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This volume springs from that fruitful project of scientific cooperation between the humanities departments of Università di Firenze and University of Arizona which was the Forum for the Study of the Literary Cultures of the Southwest (2000-2007). Tri-cultural, at least (Native, Hispanic and Anglo-American), and multi-lingual, today's Southwest presents a complex coexistence of different cultures, the equal of which would be hard to find elsewhere in the United States. Of this virtually inexhaustible object of study, the essays here collected tackle an ample range of themes. While the majority of them are concerned with the literatures of the Southwest, still a good third falls into the fields of history, art history, ethnography, sociology or cultural studies. They are partitioned in four sections, the first three reflecting the chronology of the stratification of the three major cultures and the fourth highlighting one of the most sensitive topics in and about contemporary Southwest - the borderlands/la frontera
This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not j...
This monograph discusses scalar verb classes. It tests theories of linguistic form and meaning, arguments and thematic roles, using Estonian data. The analyses help to understand the aspectual structure of Estonian. In Estonian, transitive verbs fall into aspectual classes based on the type of case-marking of objects and adjuncts. The book relates the morphosyntactic frames of verbs to properties typically associated with adjectives and nouns: scalarity and boundedness. Verbs are divided according to how their aspect is composed. Some verbs lexicalize a scale, which can be bounded either lexically or compositionally. Aspectual composition involves the unification of features. Compositionally derived structures differ according to which of the aspectually relevant dimensions are bounded.
This volume collects the interventions of the post-doctoral fellows and PhD students of the University of Cluj Napoca, the University of Bucharest and the University of Florence (Mediterranean Cultures; Doctoral School of Comparative Languages, Literatures and Cultures, specialisation in Language, Literature, Philology: Intercultural Perspectives) presented in occasion of the seminar Storia, identità e canoni letterari (“History, identity and literary canons”, Florence, 22-23 November 2011). The contributions are centred on the idea of canon, as a cultural construct founding modern national identities. Another trace is the literary and cultural hybridisations between different geographies. For the Romanian context, the contributions pay particular attention to the movements of the avant-garde of the early 1900s. Some contributions account for the most problematic aspects of the contemporary world using interdisciplinary approaches.
Following the pages of Guo Liancheng's journal, the author tries to shed light on its contents and features and to analyze the image of Italy described in the pages of Brief account of the Journey to the West, the earliest firsthand account on the Bel Paese ever published in China.Miriam Castorina received her Ph.D. in History and Civilization of East Asia in 2008 at University of Rome La Sapienza. She studied Mandarin Chinese in Tianjin Nankai University and Beijing Foreign Studies University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Peking University. Her research focuses on Chinese travel literature, on cultural contacts between Italy and China and on the history of Chinese teaching in Italy, topics on which she has published several articles and books. [Publisher's text].
This collection gathers the contributions of ten scholars on the topic of transnational cultural and physical mobility originating in China. These contributions aim to open conversations among Chinese Studies scholars by applying a Mobility Studies perspective. Exploring diverse narratives and forms of representation from people of Chinese heritage, the book is divided into three parts that each look closely at the relationship between movement and cultural production. The first part is dedicated to four types of mobility of people from China to Italy, namely tourist mobility (Miriam Castorina), labor mobility (Valentina Pedone), student mobility (Xu Hao), and mobility of social elites (Andrea Scibetta). The second part is dedicated to examples of reverse mobility from Italy to China (Gao Changxu, Chiara Lepri, Giuseppe Rizzuto). The third part focuses on case studies based on mobilities from China to territories other than Italy (Rebecca Ehrenwirth, Martina Renata Prosperi, Giulia Rampolla).
The formulation of Maxwell’s equations completely defines the connection between the electric field and the magnetic field, definitively unifying electricity and magnetism and at the same time providing a theoretical synthesis of all the experimental phenomena connected to these areas. In his revolutionary 1864 memoir where J.C. Maxwell presented his equations, he cites a handful of scientists, which were at the basis of his Theory. This book, in its first part, presents an insight on all these latter scientists, reconstructing the scientific network behind Maxwell’s unification and, in the second part, focuses on the Italians in such a network: Ottaviano Fabrizio Mossotti and Riccardo Felici, with a further insight on the connections between Maxwell and Italy and, in particular, Tuscany.
Recent work on second language acquisition within the generative framework has pointed out interfaces (syntax-discourse, syntax-semantics, etc.) as a residual domain of vulnerability in L2. Rather than in core syntax, it is at the interface level that the divergence between native and non-native grammars has been shown to be more prominent. In this book the investigation of answering strategies and the focalization of new information subjects, which require access to the syntax-discourse interface, will be pursued. Data is collected through an oral elicitation task on Finnish and Italian, a rather unexplored language pair, in various stages of language development: advanced and intermediate L2 acquisition, L1 under L2 attrition, early bilingualism, child monolingual L1 development.
The years 1676 and 1774 marked two turning points in the social and legal treatment of madness in England. In 1676, London’s Bethlehem Hospital expanded in grand new premises, and in 1774 the Madhouses Act attempted to limit confinement of the insane. This study explores almost a century of the English history of madness through the texts of five poets who were considered mentally troubled according to contemporary standards: James Carkesse, Anne Finch, William Collins, Christopher Smart and William Cowper were hospitalized, sequestered or exiled from society. Their works cope with representations of insanity, medical definitions or practices, imputed illness, and the judging eye of the ‘sane other’, shedding new light on the dis/continuities in the notion of madness of this period.
This book offers a collection of South African university students’ written responses to the Commedia and scholars’ commentary on them. The students’ collection includes writings of all genres and subjects: prose, poetry, personal reflection, dialogue, non-fiction based on the first two cantiche of the Commedia. Some are autobiographical and others are fictional stories, but they all have in common a very personal (and South African) approach to Dante’s text. The scholarly essays of the second part are concerned with the unusual way in which Dante is appreciated by our youth: not as a remote figure only encountered in the hallways of the literature department, but as an intimate presence, a guide, a friend whose language is familiar and invites a response.