martedì 4 luglio 2017

Maria Iasenza: Enfasi ed evitamento (Merope n. 66 - pp. 77-90)

Marzia Iasenza
Enfasi ed evitamento: prospettive sulla keyness
di quattro corpora giornalistici sulla crisi finanziaria

Abstract – The purpose of this study is to compare four newspaper corpora, two of which coded in English and two in Italian. For each language, the two corpora comprise texts showing different levels of specialisation – specialised or popular register, respectively – in an effort to highlight the multifaceted perspectives on narrating the breakout of the global financial crisis in 2008. The newspaper corpora were chosen and analysed following the experimental models provided by theories as “Corpus Translation Studies” and “Critical Discourse Analysis”, among which the keywords analysis proved to be effective as a means to uncover both the conceptual structure of the text, i.e. its ‘aboutness’, and its communicative function. As a result, the keywords analysis has identified “emphasis” and “avoidance” as the two opposite discourse strategies used to manage the “crisis event” at the cognitive level and to report it to the target audience.

Keywords: financial crisis, newspaper corpora, News Discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis, perspectives on keyness.

Charlo Pisani: Nostalghia (Merope n. 66 - pp. 61-76)

Charlo Pisani
The Cinematic ‘I’ in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia

Abstract – This paper seeks to illustrate how Tarkovsky’s plot-antagonistic film Nostalghia, possesses an aesthetic and affective unity, attributable to the intermeshing of diegetic and extradiegetic viewpoints engaged with the metaphysical and material dimensions of being. This interaction conveys the protagonist’s physical and affective condition away from home as a liminal condition triggering anaphoric dreams and musings that strike a motific contiguity with his present location, thus putting the viewer in an analogously liminal cinematic position. It will be shown how both dreams and film direction follow intertextual strategies which allow the protagonist and the viewer to transcend literal and figurative borders into what is, perhaps, Tarkovsky’s most idiosyncratic and audacious glimpse into the afterlife.

Keywords: Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia, diegetic/extradiegetic, viewpoint, the fourth wall, intertextuality, metaphysical

Alessandra Granito: Rensi a confronto con Cioran (Merope n. 66 - pp. 45-60)

Alessandra Granito
Rensi a confronto con Cioran.
La meontologia come sfida alla postmodernità neo-cinica 

 Abstract – The purpose of this essay is to rehabilitate the philosophy of two controversial thinkers: Giuseppe Rensi and Emile Cioran. Their corrosive and passionate Weltanschauung reverse Parmenide’s ontological principle of Being in the dramatic assertion of Nothingness, opening up to a meontological perspective of denunciation against the axiological structure of the world marked by irrationalism. Far from being relegated to the margins of a fatalistic skepticism, this perspective does not abdicate to any peaceful attestation of inconsistency nor to any laconic indifference, but it advocates the assumption of the problematic of the human being. Furthermore, in their anti-humanist investigation of negativum, I argue that Rensi and Cioran can be considered two counterfactual references for the post-modern culture that is increasingly closed in a metaphysical disengagement, hypostatized in a spiritual stagnation marked not only by nihilism and secularization, but also by cynical abandonment of responsibility and the pathologization of negativum.

 Keywords: meontology, absurd, nihilism, negativum, skepticism. cynical reason, anti/humanism

Mara Barbuni: Anna Barbauld (Merope n. 66 - pp. 27-43)

Mara Barbuni
“Hope with eager sparkling eyes”: la giovinezza, il progresso
e l’affermazione di sé nella scrittura poetica di Anna Barbauld

Abstract: This paper analyses a group of poems by Anna Barbauld (1743-1825) with the purpose of highlighting the representation of her self-affirmation as a young woman full of hope for the future in the context of the patriarchal system of values of the Dissenting Academy at Warrington. The following poems have been chosen: “The Invitation”, “To Dr. Aikin on His Complaining that she neglected him”, “To Wisdom”, “The Groans of the Tankard”, “Inscription for an Ice-House”, “An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr Priestley’s Study”, “Washing Day”. The first four poems portray the life at Warrington, where the ambitions and the passions of the young were often constrained by their older tutors: here Barbauld uses a highly ironic language to demonstrate that, in spite of the hierarchies imposed by the Academy, the young (a category to which she herself belonged) always found a way to affirm their own intelligence and their own crucial role in the development of natural and human sciences. “Inscription for an Ice-House”, “An Inventory” and “Washing Day”, although written in a later phase of her life, evoke Barbauld’s youth and childhood and aspire, through a more elevated language, to demonstrate that she has fulfilled her self-acknowledgment as a poet, whose writing is finally able to revert traditional hierarchies and is destined to resist the passage of time. 

Keywords: Barbauld, self-acknowledgment, scientific progress, poetry, eighteenth century

Francesco Marroni: Shaw e la demolizione dei modelli (Merope n. 66 - pp. 7-26)

Francesco Marroni
George Bernard Shaw e la demolizione dei modelli.
Note su una lettera orwelliana

Abstract – Taking the cue from a letter by Orwell, in which he is highly polemical towards George Bernard Shaw, this paper intends to explore the reasons underlying the demolition of celebrated literary models on the part of their former followers. Very often, from an urgency to find a space for themselves and establish their own artistic identity at the beginning of their careers, writers disavow those very literary figures who were the object of their admiration, if not worship in their youth. In this way, Orwell strives to demolish the image of Shaw from whom, during his formative years, he had derived not only an iconoclastic attitude towards orthodoxy, but also his adoption of a realistic method in writing. Before Orwell, Shaw himself had acted in exactly the same way, launching a reckless attack against Shakespeare and Victorian Bardolatry which to many appeared nothing less than a heresy. Not only, but the same posture can be seen in Shaw’s relationship with one of his main models, Henrik Ibsen. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism he gives a misreading of the Norwegian dramatist using an argumentative strategy which simultaneously appears as a wild appropriation and parallel destruction of Ibsen. Even though Shaw had affirmed in no uncertain terms that Ibsen had paved the way towards realism and a new conception of the theatre, he did not hesitate to belittle Ibsen’s extraordinary impact with the intent to affirm the superiority of his own ideas both as a Fabian socialist and a militant playwright. 

Keywords: G. B. Shaw, George Orwell, literary models, misreading, artistic demolition