Toronto Italian Studies - Böcker

Contemporary Italian Filmmaking is an innovative critique of Italian filmmaking in the aftermath of World War II - as it moves beyond traditional categories such as genre film and auteur cinema. Manuela Gieri demonstrates that Luigi Pirandello's revolutionary concept of humour was integral to the development of a counter-tradition in Italian filmmaking that she defines `humoristic'. She delineates a `Pirandellian genealogy' in Italian cinema, literature, and culture through her examination of the works of Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola, and many directors of the `new generation,' such as Nanni Moretti, Gabriele Salvatores, Maurizio Nichetti, and Giuseppe Tornatore.A celebrated figure of the theatrical world, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is little known beyond Italy for his critical and theoretical writings on cinema and for his screenplays. Gieri brings to her reading of Pirandello's work the critical parameters offered by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and postmodernism to develop a syncretic and transcultural vision of the history of Italian cinema. She identifies two fundamental trends of development in this tradition: the `melodramatic imagination' and the `humoristic,' or comic, imagination. With her focus on the humoristic imagination, Gieri describes a `Pirandellian mode' derived from his revolutionary utterances on the cinema and narrative, and specifically, from his essay on humour, L'umorismo (On Humour, 1908). She traces a history of the Pirandellian mode in cinema and investigates its characteristics, demonstrating the original nature of Italian filmmaking that is particularly indebted to Pirandello's interpretation of humour.

A resolution to the vexed problem whether a troubadour's love is erotic or spiritual is offered by Paolo Cherchi through a new reading of Andreas Capellanus' De Amore (written around 1186-1196). He suggests that Andreas, using a rhetorical strategy that creates ambiguity, condemns courtly love because its claim that passion generates virtue is untenable and deceitful. Although Andreas grasped the core of the courtly love 'system,' namely, the relation between passion and ethics, he failed to consider the notion of mezura, that courtly virtue through which troubadours transformed nature into culture, and erotic passion into social discourse.Cherchi offers an innovative interpretation and a close reading of selected poems. He traces the history of Provençal lyric poetry, highlighting some of the significant personalities and movements.

Federico Fellini remains the best known of the postwar Italian directors. This collection of essays brings Fellini criticism up to date, employing a range of recent critical filters, including semiotic, psychoanalytical, feminist and deconstructionist. Accordingly, a number of important themes arise - the reception of fascism, the crisis of the subject, the question of agency, homo-eroticism, feminism, and constructions of gender. Since the early 1970s, a slide in critical and theoretical attention to Fellini's work has corresponded with an assumption that his films are self-indulgent and lacking in political value. This volume moves the discussion towards a politics of signification, contending that Fellini's evolving self-reflexivity is not mere solipsism but rather a critique of both aesthetics and signification. The essays presented here are almost all new - the two exceptions being important signifiers in Fellini studies. The first, Frank Burke's "Federico Fellini: Reality/Representation/Signification" laid the foundation in the late 1980s for considering Fellini's work in the light of postmodernism. The second, Marguerite Waller's "Whose Dolce Vita is this Anyway?: The Language of Fellini's Cinema" (1990), provides a contemporary re-reading of Fellini's most successful film.This lively and ambitious collection brings a new critical language to bear on Fellini's films, offering fresh insights into their underlying issues and meaning. In bringing Fellini criticism up to date, it will have a significant impact on film studies, reclaiming this important director for a contemporary audience.

In this ground-breaking work, Ellen Nerenberg offers an analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, the last fifteen years of Fascism and the fifteen that followed. Nerenberg diverges from the notion that a radical break from Fascism coincided with Mussolini's fall, instead revealing a disturbing continuity of social restraints following World War II. Drawing on critical discourses of architectural design, urban planning, and cultural geography, Nerenberg offers readings of Buzzati, Piovène, de Céspedes, Banti, Morante, Pratolini, and Gadda. Not limiting herself to prisons, she also explores military barracks, convents, brothels, and homes as carceral homologue. In a surprising investigation of the male body as defined by the architectural space of the barracks and the discursive practices of military guides and journals, she challenges the notion circulated during Fascism of a homogenous model of masculinity. She also probes the social and symbolic positions of women in relation to confinement, the law, power, and liberty. In a chapter titled "House Arrest," she treats the ominous space of the home as a homologue for prison wherein "women are induced into criminality." A study of literal and literary spaces during and after Italian Fascism, this work examines the ways in which Fascist cultural and discursive practices and ideology endure in other guises past the fall of the Regime.

Of the many treatises written in Italy during the Counter-Reformation, none is more illustrative of the intellectual fermentation of the period than Comanini's work on the purpose of painting, Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura (1591). Although the importance of Il Figino has long been recognized, the text has remained largely inaccessible to many scholars throughout the world. This first complete English translation will make the work available to those readers for the first time.In Il Figino, Comanini addresses all of the most hotly debated aesthetic issues of the time, drawing on an array of classical, medieval and Renaissance sources, including Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Mazzoni, Tasso and Paleotti. The editor and translator provide copious notes which clarify Comanini's aesthetic and theological references, as well as a lucid introduction that places the issues and debates in context. Comanini's impressive erudition makes his treatise an excellent barometer of the state of scholarship in the Counter-Reformation era. This translation is a long-overdue addition to the field of Renaissance studies.

The movie screen has been the forum for many star pairings: Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, and Fellini and Kafka. While this latter combination might seem slightly unexpected or improbable at first sight, Carlo Testa's Masters of Two Arts demonstrates that pairings of famed directors and writers are commonplace in modern Italian cinema. Surprisingly, the study of the interrelation between Italian cinema and European literature has been almost completely neglected in film scholarship. Testa addresses and attempts to correct this oversight with nine in-depth analyses of the one-on-one rapport between an Italian filmmaker and a "classic" name in modern European literature. Looking at combinations such as Pasolini and Sade, Rossellini and Stendhal, and Visconti and Mann amongst others, Testa uses theoretical as well as historical methods, showing how the respective text undergoes not 'adaptation' but full 're-creation' (as defined by Èizenshtein) in a different art form and, even more importantly, in a new cultural context.

Eighteenth-century Italian playwright Pietro Chiari designated the age he lived in 'The Century of Women' - an age when women gained considerable power through education and admission to various academic positions and professions. Structured as an extended disputation, this book tells the tale of five paradigmatic and ideologically divergent eighteenth-century Italian texts by male and female authors whose leitmotif is woman. These include an academic debate, a scientific tract, an oration, an Enlightenment journal, and a fashion magazine. Analysis focuses on the specific ways in which the exigencies of the 'new science' and the burgeoning Enlightenment project founded on rational civil law, secular moral philosophy, and utilitarian social ethics forced a transformation in the formal controversy about women.By uncovering the characteristics of the expansive dominant discourse about women among Italian Enlightenment thinkers and of the counter-discourse women authors produced to assert their own distinct authority over constructions of femininity and the public sphere, this study reconceives eighteenth-century Italian culture and rectifies misconceptions about Italy's position and influence within the literary republic of the European Enlightenment. Groundbreaking and original, this study is the first to examine the contribution of women to the Republic of Letters of the Settecento, and will revise prevailing notions of eighteenth-century Italian culture and academia.

From the mysterious glosses by 'EK' in the poetry of Edmund Spenser, to the self-commentary in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, readers of literature have been fascinated by the comments, addenda, and footnotes added by authors to their own work. In this insightful and original work, Sherry Roush investigates poets' motivations for writing glosses. She argues that self-commentary differs fundamentally from standard commentary, and that it does not necessarily impose an authoritative reading, determine the poem's significance, or furnish factual autobiographical information. Rather, self-commentary presents an intriguing ulterior poetic dimension and adds to the inherent tension of the text.Roush focuses her study on three pairs of authors, each representing a distinct historical-contextual period: Dante and Boccaccio in the early Italian self-commentative tradition, Lorenzo de' Medici and Girolamo Benivieni in high Renaissance Florence, and Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella at the turn of the seventeenth century. Through numerous examples, Roush highlights the non-linear development of this mixed genre, and shows how poetic self-commentaries respond to unique literary, historical, and political exigencies, and offer keys to understanding the underlying poetic message. This seminal study will be of particular value to scholars interested in poetry, hermeneutics, autobiography, and Renaissance studies.

Italian is unique among modern European languages, for although it has a history going back eight centuries, it has only consolidated as a spoken national language during the twentieth century. Previously, it was a written, literary language, and people spoke regional dialects that were strikingly different from each other. This has intriguing implications for understanding notions such as mother tongue, native speaker, and literary language, and Giulio Lepschy discusses these and other issues in this collection of six scholarly essays on the Italian language.Lepschy also explores a little understood aspect of Italian prosody (the system of secondary stresses), and analyzes a Venetian play of the Renaissance, La Veniexiana, in which a 'gendered' reading helps to clarify some grammatically controversial passages. These aspects of the play had been examined by Carlo Dionisotti, the eminent Italianist whose life and works are the subject of the final essay. Lepschy's approach combines the insights of modern linguistic theory and the findings of fresh and original philological investigations. His essays will be essential to anyone interested in the Italian language.

The nineteenth century represents a crucial historical and cultural phase in the development of modern Italy. Writing to Delight provides a selection of short stories written by some of the most accomplished and acclaimed female authors of nineteenth-century Italy, made available to an English-speaking audience for the first time through this translation. The stories that make up this anthology are written in a realistic vein and describe the life and concerns of women at a time when Italy was going through major social and economic changes. Imbued with didactic aims, the authors of these stories strove to inspire and at the same time educate their public. In this regard, Writing to Delight also serves as an instrument for a critical investigation of both the cultural productions of nineteenth-century Italy and the process of formation of modern Italian identities. With the growth of the middle-classes and a more diffuse literacy among the population, women became a visible and conspicuous social force as consumers of cultural goods, such as books and newspapers. Many of the writers included in this anthology - Matilde Serao, Marchesa Colombi, Neera, Contessa Lara - were not only very successful writers of fiction but also worked as journalists for some of the main national newspapers of the time. They were well acquainted with their readers' tastes and expectations and made such awareness an integral part of their creative process. Their fiction thus reflects the many topics and concerns that informed the social and cultural debates of nineteenth-century Italy.

The nineteenth century represents a crucial historical and cultural phase in the development of modern Italy. Writing to Delight provides a selection of short stories written by some of the most accomplished and acclaimed female authors of nineteenth-century Italy, made available to an English-speaking audience for the first time through this translation. The stories that make up this anthology are written in a realistic vein and describe the life and concerns of women at a time when Italy was going through major social and economic changes. Imbued with didactic aims, the authors of these stories strove to inspire and at the same time educate their public. In this regard, Writing to Delight also serves as an instrument for a critical investigation of both the cultural productions of nineteenth-century Italy and the process of formation of modern Italian identities. With the growth of the middle-classes and a more diffuse literacy among the population, women became a visible and conspicuous social force as consumers of cultural goods, such as books and newspapers. Many of the writers included in this anthology - Matilde Serao, Marchesa Colombi, Neera, Contessa Lara - were not only very successful writers of fiction but also worked as journalists for some of the main national newspapers of the time. They were well acquainted with their readers' tastes and expectations and made such awareness an integral part of their creative process. Their fiction thus reflects the many topics and concerns that informed the social and cultural debates of nineteenth-century Italy.

The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. Mostly used between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries - from the invectives of Rustico Filippi, Franco Sacchetti, and Burchiello, to the paradoxical praises of Francesco Berni, Niccolò Campani and Pietro Aretino, and further to the conceited encomia of Giambattista Marino and Marinisti - the portrayal of female unattractiveness was, argues Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman, one way of figuring woman as 'other.'Bettella shows how medieval female ugliness included transgressive types ranging from the lustful old hag, to the slanderer, the wild woman, the heretic/witch, and the prostitute, whereas Early Modern unattractiveness targeted peasants, mountain dwellers, and black slaves: marginal women whose bodies and manners subvert aesthetic precepts of culturally normative beauty and propriety. Taking a philological and feminist approach, and drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and on the poetics of transgression, The Ugly Woman is a unique look at the essential counterdiscourse of the celebrated Italian poetic canon and a valuable contribution to the study of women in literature.

Founded by F.T. Marinetti in 1909, Italian Futurism was the first major avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. It was also one of the longest lasting, having continued as long as Marinetti and his colleagues remained active – until 1944. Despite the provocative manifestos and outrageous public performances that earned its members international fame, their remarkable poetic achievements have received little post-war scholarly attention. This anthology, by the widely recognized Italian Futurist scholar Willard Bohn, seeks to correct this oversight.It is commonly believed that Futurist poetry rarely strayed from three main subjects: modern machinery, warfare, and the Fascist dream. Bohn demonstrates that, in reality, it was much more diverse. Although military, mechanical, and patriotic themes occur in a number of poems, including some in this volume, the Futurist repertoire was actually much larger. Ranging from Symbolist exercises to radical experiments worthy of Dada or Surrealism, it was also surprisingly creative.Italian Futurist Poetry contains more than 100 poems (both Italian and English versions) by sixty-one poets from across Italy. Arranged in roughly chronological order, the anthology reflects numerous aesthetic, historical, and cultural developments. It is a major contribution to the understanding of modern Italian culture and, indeed, of twentieth-century avant-garde literature in general.

Designed to teach the basic elements of the Italian language, this book is a breakthrough in the field of language studies. Its easy, stimulating, and enjoyable approach to learning Italian will benefit beginners and more advanced speakers alike.An opening chapter on Italian spelling and pronunciation is followed by thirty lessons, each one introducing a conversational theme centred around a crossword puzzle. The lessons present new words and expressions, sample conversations, and language notes, each one building on the last and presenting puzzles that are progressively more challenging. A number of chapters designed as reviews include word-search puzzles and anagrams. Answers are at the back, along with verb conjugation charts and language glossaries.An ideal learning tool for anyone who has little time for serious study but can always find a minute to do a crossword puzzle, this book will also provide an excellent course supplement at both high-school and university levels.

The contemporary Italian writer Gianni Celati has published work in many different genres, including critical and philosophical essays, fiction, and travel books. Well known in Italy, Celati is growing in popularity with readers in North America and England. This is the first book-length study in any language of his entire production of the last thirty-five years.Nonlinear in approach, this book ranges over a broad landscape of critical thought and creative writing. While analyzing Celati's specific contributions, it also offers vivid sketches of the many literary and intellectual scenes that have influenced the author's life and writing. Rebecca West discusses Celati in relation to other Italian writers, such as Calvino and Ghirri, and American sociolinguists William Labov and Dell Hymes, as well as to postmodern literary theorists, and practitioners of the post-modern, contemporary ethnographers, and experimental writers from many countries. Along the way, she poses questions about human existence, using Celati's reflections as a guide. She also shares much biographical material about the author and accounts of her own encounters with him.The world's leading authority on Celati, West has produced a work of deep and wide-ranging scholarship that will appeal to anyone interested in literature and the literary world. "Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling" won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Studies presented by the Modern Language Association of America.

In this book, Guy Raffa offers a fresh reading of Dante's major literary works - the Divine Comedy and the Vita nuova - that combines central tenets of incarnational theology and dialectical thought to illuminate the poet's renowned ability to 'have it both ways' on issues that conventionally elicit an 'either/or' response. Viewing Dante as a poet of revision, not conversion, Raffa challenges a dominant paradigm in Dante criticism and takes full account of the poet's unconventional approach to such conventional dichotomies as eros and spirituality, fame and humility, action and contemplation, and obedience and transgression. Divine Dialectic ultimately argues that Dante crosses textual and theological boundaries in his medieval epic to promote the paradoxical union of contradiction and resolution as a way of reading his poem and, by extension, the world itself.

In this companion volume to L'Italia verso il Duemila, Ugo Skubikowski provides a glimpse into authentic Italian life through the presentation of twelve interviews with Italians. Intended as a text for students in second-year university and beyond, Vite italiane brings together discussions with Italians from different regions and backgrounds, who speak candidly about a wide range of experiences. Among those we encounter are a recent university graduate, a widow raising a young daughter as a single mother, a high school teacher who has traded her leftist political activism for a new, more moderate approach, and a successful, ambitious restauranteur. These and other interviews provide a fascinating and varied picture of life in Italy as experienced and described by Italians themselves.

Designed for beginning students of Italian at the high-school, university, and community college levels, Lettura e Conversazione is a series of interesting, stimulating dialogues and readings based on actual experiences and situations that the student faces in daily life, It stresses the acquisition of useful, practical vocabulary and the development of speaking and comprehension skills.

Italian words that resemble words in English but have different meanings are the cause of student bafflement and some hilariously mistaken usage. Examples of falsi amici that continue to amuse teachers of Italian include casino, which is a brothel or mess, not a gambling place, and intossicazione, which is food poisoning, not intoxication. Ronnie Ferguson has confronted the much-neglected problem of `false friends,' or deceptive cognates, with a dictionary which makes it possible for the student of Italian to alert her- or himself to the pitfalls. Accurate translation, essay work, and comprehension hinge on the confident handling of key words prone to incorrect interpretation, and Italian False Friends will be a useful tool to assist students to improve their proficiency in these areas.This book is an excellent companion volume to Interferenze Lessicali:Italiano-inglese, the practical teaching workbook with drills and exercises by Marina Sasu Frescura published earlier in the series. Italian False Friends is effectively illustrated with samples from newspapers, magazines, street signs, and books.

Contemporary Italian Filmmaking is an innovative critique of Italian filmmaking in the aftermath of World War II - as it moves beyond traditional categories such as genre film and auteur cinema. Manuela Gieri demonstrates that Luigi Pirandello's revolutionary concept of humour was integral to the development of a counter-tradition in Italian filmmaking that she defines `humoristic'. She delineates a `Pirandellian genealogy' in Italian cinema, literature, and culture through her examination of the works of Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola, and many directors of the `new generation,' such as Nanni Moretti, Gabriele Salvatores, Maurizio Nichetti, and Giuseppe Tornatore.A celebrated figure of the theatrical world, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is little known beyond Italy for his critical and theoretical writings on cinema and for his screenplays. Gieri brings to her reading of Pirandello's work the critical parameters offered by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and postmodernism to develop a syncretic and transcultural vision of the history of Italian cinema. She identifies two fundamental trends of development in this tradition: the `melodramatic imagination' and the `humoristic,' or comic, imagination. With her focus on the humoristic imagination, Gieri describes a `Pirandellian mode' derived from his revolutionary utterances on the cinema and narrative, and specifically, from his essay on humour, L'umorismo (On Humour, 1908). She traces a history of the Pirandellian mode in cinema and investigates its characteristics, demonstrating the original nature of Italian filmmaking that is particularly indebted to Pirandello's interpretation of humour.

This book is an outstanding collection of readings in Italian designed to introduce language students to contemporary Italian culture while developing their skills in reading, speaking, writing, and listening. The selections in L'Italia verso il Duemila range from essays on serious topics such as recent history and politics, the Italian economy, immigration from developing countries, the North-South gap, and the environment, to lighter pieces on Italian surnames, traditions, food, popular music, and soccer. Suggested activities designed to facilitate development of language skills, comprehension, and grammar review accompany the readings.Although it requires a knowledge of basic grammar, L'Italia verso il Duemila may be used as early as the second semester of an intensive beginning Italian course. The book is organized into three sections: Tradizioni, Storia e politica contemporanea, and Sviluppi, each representing an increasing level of difficulty. Definitions are given for vocabulary that is likely to be unfamiliar to students.This book is designed to offer students and instructors material to suit a wide range of individual tastes while reinforcing the basic language skills essential for achieving competence in a foreign language.

This workbook offers the teacher of Italian a varied collection of activities for the classroom. The thirty-one activities involve situations and guided exercises for creating dialogues, exchanging information, providing descriptions, and completing questionnaires and forms. In L’italiano si impara in due students work in pairs. The situations and contexts are typical of Italian society, combining topics of interest to contemporary Italian youth with traditional elements of Italian culture. The book is intended for beginner and intermediate students as a means of integrating and complementing a basic course of study.In each unit, grammatical structures are introduced and developed, as is vocabulary. Interaction between students is ensured by the complementary, two-part composition of the text. An exhaustive glossary that includes all idiomatic expressions and jargon used in the activities completes the book.

The Trilogia della vita (Trilogy of Life) is a series of three films that Pier Paolo Pasolini completed before his horrifying assassination in 1975, and it remains among the most controversial of his cinematic works. In Allegories of Contamination Patrick Rumble provides an incisive critical and theoretical study of these films and the Marxist filmmaker's complex, original concept of the cinematic medium.With the three films that make up the Trilogy of Life – The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, andThe Arabian Nights – Pasolini attempts to recapture the aura surrounding popular, predominantly oral forms of storytelling through a pro-modern vision of innocent, unalienated bodies and pleasures. In these works Pasolini appears to abandon the explicitly political engagement that marked his earlier works - films that led him to be identified with other radical filmmakers such as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, and Godard. However, Pasolini insisted that these were his 'most ideological films,' and his political engagement translates into a mannerist, anti-classical style or what he called a 'cinema of poetry.' Rumble offers a comparative study based on the concept of 'aesthetic contamination,' which is fundamental to the understanding of Pasolini's poetics. Aesthetic contamination concerns the mediation between different cultures and different historical moments. Through stylistic experimentation, the Trilogy of Life presents a genealogy of visual codes, an interrogation of the subjectivity of narrative cinema. In these films Pasolini celebrates life, and perhaps therein lies their simple heresy.

Twentieth-century Italian poetry is one of the most vital, innovative and influential bodies of literature on the European continent. This volume presents a selection of poems in the original Italian, with introductory material and notes in English.

In every society proverbs provide a lively and colourful point of access to the language and the culture, Caterina Cicogna takes the images associated with Italian proverbs and idiomatic phrases and breaks them up into their constituent semantic categories, so that the learner can come to grasp and acquire the structure of figuration in Italian progressively and methodically. The exercise material is based both on receptive/perceptual skills and productive ones. Well-chosen Italian proverbs and idiomatic expressions are accompanied by a wide range of written and oral exercises. For students at an intermediate-advanced level in high schools, community colleges, and universities, this book provides and engaging approach to improving fluency in the Italian language.

Dante: Contemporary Perspectives gathers recent and newly commissioned articles on Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), whose epic the Divine Comedy, is one of the landmarks of world literature. The essays in this volume probe current critical assumptions about the celebrated Italian poet, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political theorist. Dante's attitude towards poetic authority and language comes under scrutiny in several essays, while others examine his political thought and his views on women and gender. Several articles focus exclusively on the Divine Comedy, and, in particular, on its distinctive textual characteristics. There are new readings of two of the Divine Comedy's most important episodes – those of Paolo and Francesca, the Earthly Paradise, and Ulysses – whose significance extends far beyond their immediate contexts. These essays bring into focus Dante's bold narrative innovations and reflections on literature and history.

Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946-55. As this anthology reveals, however, his production was remarkably multifaceted. The essays included here - some newly commissioned, some reprinted, and others in translation - look at De Sica's varied career from many perspecives.Structured chronologically, the volume begins by introducing readers to De Sica's early popularity as an actor and singer during the years of Italian Fascism, and to his initial directorial efforts before the end of World War II. It was not until the postwar era, however, that De Sica made his mark in film history. Special attention is given to this critical phase of his career, which encompasses the neorealist films that made him famous: "Shoeshine", "Bicycle Thieves", "Miracle in Milan", and "Umberto D."When the neorealist movement waned after 1955, De Sica returned to his roots in Neapolitan comedy for a series of commercially successful films starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Memorable works from this period include "Two Women" and "Marriage Italian Style" as well as "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow", which won De Sica an Academy Award in 1965. In one of his final films, "The Garden of the Finzi Continis", he returned to the subject of World War II and to the human tragedy characteristic of his best neorealist productions. This fine anthology offers a comprehensive critical survey that covers the entire scope of De Sica's career, and is an excellent resource for students, critics and film enthusiasts.

Cosmopoiesis means world-making, and in this erudite, polemical book, Professor Mazzotta traces how major medieval and Renaissance thinkers invented their worlds through utopias, magic, science, art, and theatre. The Renaissance is usually read from a Cartesian or Hegelian (via Burckhardt) perspective. It is viewed as a time of individualities or it is studied in terms of disembodied ideas and abstract forms. Mazzotta calls for a new approach: the necessity to study the Renaissance in terms of the ongoing conversation of the arts and sciences. His is an encyclopedic grasp that takes into consideration literature, philosophy, politics, history, and theology.The book's theoretical premise lies in the thought of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico. Vico's own reading of the Renaissance, available in his New Science, is obliquely, yet clearly reproposed as the alternate interpretive key for opening up the deeper imaginative concerns of this extraordinary period of Western history.By a series of rigorous textual analyses that range from Poliziano to Ariosto, from Machiavelli to Bacon, to Shakespeare and Cervantes, "Cosmopoiesi"s highlights the ongoing dialogue between literature and philosophy (or literature and science, or, in Vichian terms, philology and philosophy) in some of the central texts of the time.In this dialogue across time and the barriers of space, the esthetic world - the world of the pastoral, romances, epics, utopian fictions, the theatre, and the lyric - far from signalling an evasion from history, is steadily and vitally engaged with the most pressing exigencies of the time. Consistently, the analyses conducted in "Cosmopoiesis" come to grips with these exigencies: the power of science, the relationship between politics and science, and the emergence of a new ethics in the midst of the secretive techniques by new elites in their exercise of political power. Above all, these central texts argue for a necessary reconstitution of the unity of knowledge, for the "encyclopedic" compass of the arts and sciences. The retrieval of this unity is made possible by reclaiming a role for the esthetic or contemplative mode of thought which underlies and shapes the most creative achievements in the world of making.

The movie screen has been the forum for many star pairings: Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, and Fellini and Kafka. While this latter combination might seem slightly unexpected or improbable at first sight, Carlo Testa's Masters of Two Arts demonstrates that pairings of famed directors and writers are commonplace in modern Italian cinema. Surprisingly, the study of the interrelation between Italian cinema and European literature has been almost completely neglected in film scholarship. Testa addresses and attempts to correct this oversight with nine in-depth analyses of the one-on-one rapport between an Italian filmmaker and a "classic" name in modern European literature. Looking at combinations such as Pasolini and Sade, Rossellini and Stendhal, and Visconti and Mann amongst others, Testa uses theoretical as well as historical methods, showing how the respective text undergoes not 'adaptation' but full 're-creation' (as defined by Èizenshtein) in a different art form and, even more importantly, in a new cultural context.