Examining the modalities of the sacred’s presence in contemporary writings, born of the era of the “death of God” (Nietzsche) and a century of “dechristianization” (Delumeau), requires a reflection rooted in experiences that call everything into question, including the foundations of the Christian religion. Within the framework of representing these profoundly moving experiences, how then can we explain the insistent emergence of the image of Christ, a figure that haunts the imagination of writers of the last century and embodies the supreme Christian manifestation of the sacred? These questions guide a comparative reading which, drawing on Bataille’s thought, offers a journey through the works of Artaud, Beckett, and Pasolini, aiming to explore the ambivalent nature of these profound experiences and to examine the work of defiguring the image of Christ that they entail.

Publisher’s website: http://editionsorizons.fr/index.php/experiences-du-sacre-et-de-figurations-du-christ-lectures-croisees-de-bataille-a-artaud-beckett-et-pasolini.html

Traduzione e Introduzione di Simone Biundo e Paola Fossa

Un viaggio attraverso le parole di Louis Brauquier nella traduzione di Simone Biundo e Paola Fossa, una rotta azzardata e libera tracciata sulla mappa che prende avvio dalle sue opere complete.
Ai versi fanno eco le foto, e viceversa, di vari autori, professionisti e non, che hanno sposato il progetto Festamobile, condividendo la loro visione di persone affacciate sui tre quarti del mondo: il mare.

Traduzione e introduzione: Simone Biundo e Paola Fossa
Fotografie: Fabio Annese, Lorenzo Armagno, Andrea Aschedamini, Michele Cannavò, Kevien Damico, Alessandra Fuccillo, Andrea Giampiccolo, Gaia Gulizia, Pandora Lapoudre, Luciano Lucci, Giovanna Martini, Carlo Pala, Ambre Philippe, Federica Polin

con una illustrazione di Andrea Musso
Collana Ouvertures, n. 3
stampa e realizzazione: Litografia Solari, Peschiera Borromeo (Milano)
isbn: 9788899825065
Edizioni Festamobile

This book is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. The simultaneously physical and ideological nature of objects has made them remarkably transparent to critical inquiries into their aesthetic, political, social, historical, or philosophical uses and meanings. This book identifies three processes at work in the apprehension of objects in poetry, prose, visual arts, culture, and crafts. If the first instinct of the modernist novelists and playwrights was to object to the realist tradition of objects as more or less stable inherited signifiers, they felt themselves equally free, we find, to take up humanity as their object. The human body, emotions, and mind were endowed with newfound plasticity, and it was now the artist’s and the writer’s task to fashion them after their own image, mobilizing and expanding them through objects seen as relational and connective catalysts for the modernist subject. Finally, the futile and decorative object is explored. From Baroness Elsa performing the commodity fetish to Jean Rhys performing the dissolution of the self in a frenzy of sartorial ornament, the agency of surface detail (misplaced, proliferating, or repurposed) is made manifest and given free play.

What are the true stakes in Gide’s discourse on music? It would seem that, although he defends a classical musical aesthetic which he uses as a safeguard, André Gide is above all, sometimes against his will, initiated into desire by music.

Publisher’s website: https://classiques-garnier.com/musique-et-desir-chez-andre-gide.html

Book Presentation

Beyond the role of Latin culture as a creative principle in the work of André Gide, this volume aims to examine two aspects of Gidean “Latinity”: his language and his thought. Indeed, André Gide’s work reflects, on an ethical, aesthetic, and even stylistic level, the politico-ideological debate on Latinity that stirred the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, concerning the status of Latin, but also, more broadly, the value of Latin culture. While André Gide never directly takes part in the controversy, the articles gathered here highlight how his work echoes it, even formulating a unique response: that of a critical reinterpretation of a certain Latin heritage.

Contributions: Marie-Françoise André, Stéphanie Bertrand, Paola Codazzi, Martina Della Casa, Alain Goulet, Enrico Guerini, Frank Lestringant, Pierre Masson, Patrick Pollard, Carmen Saggiomo, Jean-Michel Wittmann.

Publisher’s website: https://classiques-garnier.com/latin-et-latinite-dans-l-oeuvre-d-andre-gide.html

Writer, traveler, and courtier, a close associate of Louise of Savoy and Francis I who commissioned his works, the Franciscan Jean Thenaud (c. 1480–1542) is a pivotal figure due to the innovations he brought to French Renaissance culture. Known for his only printed book, Voyage d’Oultremer, which recounts his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land, he is also the author of an important poetic and mythographic synthesis inspired by Boccaccio. He is also credited with the first French adaptations of Lucian and Erasmus. His masterpiece, the four volumes of Triumphs of Virtue, is the last great allegorical dream that extends the medieval tradition and foreshadows Rabelais’s Third and Fourth Books, with whom the author was acquainted. Finally, his treatise on “Christian Kabbalah” inaugurated the genre in French, and its talismanic motifs informed the iconographic program at Chambord. This collection of studies, written by specialists in medieval and Renaissance literature, is the first to be entirely devoted to him.

Publisher’s website: https://www.droz.org/product/9782600060042

In medieval Europe, people and texts circulated, crossing kingdom borders and linguistic barriers. The contributions gathered here explore the perception of boundaries between territories, languages, and cultures, and the awareness of their transgression in medieval texts. Specialists from various fields, ranging from medieval French to Scandinavian languages, including German, Spanish, English, and Yiddish, analyze how works represent fictional borders, cross real ones, or reflect an awareness of belonging to a cultural, political, or linguistic group. By highlighting the diversity of literary experiences of borders in the Middle Ages, this book also invites us to reflect on our modern perspective of the intense circulation that underpins European culture.

Sofia Lodén is a researcher in medieval European literature at Stockholm University and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Pro Futura Scientia XII Fellow).

Vanessa Obry is a lecturer in medieval French language and literature at the University of Haute-Alsace.

Publisher’s website : https://www.honorechampion.com/fr/champion/11067-book-08535139-9782745351395.html

Dziub N., Musinova T., and Voegele A. (eds.), Translation and Interculturality: Between Identity and Otherness, Bern, Peter Lang, coll. “Studies in Linguistics, Literature, and the Arts,” 2019.

Since interculturality is constitutive of culture, and translation functions as a tool for mediation between cultures, it seems essential to study the links between the two. The figure at the heart of translation studies is that of the Other, and the translator must find the right balance between identity and otherness, but also between denotation and connotation(s), between explicit and implicit, and between literature and culture. To successfully carry out this “negotiation” (Umberto Eco), the translator must take into account elements as varied as the cognitive differences between readers of the original and those of the translation, the variability of the cultural connotations of certain terms, and the discursive ethos mobilized in the text to be translated.

Publisher’s website: https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/71277

a cura di Martina Della Casa, Tania Collani

«Scrivere in Svizzera significa, in primo luogo, misurarsi con un tipo di alterità e varietà che non è solo linguistica ma anche sociale e culturale; in secondo luogo, vuol dire assumere quell’alterità come parte della propria identità, non affermata e rivendicata come insegna o “etichetta”, ma più spesso discussa, negoziata, straniata. Quest’oggettività è forse uno dei tratti comuni alla maggiore poesia nella Svizzera italiana, quasi inscritto nel suo patrimonio genetico novecentesco». Nella sua prefazione, Niccolò Scaffai dipinge un quadro rappresentativo della possibilità di parlare della «particolarità» svizzera di una certa poesia contemporanea. Oggetto di grande apprezzamento, letture e studi negli ultimi anni, la poesia ticinese del Ventunesimo secolo è allo stesso tempo erede e testimone di una via aperta e legittimata da esponenti quali Francesco Chiesa, Giuseppe Zoppi, Giorgio Orelli, Fabio Pusterla e Alberto Nessi. Oggi, una volta superato il bisogno di definire la propria identità dall’interno, il bacino della creazione elvetica si è allargato, diventando un vero e proprio crocevia di incontri, voci e culture: con Alberto Nessi stesso e con Fabiano Alborghetti, Yari Bernasconi, Pierre Lepori, Dubravko Pušek, Anna Ruchat, i lettori sono invitati a osservare la realtà, tanto interiore quanto esteriore, con uno sguardo nuovo, con il piglio dell’esploratore, del viaggiatore, ma anche attraverso gli occhi e l’esperienza dell’emigrante. Una poesia vitale e ricca, che il presente volume cerca di rappresentare in tutte le sue mutevoli sfaccettature.

Editor’s website : http://www.sefeditrice.it/catalogo/attraversare-le-parole/1077

Daniel Annen, Régine Battiston, Jacqueline Bel, Tania Collani, Martina Della Casa, Sylviane Dupuis, Emily Eder, Sylvie Jeanneret, Stéphane Maffli, Daniel Maggetti, Daniel Rothenbühler, Hubert Thüring

Publisher’s website : https://www.verlag-koenigshausen-neumann.de/product_info.php/language/de/info/p9223_Historizing-the-Dream—–Le-r–ve-du-point-de-vue-historique–Cultural-Dream-Studies—Kulturwissenschaftliche-Traum-Studien–Bd–3-.html