception of variety, and the consequent absence of ultimate, once and for all, answers. Il mio articolo "Il postmodernismo: l'accettazione ironica del doppio senso", pp. 85-111, traccia i tratti formali e l'influsso della filosofia del postmodernismo in letteratura. Esamina pertanto i paradigmi filosofici del postmodernismo (relativismo strategico, smantellamento della gerarchia binaria, difesa delle identità marginali, trionfo della varietà sull'unità, eccletismo, egualitarismo) mettendo in enfasi la ricezione ironica, postmoderna per l'appunto, e non tragica (tipica del modernismo letterario) della varietà degli stili e delle interpretazioni del reale. Si esaminano quindi alcuni assunti filosofici della filosofia del postmodernismo (elaborati da Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Vattimo) e le loro ricadute e declinazioni formali in letteratura (opera aperta, finali multipli, punti di vista e voci molteplici all'interno del testo, abbandono della III persona narrante, 'morte dell'autore', nascita del lettore, citazionismo, intertestualità, collage e estetica del mosaico).

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
DICKENS AND THE VOICES OF VICTORIAN CULTURE VERONA, JUNE 8-10 2009,
organized by prof. Yvonne Bezrucka and prof. David Paroissien https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/research/hri/fellows/paroissien
editor of the prestigious journal "Dickens Quarterly", 3 days, organized in parallel sessions.