You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians—Jews and others—were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.
Primo Levi (1919–87) was the author of a rich body of work, including memoirs and reflections on Auschwitz, poetry, science fiction, historical fiction and essays. In particular, his lucid and direct accounts of his time at Auschwitz, begun immediately after liberation in 1945 and sustained until weeks before his suicide in 1987, has made him one of the most admired of all Holocaust writer-survivors and one of the best guides we have for the interrogation of that horrific event. But there is also more to Levi than the voice of the witness. He has increasingly come to be recognised as one of the major literary voices of the twentieth century. This Companion brings together leading specialists on Levi and scholars in the fields of Holocaust studies, Italian literature and language, and literature and science, to offer a stimulating introduction to all aspects of the work of this extraordinary writer.
These essays by outstanding international scholars in honour of Robert P. Gordon cover topics ranging from accuracy and anachronism in the books of Samuel, through the theology of Psalms, ancient near eastern historiography, to ideology, philology, grammar and linguistics in the translations and versions.
In the twenty years since his death, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) has grown into a figure of defining importance in the history of post-war Italian literary and cinematographic culture. His extraordinary and continuing impact is explained by his capacity to appropriate and transform or distort traditional genres, media, languages, and forms of art, and to bring them into stark confrontation with the deeply fractured social, political, and sexual landscape of modern Italy. Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity aims at a global reassessment of Pasolini, examining in turn his journalism and essays, his poetry, his film theory and practice, and his sprawling, posthumously published narrative fragment Petrolio, all from the perspective of the complex shifting workings of subjectivity which animate every aspect of his work. Gordon provides a conceptual and interpretative framework which illuminates Pasolini's mastery of both the written word and the cinematographical world.
One of twentieth-century Italy's greatest thinkers, Primo Levi (1919-1987) started reflecting on the Holocaust almost immediately after his return home from the year he survived in Auschwitz. Levi's powerful Holocaust testimonials reveal his preoccupation with processes of translation, in the form of both embedded and book-length renderings of texts relevant to Holocaust survival. In Arduous Tasks, Lina N. Insana demonstrates how translation functions as a metaphor for the transmission of Holocaust testimony and broadens the parameters of survivor testimony. The first book to study Levi and translation, Arduous Tasks overcomes the conventional views of the separation between his own personal memoirs and his translations by stressing the centrality of translation in Levi's entire corpus. Examining not only the testimonial nature of his work, Insana also discusses the transgressive and performative aspects of transmission in his writings. Arduous Tasks is a superb and innovative study on the importance of translation not only to Levi, but also to Holocaust studies in general.
The Structure of Emotions argues that emotion concepts should have a much more important role in the social and behavioural sciences than they now enjoy, and shows that certain influential psychological theories of emotions overlook the explanatory power of our emotion concepts. Professor Gordon also outlines a new account of the nature of commonsense (or 'folk') psychology in general.