Books by Guido Mattia Gallerani
Firenze University Press, 2022
Journalism invented the interview, a tool to investigate the lives of writers. This indiscretion ... more Journalism invented the interview, a tool to investigate the lives of writers. This indiscretion triggers the authors’ reaction: a new literary genre, the imagined interview, becomes a shield to protect their own intimacy as wells as a tactic to overturn the press’ spotlight, primarily against the interviewers. Pretending to be like them, the authors will also be able to talk to the ghosts of our imagination. All their interlocutors become characters shaped by irony, satire, self-representation. Through the creative variations of the imagined interview and across different media (publishing, radio, television, digital devices), this book shows how the media context, with its laws and conflicts, is the scene of writers’ counterattack—a battle fought by the double-edged sword of journalistic imitation and fictional invention.
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Morellini Editore, 2019
Con lo pseudo-saggio, la critica letteraria esce dalle solite sedi istituzionali e si presenta so... more Con lo pseudo-saggio, la critica letteraria esce dalle solite sedi istituzionali e si presenta sotto le spoglie di un altro genere. Tra la fine dell’Ottocento e gli inizi del Novecento, appaiono scritture saggistiche che valicano i confini del tradizionale saggio critico e ambiscono a partecipare alla dimensione della letterarietà, al pari del romanzo e della poesia. Tramite diverse strategie di camuffamento, gli pseudo-saggi si diffondono in Europa e negli Stati Uniti, dimostrando una capacità di metamorfosi che consente loro di rinnovarsi e giungere fino a oggi. Il volume studia le varie combinazioni tra il saggio critico e altre pratiche di scrittura, come il dialogo, l’autoritratto, la biografia romanzesca, la riscrittura parafinzionale e l’autobiografia, e individua nella tensione tra il commento dei testi e l’invenzione creativa, tra l’interpretazione e l’immaginazione una nuova possibilità artistica per il saggio critico, anche ibridandosi con i media visivi e andando oltre il testo scritto, come nel caso del video essay.
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Following my dissertation and series of articles, my 10-year research on the genre of the essay has been achieved in my book Pseudo-saggi. (Ri)Scritture e critica letteraria. Here, I develop the original idea of the pseudo-essay: a literary form of the critical essay. Through different strategies of camouflage, the pseudo-essays spread throughout Europe and the United States, and they experience various metamorphosis in combination with the dialogue, self-portrait, fictional biography, para-fictional rewriting and autobiography. Finally, the pseudo-essay represents an artistic attempt to keep together the commentary of the texts and the creative invention, interpretation and imagination, by also hybridizing the criticism with visual media and going beyond the written text, as in the case of the video essay.
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At the time of his death, Roland Barthes was writing a novel entitled Vita Nova, which remained u... more At the time of his death, Roland Barthes was writing a novel entitled Vita Nova, which remained unfinished. The aim of my book is to trace the steps of Barthes’ final uncompleted project, to reveal how this consideration of the novel genre as a creative process actually became a re-consideration of his own work. My work examines a new way of looking at essay writing, placing it between critical and narrative discourse. The book's first part is entitled “L’aura del romanzo” and is in two chapters: “L’abito del critico” and “Vita Nova e il simulacro del romanzo”. It focuses on Barthes’ statements during his lecture course La préparation du roman at the Collège de France, and on the schemes of his novels. The aim of this first part is to demonstrate the intertextual nature of the Vita Nova project. The second part is entitled “Una strana indole del saggio” and contains two chapters, “Lessico d’insieme: saggistica e narrazione” and “Prove d’intersezione: la trilogia dell’ultimo Barthes”. It examines some concepts derivable from Barthes’ final work and analyzes his later ideas on genre contamination. Additionally, the book offers a chronological appendix of edited and unpublished texts, held in the Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine’s archive, in Caen (France).
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"Quaderno di quattro anni" uscì da Mondadori nel 1977. I centoundici componimenti che ne fanno pa... more "Quaderno di quattro anni" uscì da Mondadori nel 1977. I centoundici componimenti che ne fanno parte risalgono al periodo 1973-77: si tratta quindi di un libro composto a cavallo dell'assegnazione del Nobel, in sintonia con le considerazioni svolte dal poeta nel discorso pronunciato a Stoccolma: "È ancora possibile la poesia?" Ed è anche una summa della sua intera storia poetica e ideale: un bilancio, letterario ed esistenziale, nel quale tornano gli echi degli scrittori amati - Svevo in primis - e le figure di donne da sempre protagoniste dei suoi versi, Annetta, Clizia e Mosca. L'io lirico di un poeta più che maturo riflette sul proprio percorso e riscopre pressoché immutati i temi degli esordi, le grandi domande degli inizi: Caso o Necessità, vuoto o indifferenza, sopravvivenza o Nulla. E tra mito, storia, cronaca e tragedia, anche in questo libro il pessimismo montaliano si conferma come "l'altra faccia di una; fede profonda". L'edizione, curata da Alberto Bertoni e da Guido Mattia Gallerani, oltre a introduzione, commento e note ai testi, è arricchita da un efficace scritto del critico Cesare Garboli e da un ampio saggio del poeta Giorgio Orelli.
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Book Reviews by Guido Mattia Gallerani
Francofonia 81, 2021
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Fata Morgana Web, 2019
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Linguæ & Rivista di lingue e culture moderne, 2020
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On Essay by Guido Mattia Gallerani
L'essai médiatique (ed. Irène Langlet, Chloé Conant-Ouaked), 2022
Le débat sur les nouvelles formes de critique et de recherche, universitaires ou non, se polarise... more Le débat sur les nouvelles formes de critique et de recherche, universitaires ou non, se polarise à la fois sur les fonctions du numérique, à savoir son action de deep remixability, qui selon Lev Manovich identifie la spécificité des logiciels de rendre tout type de langage, et sur la prédominance conservée, même dans un contexte médiatique, par les stratégies expressives et argumentatives de l’écriture. Notre objectif est d’étudier l’apparition du numérique et les possibilités critiques et pédagogiques qu’il apporte à un genre qui a développé, au cours de l’histoire, la fonction de la critique et de la recherche. Tout en considérant la collaboration entre le visuel et l’écriture, nous voulons montrer que le vidéo-essai – cette typologie d’essai médiatique – ne se base ni sur la prédominance du visuel, ni sur la simple présence d’une argumentation, mais plutôt sur la relation critique entre les sources commentées (aussi bien visuelles qu’écrites) et une voix de commentaire qui est, elle aussi, technologisée par les logiciels.
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Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative Literature, “Narration and Reflection”, ed. by Christy Wampole and Stefano Ercolino, 33 (2015), 109-128, Apr 2015
This paper focuses on narrative hybridization within the genre of the essay. The comparative corp... more This paper focuses on narrative hybridization within the genre of the essay. The comparative corpus draws on three highly illustrative essays from English, French and Italian literature at the turn of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century: Oscar Wilde’s "The Critic as Artist" (1890), Marcel Proust’s "Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide" (1907), and Renato Serra’s "Ringraziamento a una ballata di Paul Fort" (1914). My thesis is that these hybrid essays represent a new intellectual critique of bourgeois individualism during the crisis of modern Europe from the Great Depression of 1873-1896 up to the First World War. Nevertheless, their narrative frames do not lay the groundwork for a new literary genre, oriented either philosophically or narratively. Rather, the introduction of a narrative framework within the essay aims at protecting the essayist and the individual from a collapse into the external narrative of history.
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Compte rendu sur Vincent Ferré, "L’Essai fictionnel. Essai et roman chez Proust, Broch, Dos Passo... more Compte rendu sur Vincent Ferré, "L’Essai fictionnel. Essai et roman chez Proust, Broch, Dos Passos", Paris : Honoré Champion, coll. « Recherches proustiennes », 2013, avec bibliographie raisonnée
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This contribution discusses the literary hybridization in its relations with the literary genre o... more This contribution discusses the literary hybridization in its relations with the literary genre of the critical essay in the medium-term period 1970-2010. Following the historical outline of appearance of hybridization within Western aesthetics, in the first part of the paper it is claimed that hybridization formerly indicates aesthetic and literary issues which do not fit into poetics’s principles and entails moral disapprobation. Then, from the 20th century until today, hybridization means a sort of liberation of any literary work from the category of genre itself. The critical essay is selected as a literary genre of investigation of the hybridization’s topics. Four authors (Roland Barthes, Giorgio Manganelli, Mario Lavagetto, and William Deresiewicz) and three literatures narrow the choice of hybrid essays from the period of literary theory at its peak until today. The second part of the article points out the relationship between both the commentary and the rewriting and the argumentative discourse and the narrative. A discourse parallel to the critical text reveals the presence of another genre, neither essayistic nor philosophical. This parallel concerns the essay with the narrative and cannot be interpreted as the dispossession of literary genres by means of the hybridization. The final aim is to show that the hybridization acts as a historical phenomenon in compliance with the market system of our culture even in the case of the intellectual and peripheral genre of the critical essay. In short, as far as literary theory is replaced by new paradigms in critical texts, hybridization accounts for critical essays which adapt themselves to the traditional narrative genres.
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On Poetry by Guido Mattia Gallerani
https://www.poetipost68.it/2023/09/11/poesia-presente-storia-passata/, 2023
Questo intervento è stato presentato il 29 maggio 2023 in occasione di
un seminario, dal titolo P... more Questo intervento è stato presentato il 29 maggio 2023 in occasione di
un seminario, dal titolo Poesia presente, storia passata, tenutosi presso
il Dipartimento di Filologia classica e Italianistica dell’Università di
Bologna.
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In current studies on paratextual elements, the micro-writing forms of the authorial biographical... more In current studies on paratextual elements, the micro-writing forms of the authorial biographical notes have not been properly studied. The purpose of this article is to study these short forms while they assume an autonomous paratextual status in a specific macro-genre. Unlike the edu- cational anthology, in literary anthologies (for example poetic and narrative anthologies) biographical notes often assemble an autonomous chapter or are presented together in succession. First, I define their formal features and their specific paratextual function. Then, I recognize their recurring patterns, which can correspond to some postures by which the author negotiates his/her position within the literary field. Finally, I try to find the relationships between certain types of notes and some types of anthology to understand how this neglected paratext also en-tails the legitimation strategies that the anthology’s genre uses to shape the literary canon.
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Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2018
In the field of Law and Literature studies, contributions on poetry are rare. This article focuse... more In the field of Law and Literature studies, contributions on poetry are rare. This article focuses on a selection of contemporary poetic works: Cornelius Eady's A Brutal Imagination (2001), Frédéric Boyer's Le Goût du suicide lent (1999), Maurizio Cucchi's Il disperso (1976) and Corrado Benigni's Tribunale della mente (2012). Their lyrical shaping of law establishes a difference from the model of " forensic " poetry that can be found in Charles Reznikoff's Testimony (1978–1979). Through them, this contribution shows how it is possible to challenge a reflection on the language of lyric poetry and that of law at the same time, if we interpret the lyric poetry as a non-narrative discourse.
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Two prose poems of Le Parti pris des choses (1942), entitled R.C. Seine and Le restaurant Lemeuni... more Two prose poems of Le Parti pris des choses (1942), entitled R.C. Seine and Le restaurant Lemeunier, are different from others texts of the book because the subject, which is not a bear inactive thing, but a social body. They describe a group of people and are set in an office and in a restaurant. This article claims that the subject of both poems by Francis Ponge is the working time rather than the description of a social place. The condemnation of the capitalistic production appears clearly by temporality’s deformation of the human time along the sequence of the two texts within the book. Moreover, the poems stand for the representation of a workday in compliance with the analysis in The Capital by Karl Marx.
My aim is to develop a particular analysis of textual elaboration of the author’s poetics, through genetic study of preliminary texts, interviews, and his political discours as trade unionist. First, Ponge’s discourse seems presenting an opposition between politics and poetry. Then, we discuss the presence of such contrast inside his texts. Finally, we see that Ponge creates an incomplete and pending discourse waiting for politics as natural complement of common concerns about modern individual, according to his literary posture and his poetics.
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On Barthes by Guido Mattia Gallerani
The paper examines the intellectual relationship of Roland Barthes with some Italian authors in t... more The paper examines the intellectual relationship of Roland Barthes with some Italian authors in the 1950s and 1960s. First, some letters by Barthes with the poet and intellectual Franco Fortini are explored in order to reconsider also the role of two Marxist literary reviews, such as Ragionamenti and Arguments, which collaborate together during the post-Stalinism crisis. Then, we focus on the breakdown between Barthes and Fortini and the role played by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s idea of “abjuration” of the past concerning Barthes’s relationship with institutional powers and his auto-critique. The final comparison of mythological analysis by Barthes with the whole semiological experience of Umberto Eco shows the theoretical and literary connections between Barthes’s work and some Eco’s writing (e.g. Diario minimo).
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Between Journal 5.9 (2015)
This paper aims at considering the most relevant photography removed from the Camera Lucida (1980... more This paper aims at considering the most relevant photography removed from the Camera Lucida (1980) by Roland Barthes as the object of a form of self-censorship that reveals itself to be particularly significant in order to shape the book. The thesis is that the fact that Barthes does not show the mother’s photography carries out a main textual consequence such as the narrative hybridization within an essay.
First, the approach of the genesis of the book shows that the Photography of the Winter Garder was the real source of the Barthes’ essay. Then, some textual analysis retrace the appearances of the missing image of the mother. Finally, the explanation of a complex photographic apparatus governing the photo's disappearance relocates the photo as part of the unconscious reading, even though the relative image can appear shattered both discursively and visually.
Thus, grounding on Freud’s theories about psychic censorship and the opposite Sartre’s critical conclusions three different modes of self-censorships will be found within Barthes’ discourse and disposed by a hierarchical succession. The media self-censorship focuses on the perservation of this image from the commercialization of the image as a product at the age of media. The romantic self-censorship bases on a metaphysical and mystical concept of the photographical portait. The Counter-censorship, as Barthes claims, creates a paradoxical discours that avoids his own self-censorship through the active contribution of the imagination of the reader.
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Barthes à l'étranger
À partir des voyages de Barthes en Italie et de ses projets de collaboration avec le milieu cultu... more À partir des voyages de Barthes en Italie et de ses projets de collaboration avec le milieu culturel italien, cette contribution remonte aux raisons de son refus du stéréotype touristique de l'italianité jusqu’à la recherche de ses liaisons professionnelles avec les intellectuels italiens. Nous examinons ensuite comment la critique que fait Barthes de ce stéréotype dans le théâtre et la publicité laisse apparaître un espace de fête et de musique, et donc d’écriture, avec un autre imaginaire de l’Italie dans ses écrits. Enfin, nous présentons une liste chronologique des traductions italiennes, un commentaire des différentes études parues sur l’auteur dans le temps et une synthèse des vagues successives de sa réception dans ce pays.
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Barthes Studies, 2017
In this article, I illustrate the state-of-the-art of the research on Barthes’s interviews and q... more In this article, I illustrate the state-of-the-art of the research on Barthes’s interviews and quickly analyse three of them, giving some examples of analysis of his radio and TV interviews using the concept of literary posture. First, I will summarize research that has been done on the interview to define its boundaries as a genre in order to approach an analysis of the whole corpus of Barthes’s interviews, both in print and broadcast media. Then, I focus on traditional literary postures of French intellectuals which can also be found in Barthes’s broadcast interviews. My short itinerary follows three steps: 1) the engaged intellectual, the intellectual as amateur, the "génie malheureux". The aim is to show the itinerary that leads Barthes to the posture of the original writer, that emerges in Barthes from an opposition between the posture of Castorp within the community life of "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann and the posture adopted by the model of André Gide. The main result of his research is to update a list including all the interviews (print, radio, and filmed) given by Barthes as the investigation within different archives has more than doubled the total amount of his interviews listed before.
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Books by Guido Mattia Gallerani
***
Following my dissertation and series of articles, my 10-year research on the genre of the essay has been achieved in my book Pseudo-saggi. (Ri)Scritture e critica letteraria. Here, I develop the original idea of the pseudo-essay: a literary form of the critical essay. Through different strategies of camouflage, the pseudo-essays spread throughout Europe and the United States, and they experience various metamorphosis in combination with the dialogue, self-portrait, fictional biography, para-fictional rewriting and autobiography. Finally, the pseudo-essay represents an artistic attempt to keep together the commentary of the texts and the creative invention, interpretation and imagination, by also hybridizing the criticism with visual media and going beyond the written text, as in the case of the video essay.
Book Reviews by Guido Mattia Gallerani
On Essay by Guido Mattia Gallerani
On Poetry by Guido Mattia Gallerani
un seminario, dal titolo Poesia presente, storia passata, tenutosi presso
il Dipartimento di Filologia classica e Italianistica dell’Università di
Bologna.
My aim is to develop a particular analysis of textual elaboration of the author’s poetics, through genetic study of preliminary texts, interviews, and his political discours as trade unionist. First, Ponge’s discourse seems presenting an opposition between politics and poetry. Then, we discuss the presence of such contrast inside his texts. Finally, we see that Ponge creates an incomplete and pending discourse waiting for politics as natural complement of common concerns about modern individual, according to his literary posture and his poetics.
On Barthes by Guido Mattia Gallerani
First, the approach of the genesis of the book shows that the Photography of the Winter Garder was the real source of the Barthes’ essay. Then, some textual analysis retrace the appearances of the missing image of the mother. Finally, the explanation of a complex photographic apparatus governing the photo's disappearance relocates the photo as part of the unconscious reading, even though the relative image can appear shattered both discursively and visually.
Thus, grounding on Freud’s theories about psychic censorship and the opposite Sartre’s critical conclusions three different modes of self-censorships will be found within Barthes’ discourse and disposed by a hierarchical succession. The media self-censorship focuses on the perservation of this image from the commercialization of the image as a product at the age of media. The romantic self-censorship bases on a metaphysical and mystical concept of the photographical portait. The Counter-censorship, as Barthes claims, creates a paradoxical discours that avoids his own self-censorship through the active contribution of the imagination of the reader.
***
Following my dissertation and series of articles, my 10-year research on the genre of the essay has been achieved in my book Pseudo-saggi. (Ri)Scritture e critica letteraria. Here, I develop the original idea of the pseudo-essay: a literary form of the critical essay. Through different strategies of camouflage, the pseudo-essays spread throughout Europe and the United States, and they experience various metamorphosis in combination with the dialogue, self-portrait, fictional biography, para-fictional rewriting and autobiography. Finally, the pseudo-essay represents an artistic attempt to keep together the commentary of the texts and the creative invention, interpretation and imagination, by also hybridizing the criticism with visual media and going beyond the written text, as in the case of the video essay.
un seminario, dal titolo Poesia presente, storia passata, tenutosi presso
il Dipartimento di Filologia classica e Italianistica dell’Università di
Bologna.
My aim is to develop a particular analysis of textual elaboration of the author’s poetics, through genetic study of preliminary texts, interviews, and his political discours as trade unionist. First, Ponge’s discourse seems presenting an opposition between politics and poetry. Then, we discuss the presence of such contrast inside his texts. Finally, we see that Ponge creates an incomplete and pending discourse waiting for politics as natural complement of common concerns about modern individual, according to his literary posture and his poetics.
First, the approach of the genesis of the book shows that the Photography of the Winter Garder was the real source of the Barthes’ essay. Then, some textual analysis retrace the appearances of the missing image of the mother. Finally, the explanation of a complex photographic apparatus governing the photo's disappearance relocates the photo as part of the unconscious reading, even though the relative image can appear shattered both discursively and visually.
Thus, grounding on Freud’s theories about psychic censorship and the opposite Sartre’s critical conclusions three different modes of self-censorships will be found within Barthes’ discourse and disposed by a hierarchical succession. The media self-censorship focuses on the perservation of this image from the commercialization of the image as a product at the age of media. The romantic self-censorship bases on a metaphysical and mystical concept of the photographical portait. The Counter-censorship, as Barthes claims, creates a paradoxical discours that avoids his own self-censorship through the active contribution of the imagination of the reader.
open access: https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/status_quaestionis/issue/view/1676