Maria Grazia Bartolini – författare

In The Eye of the Mind, Maria Grazia Bartolini investigates how early modern Ukrainian preachers prompted their listeners to see and remember sermons by calling upon vision, memory, and mental imagery. With memorization recognized in Ukraine as a cognitive skill vital to the internalization of texts, these preachers, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, designed their sermons to enable listeners to see the subject matter as mental images and situate them in imaginary locations for easy recall.Based on analysis of little-known printed and manuscript sources from the second half of the seventeenth century, Bartolini masterfully demonstrates how verbal and visual images within the sermon functioned as mnemonic devices that helped Ukrainian preachers construct and deliver sermons and evoked intellectual and emotional associations in the minds of the audience. The effect of this rhetorical practice, Bartolini argues, was to create a theatrum meditationis—a memory theater—in which the audience was encouraged to take part as spectators. By fully integrating intellectual history, visual studies, and rhetorical analysis, The Eye of the Mind provides a unique perspective on seventeenth-century religious orators and their audiences in Ukraine and beyond.

This book examines the early poetry (1956–1971) of the Ukrainian/American writer Yuriy Tarnawsky, one of the founders of the New York Group of Ukrainian poets and a unique figure among Ukrainian writers with regard to his experiments with forms. Demonstrating the radical changes that occurred in his poetic style between the 1950s and 1970s, Maria Grazia Bartolini analyzes the relationship between these innovations and the similar shifts taking place in Western poetry and culture during the 1950s and 1960s, when new forms of expression and a new consciousness developed in the interstices between modernism and nascent postmodernism. The book provides the reader with a selection of unpublished materials from the Yuriy Tarnawsky Papers at the Bakhmeteff Archive of Columbia University.