Katia Pizzi – författare

Venice Tales is the first comprehensive collection of short-stories on Venice by Italian authors. The book encompasses a broad chronological span, beginning from the Middle Ages (Boccaccio), through to the early modern period (Sansovino), the Enlightenment (Casanova, Goldoni), to the modern and contemporary eras (Marinetti, Montale, Calvino, Scarpa and others). A dream-like city uniquely built on water, Venice was a hub of trade with the East and the seminal cosmopolitan city. Venice was proudly independent politically from the word go and was at the forefront of several arts and industries: glass-making and ship-building, as well as music and the fine arts. A site of Carnivalesque joie de vivre, luxury, and licentiousness on the one hand, Venice also became widely synonymous with darkness, melancholy, and a wish for death. In short, the siren call of Venice has always seduced literati, visitors, and tourists alike. Venice continues to haunt and inspire the imagination of authors and artists the world over and yet few Italians have dared taking on the city in their works of literary fiction. It is possible that Venice's worldly exotic allure proved daunting and evanescent to many. As these Venice Tales vividly demonstrate, those who did not fear to tread into Venice as a literary subject produced inspired, incandescent, ironical, evocative, tragic, and utterly magical vistas on this unique city which, despite eliciting such wealth of literary, artistic, musical, and theatrical feats, remains to this day largely elusive, fluid, and thoroughly impossible to pin down.

This study assesses the significance of Pinocchio in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in addition to his status as the creature of a nineteenth century traversed by a cultural enthusiasm for dummies, puppets, and marionettes. This collection identifies him as a figure characterized by a 'fluid identity,' informed with transition, difference, joie de vivre, otherness, displacement, and metamorphosis, making Pinocchio a truly modern, indeed postmodern and posthuman, cultural icon. Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity explores this crucial and as yet little visited field, reassessing Pinocchio's genealogy and progeny, as well as illuminating both the wider context and more specific cultural manifestations of the mechanical-human interface in the domains of theatre, the fine arts, literature, radio, and even virtual reality coherently with the digital metamorphosis of our times. The wide-ranging scope of this exploration encompasses Italian, French, and English literature, dummies and marionettes in modernist and contemporary theatre, the fairytale tradition, and traditional and contemporary painting, as well as the older and newer media of radio, television, cinema, and the Internet. The diverse, comparative, and multimedia focus of this original discussion testifies to the enduring transcultural legacy of Pinocchio. Eminently sellable as a traditional cultural icon, Pinocchio is equally impactful and relevant for a globalized, multicultural, and virtual society, from Collodi to Disney and beyond.Katia Pizzi is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has published volumes on cultural identities, including A City in Search of an Author (2001) and The Cultural Identities of European Cities (2010), and on children's literature and illustration.

Poised between the Mediterranean and the Mitteleuropa, crossroads of civilizations and seat of vibrant cultural and literary life, Trieste is now acknowledged as enjoying unrivalled cultural status amongst Italian cities. This volume, the first comprehensive study of Triestine literature in English, originally reassesses TriesteÆs literary identity, paying particular attention to the period between 1918 and 1954 when local writing became intensely aware of its local specificity and some of its central motifs came prominently to the fore. TriesteÆs singular border identity, mirrored in a variegated literary output, emerges here as laden with complexities and ambiguities, such as the controversial notion of triestinita, the ambiguous relation with nationalism, specifically in its Fascist inflection, and the anxieties generated by repeated re-definitions of the areaÆs historical borders.

This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of machine culture in Italian futurism after the First World War. The machine was a primary concern for the futuristi. As well as being a material tool in the factory it was a social and political agent, an aesthetic emblem, a metonymy of modernity and international circulation and a living symbol of past crafts and technologies. Exploring literature, the visual and performing arts, photography, music and film, the book uses the lens of European machine culture to elucidate the work of a broad set of artists and practitioners, including Censi, Depero, Marinetti, Munari and Prampolini. The machine emerges here as an archaeology of technology in modernity: the time machine of futurism.

This study assesses the significance of Pinocchio in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in addition to his status as the creature of a nineteenth century traversed by a cultural enthusiasm for dummies, puppets, and marionettes. This collection identifies him as a figure characterized by a 'fluid identity,' informed with transition, difference, joie de vivre, otherness, displacement, and metamorphosis, making Pinocchio a truly modern, indeed postmodern and posthuman, cultural icon. Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity explores this crucial and as yet little visited field, reassessing Pinocchio's genealogy and progeny, as well as illuminating both the wider context and more specific cultural manifestations of the mechanical-human interface in the domains of theatre, the fine arts, literature, radio, and even virtual reality coherently with the digital metamorphosis of our times. The wide-ranging scope of this exploration encompasses Italian, French, and English literature, dummies and marionettes in modernist and contemporary theatre, the fairytale tradition, and traditional and contemporary painting, as well as the older and newer media of radio, television, cinema, and the Internet. The diverse, comparative, and multimedia focus of this original discussion testifies to the enduring transcultural legacy of Pinocchio. Eminently sellable as a traditional cultural icon, Pinocchio is equally impactful and relevant for a globalized, multicultural, and virtual society, from Collodi to Disney and beyond.Katia Pizzi is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has published volumes on cultural identities, including A City in Search of an Author (2001) and The Cultural Identities of European Cities (2010), and on children's literature and illustration.

«Through marvelously attentive case studies of a handful of works, some canonical, others obscure, Mark Stuart-Smith provides the most thorough exploration so far of Juan Muñoz’s mesmerizing and haunted world. He inhabits the works, analyzing their mechanisms, materialities and drama, while at the same time connecting them to histories of politics, art and thought of great urgency to Muñoz and no less urgency now. This book has much to say not only about the forces and voices of silence but also about Muñoz’s extraordinary struggle to make art that could hold its own against the fascinations of image and spectacle.»(Michael Brenson, author of David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor (2022))The spectacular international success of the Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz has tended to encourage a critical framing of the artist’s work within narratives of global postmodernist innovation. This book, the first in-depth study of the central idea of silence in Muñoz’s work, aims to position him more clearly within his historical moment, by reading his work against the silences of Spanish politics and culture in post-Civil War Spain.Drawing on a wealth of documents, beginning with Muñoz’s student notebooks, the book shows how silence and memory defined and shaped his art. A range of methodologies from within Muñoz’s own intellectual horizon is applied to explore a progression from the implied silences of his sculptural installations to the literal sounds and silences of his first radio piece. Muñoz’s silencing strategies are analysed across different mediums, both visual and verbal, to show how his art probes and reanimates the uncanny memory of Spain’s traumatic past.

«A unique, invaluable, and potent reminder that the past shapes the future and yet all the while is being rewritten and reinterpreted.»(Dr. Dennis Deletant, OBE, Emeritus Professor, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London)«Points out on almost every page that the past always reappears; the fate of the victims, their persecutors and descendants is intertwined in one way or another.»(Dr. Péter Krausz, Chairman, Jewish Roots in Győr Foundation)«Returning to his parents’ home country, the author uncovers the history of the Austrian-Hungarian border region. He works through layers of truth and falsification, and gives a fascinating insight into the history of this region»(Dr. Erwin A. Schmidl, retired director of the Institute of Strategy and Security Policy of the Austrian National Defense Academy, president of the Austrian Commission of Military History)How do we remember the past? What do we choose to remember? And, just as important, what has been forgotten and erased from public memory, and where do we find the erased and forgotten reminders of the wrenching events that defined the twentieth century?This book examines how Hungarians and Austrians living along their common border remember, distort, forget, and ignore episodes marking recent times, among them World War I, the collapse of the Habsburg empire, postwar instability, the Treaty of Trianon, World War II and the Holocaust, removal of ethnic Germans, the Iron Curtain and 1956 revolution, the end of Soviet rule, and the post-1989 migration crisis. The book examines the shaping of memory, both public and private, of this tumultuous century of upheaval, including war, revolution, systematic theft, and murder, along with changes in political regimes, national borders, and demographics.The author draws on fifteen years of travel in the borderlands from his home in Győr, the largest city in the region, along with published sources and conversations with residents. Part social history and part memoir, this highly illustrated book contains sixteen maps and sixty illustrations to help readers find the answers.

Th​is​​ b​ook offers a survey of post-World War II German-language post-memorial writing.​ An analysis​ of​ the books by​ Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Wolfgang Koeppen​ e​xposes the difficult path of German writing about the Holocaust. Koeppen’s unauthorized ​​appropriation of Jakob Littner’s survivor memoir serves as the frame for th​is study,​​ ​expos​ing​​ ​the difference​s​ between perpetrator and victim perspectives. The various attempts ​by​ the current generation​ of authors​ to bridge th​is​ ​divide​ ​reflect​ the renewed interest and changed attitude​s​ towards the Holocaust ​that emerged ​in Germany after ​R​eunification. Included in this volume are W. G. Sebald’s imaginary dialogue between a victim and a perpetrator, Ursula Krechel’s exploration of Jewish life in Shanghai from a Jewish perspective, Iris Hanika’s presentation of the distraught mindset of a member of Germany’s second perpetrator generation, and Kevin Vennemann’s ​narrative about​ a Jewish child in​ the midst of​ a Polish massacre.

Poised between the Mediterranean and the Mitteleuropa, crossroads of civilizations and seat of vibrant cultural and literary life, Trieste is acknowledged as enjoying unrivalled cultural status amongst Italian cities. This comprehensive study of Triestine literature reassesses the city's literary identity, paying particular attention to the period between 1918 and 1954 when local writing became intensely aware of its local specificity and some of its central motifs came prominently to the fore. Trieste's singular border identity, mirrored in a variegated literary output, emerges here as laden with complexities and ambiguities, such as the controversial notion of triestinita, the ambiguous relationship with nationalism, specifically in its Fascist inflection, and the anxieties generated by repeated re-definitions of the area's historical borders.

This collection of essays reappraises the contributions made by modernist movements from regions generally regarded as peripheral or semi-peripheral to a global aesthetic of Modernism. It particularly focuses on European semi-peripheries, combining theoretical chapters and individual case studies to examine the cultural and aesthetic complexities of so-called peripheral modernisms. Contributing to research on the ‘transnational turn’ in New Modernist Studies, the volume takes recent scholarship on postcolonial modernisms one step further by exploring a broader geopolitical expanse than the (formerly) colonised regions under global capitalism. It highlights the local and translocal specificities of modernist movements from regions such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean to offer new insights into the concept of global modernism.

This collection of essays reappraises the contributions made by modernist movements from regions generally regarded as peripheral or semi-peripheral to a global aesthetic of Modernism. It particularly focuses on European semi-peripheries, combining theoretical chapters and individual case studies to examine the cultural and aesthetic complexities of so-called peripheral modernisms. Contributing to research on the ‘transnational turn’ in New Modernist Studies, the volume takes recent scholarship on postcolonial modernisms one step further by exploring a broader geopolitical expanse than the (formerly) colonised regions under global capitalism. It highlights the local and translocal specificities of modernist movements from regions such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean to offer new insights into the concept of global modernism.

This collection of essays reappraises the contributions made by modernist movements from regions generally regarded as peripheral or semi-peripheral to a global aesthetic of Modernism. It particularly focuses on European semi-peripheries, combining theoretical chapters and individual case studies to examine the cultural and aesthetic complexities of so-called peripheral modernisms. Contributing to research on the ‘transnational turn’ in New Modernist Studies, the volume takes recent scholarship on postcolonial modernisms one step further by exploring a broader geopolitical expanse than the (formerly) colonised regions under global capitalism. It highlights the local and translocal specificities of modernist movements from regions such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean to offer new insights into the concept of global modernism.

The Cold War left indelible traces on the city, where polarities on the global stage crystallized and intersected with political and social dynamics predating and bypassing the Blocs. This collection taps into the rich fabric of memories, histories and cultural interactions of thirteen cities worldwide and the lived experience of urban communities during the long Cold War: activated and mobilized by atomic technologies, taking tourist photographs, attending commercial fairs, enjoying the cinema and the ballet, singing in choirs, paying respect in local cemeteries, visiting museums, and responding to town councils, unions and the local press. Literature, film, photography, the press, the monument, the cemetery, the factory, the ruin, the archive and the natural ecosystem are some of the key frameworks of cultural production elucidated here with a view to countering and exploding received myths about the Cold War.

Networked Remembrance is the first book to explore questions of urban memory within what are some of the most commonly experienced subterranean margins of the contemporary city: underground railways. Using London’s and Berlin’s underground railways as comparative case studies, this book reveals how social memories are spatially produced – through practices of cartography and toponymy, memory work and memorialization, exploration and artistic appropriation – within the everyday and concealed places associated with these transport networks.Through numerous empirical excavations, this book highlights an array of different mnemonic actors, processes, structures and discourses that have determined the forms of «networked remembrance» associated with the subterranean stations and sections of the London Underground and Berlin U- and S-Bahn. In turn, it invites readers to descend into the «buried memories» that are often imperceptible to those travelling by rail beneath the British and German capitals and encourages them to ask what other memories might lie latent in the infrastructural landscapes beneath their feet.This book was the winner of the 2014 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Memory Studies.

Since Auschwitz, and more and more frequently today, places that were theatres of mass suffering and other atrocities are becoming common features of our cultural landscape. What should we do with these places? Keep them as they were, to remind us of what actually took place there, as ideal museums of past evils? Or should we transform them and, if so, into which forms and according to which principles? Which pasts do these places transmit, and how? This volume uses an innovative semiotic methodology to analyse selected key trauma sites. The author demonstrates that these places can become, once properly interrogated, privileged observatories capable of throwing light upon the many different conflicts, forms of social control, and power relationships that underlie any politics of memory. The selfsame notions of trauma and memory become, in this way, rewritten in quite a different light: far from any kind of naturalistic definition, they emerge as painful «knots» within which many of the most crucial questions in the contemporary world are intertwined.

Cities are both real and imaginary places whose identity is dependent on their distinctive heritage: a network of historically transmitted cultural resources. The essays in this volume, which originate from a lecture series at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, explore the complex and multi-layered identities of European cities.Themes that run through the essays include: nostalgia for a grander past; location between Eastern and Western ideologies, religions and cultures; and the fluidity and palimpsest quality of city identity.Not only does the book provide different thematic angles and a variety of approaches to the investigation of city identity, it also emphasizes the importance of diverse cultural components. The essays presented here discuss cultural forms as various as music, architecture, literature, journalism, philosophy, television, film, myths, urban planning and the naming of streets.

Why do you throw a coin into the Trevi Fountain and make a wish?This book links cultural memory with the materiality of the Trevi Fountain as historical monument and uses this perspective to examine its imagery in art, literature, film and music, concluding with the e-Trevi on the internet. How memory takes different pathways is of current interest in memory studies and the cross-disciplinary approach taken here considers how memory travels between media as well as exploring related issues such as forgetting and media convergence.Yet there is a dark side to the Trevi, previously unexplored, of memory linked to water, which runs counter to its usual blue sky image, and this ambiguity is unravelled. The book also conveys the international, national and localized meanings of the Fountain and describes the changing ideologies that are hidden in the many performances the monument is made to give. The Trevi is symbolic of both commodification and misogyny, symbols that flow with changing and contemporary meanings. Throw your coin with care!