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Digital Humanities (DH) offers contemporary literary criticism a unique and constantly expandable set of “big data” that can be investigated through statistical analysis. Indeed, computational methods can be viewed as a “toolkit,” a unique array of instruments that allow the generation of new analytical data on literary texts. Through quantitative analysis of digitized texts, DH produces data that literary critics can use in qualitative analysis. Three case studies of computational analysis of “Late Style” (J. W. Goethe, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka), of “attribution of authorship” (Robert Musil) and of “literary movement” (German Romanticism and Heinrich von Kleist) are presented, demonstrating that the DH approach allows concepts in literary theory to be “operationalized,” i.e., translated from a theoretical to an empirical level. The methods exemplified in the three case studies provide a potential model for bridging the gap between literary theory and stylometric analysis., Iperstoria, No 12 (2018): Digital Humanities: a cross-disciplinary approach to literature, language and education

The paper shows how selected works of pre-internet American autobiographical nonfiction already presupposed forms of cognitive mapping more typical of recent epistemological developments in the field of digital humanities. By means of a renovated focus on the too-often overlooked potentialities of early electronic literature, my analysis sheds light on the possibility of reenvisioning hypertext as a tool able to mediate the reading experience between the impersonal approach of so-called distant reading more typical of empirical sciences and the subjectiveoriented practice of close reading in the humanities. The second half of the paper narrows its focus on highlighting the ways in which these narratives challenge the capabilities of human cognition. As a whole, my study hopefully illustrates how it is mainly the task of the reader – especially the critical reader – to recognize and make visible in traditional printed texts a number of germinal technological features that not only had not been envisioned or conceived of as such by their authors but that allow us to reconfigure our views on the current characterizations of digital technologies used for macroanalysis of large-scale data sets., Iperstoria, No 12 (2018): Digital Humanities: a cross-disciplinary approach to literature, language and education

Published before the very recent publication of Jhumpa Lahiri's first narrative work in Italian, Dove mi trovo (2018), In altre parole (2014) is, according to the Bengali American author, a "linguistic autobiography" that marks a stage of creative transformation in her career. Written exclusively in Italian, and in a context of voluntary exile in Rome, where the writer lived from 2012 to 2014, this collection of essays, personal reflections, and narratives operates as both a linguistic and a literary forge, and explores the creative potentialities emerging along with a new writerly subjectivity, unmoored from the use of the English language and from the literary themes of the South Asian American diasporic experience. A reflection on linguistic renunciation, navigating between the constraints imposed by the fragility of a new language and exploring the vivifying possibilities of a simultaneous disarticulation and re-elaboration of the self, In altre parole operates at the interstices between self and language, investigating the links between identity and otherness. Focusing on the analysis of its formal articulation and metatextual awareness, this essay retraces the translinguistic itinerary of this transformation, relocating In altre parole (In Other Words in its 2016 American translation) and Lahiri's artistic turn in a critical space exploring how the search for expressive freedom negotiates the relationship with the reading community and with the expectations that surround the writer's migrant background., Iperstoria, No 12 (2018): Digital Humanities: a cross-disciplinary approach to literature, language and education

Recensione di New Perspectives on English as a European Lingua Franca, di Heiko Motschenbacher., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

At the end of chapter LXVI in The Way of All Flesh (1903) we read: “The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected.” (TWAF 313) The statement hardly leaves any room for doubt that Butler's overall purpose in his posthumous novel is to observe and criticize the typical idea of family. Nevertheless, it must be said that this fictional attack constantly maintains an ironic tone and, above all, never aims at destroying it as a social institution. Standing back from the text, we perceive a double movement of emerging rebellion against restraints and self-imposed respect for patriarchal moral education, which depicts the protagonist Ernest as a weak-willed person, incapable to escape his parents' influence. Moreover, Butler's sharp eye for paradox and linguistic reversal is the engine of a complex texture providing us with laughter and serious reflections at the same time, so to expose the main unsolved contradictions in the late nineteenth-century lifestyle. In this essay I will try to discuss on the one hand the challenges posed by the shifting narrator, both personified by the adult point of view of Mr. Overton and the innocent look of little Ernest, and on the other hand the reaction to traditional values with respect to parental, religious and literary models, all conceived as a whole category of overwhelming fathers., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

Recensione di Dalle piantagioni allo studio ovale. L'inserimento degli afro-americani nella politica statunitense, di Stefano Luconi., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

Recensione di Lake Garda: Gateway to D.H. Lawrence's Voyage to the Sun, a cura di Nick Ceramella., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

È ben noto che lo studio della letteratura degli Stati Uniti dell’Ottocento è stato dominato da considerazioni di carattere estetico e da pressioni di gruppi elitari che hanno contribuito alla marginalizzazione, fino agli anni settanta del Novecento, della letteratura scritta dalle donne e dalle minoranze etniche. Solo allora, grazie ai Women Studies e agli studi “etnici,” ha cominciato a riempirsi un vuoto di proporzioni notevoli. Quest’opera di revisione del canone, oggi ancora in corso, ha tuttavia trascurato una parte importante: quel formidabile patrimonio di cultura popolare rappresentato dai dime novels, cioè quei romanzetti da dieci centesimi che invasero il nascente mercato di massa subito prima dell’inizio della Guerra civile. La letteratura critica deve ancora affrontare molti aspetti e buona parte di quel corpus: la stessa reperibilità dei testi, peraltro di recente molto accresciuta, è ancora problematica., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

Recensione di Morte a Venezia. Thomas Mann/Luchino Visconti: un confronto, a cura di Francesco Bono, Luigi Cimmino e Giorgio Pangaro., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

Recensione di Looking Out, Looking In: An Anthology of Latino Poetry, a cura di William Luis., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

As W. E. B. Du Bois maintains, America’s authentic national culture is grounded in its history, popular culture, and the traditions of blacks. This claim is deeply rooted in Du Bois’s belief in the theory of Volkgeist, a conceptual model developed by the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. The word Volkgeist can be translated as “national soul” and it refers to the Herderian vision of the spiritual life of a nation which is expressed in every aspect of its social and cultural life. For Herder, as for Du Bois, the culture of a nation is revealed not only through the literary writings of scholars and academics ‒ it can also be found in the folklore, tales and songs passed on generation after generation. Just as Du Bois maintained that the black soul was perfectly expressed through spirituals, Zora Neale Hurston similarly believed that black identity was to be found in the tradition of folktales. Hence, Hurston’s quest for black identity in the black tales could be read both as an act of connection to the voice of their ancestors and a search for the roots of black culture itself., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

Traduzione del racconto The Toll-House, di W.W. Jacobs., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors

Nonostante la letteratura di mare statunitense sia sovente identificata soprattutto con la grande narrativa ottocentesca, da James Fenimore Cooper a Richard Henry Dana e fino a Herman Melville (e con una regione, il New England, per cui il mare è stato a lungo motore economico primario), l’oceano non ha mai perso il proprio fascino nella cultura degli Stati Uniti, e ancora oggi le geografie d’acqua continuano a essere un terreno fertile di metafore e di paradigmi per leggere e interpretare la cultura e la società. Accanto alla centralità simbolica di uno spazio di terra divenuto ben presto incarnazione delle proiezioni identitarie ed espansionistiche di una nazione “altra” non da ultimo per il suo essere, allo sguardo europeo, oltreoceano, anche i contorni d’acqua di quel mondo si sono prestati fin dagli albori della parabola nazionale a farsi riflesso di volontà e di tensioni politiche, sociali e culturali che hanno profondamente plasmato la storia coloniale prima e statunitense poi., Iperstoria, No 4 (2014): Ancestors