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Negli ultimi decenni, soprattutto dopo gli eventi dell’11 settembre 2001, la religione è tornata in primo piano non solo come oggetto dialettico all’interno di narrazioni che la incrociano, ma anche come vero e proprio soggetto che ricostruisce o riformula sé stessa. È il caso, ad esempio, di quei racconti che riscrivono in diversa maniera figure di testi sacri, soprattutto, negli ultimi anni, personaggi dei Vangeli. Inoltre, la decostruzione socio-politica e ideologica degli ultimi decenni, nonché la diffusione di piattaforme di streaming su scala globale, hanno permesso un’esplosione nella trasmissione di storie che intersecano sfere di influenza culturale e religiosa differenti. Il mio saggio vuole quindi esplorare le modulazioni che tali riscritture hanno assunto nella “fiction” degli ultimi decenni, e tre in particolare: il Jesus-novel, sottogenere romanzesco studiato e classificato da Westphal (2002) e Holderness (2015), in cui Gesù personaggio assume funzioni narrative articolate, nelle quali confluiscono molteplici tipologie di personaggi e strutture drammatiche: il capro espiatorio e il re pescatore, ma anche il fool, l’idiota, il divo, come nel romanzo The Second Coming (2011) dello scrittore scozzese John Niven. Un secondo paradigma, ancor più sui generis, è quello di un sottogenere ancora più di consumo, una fantascienza di matrice genetica che immagina Cristo non risorto, ma clonato: è quanto accade nella Christ Clone Trilogy (1988, 1997, 2003) dell’americano James BeauSeigneur. Infine, interessanti riflessioni possono scaturire dall’analisi di una serie tv del 2020 intitolata Messiah, di produzione statunitense, in lingua inglese, araba ed ebraica, in cui tra dubbi e incertezze il/un Messia ritorna per richiamare alla pace l’umanità, in un movimento, tuttavia, che sembra portare a una forma di anarchia religiosa., SigMa - Rivista di Letterature comparate, Teatro e Arti dello spettacolo, No 6 (2022)

War and trauma ��� be it related to war itself, or to other problematical issues such as collective or individual precariousness, struggle for gender and/or national identity, discovery of personal or historical truths ��� are often sublimated in literature by objective correlatives and structural features that simultaneously create an identity and enhance the idealization related to it. Of particular interest are those works in which characters build their identities through an accumulation of both material and immaterial objects, which can be either utterly messy or compulsively ordered, in both structure and content. In Victorian and Edwardian England, Uranian poets and writers (John Gambril Nicholson, John Addington Symonds, William Johnson Cory, Lord Alfred Douglas, Montague Summers, Frederick Rolfe, Charles Kains Jackson, E. E. Bradford, John Moray Stuart-Young, among many others) based the essence of their works on apparently ordered classical forms and paradigms to represent complex questions of sexuality and social restraint. They often referred to World War I and to trauma as well, especially when personally experienced, as in the case of Edmund John and other canonical authors (see Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon), who were driven to write poetry to overcome shell shock. As Paul Fussell recognized, Uranian poetry formed the basis of World War I war poetry in terms of imagery, which drew on Greek myths and ideas to give structure to otherwise intolerable conflicts and emotions. Responding to the virtuosistic experimentation of Modernism and Postmodernism and the new realism of some post-war fiction, some novelists of the late twentieth century either adopted similar tendencies to create order out of a chaotic reality or subverted formal order completely. The latter seems to be the case with Jonathan Safran Foer���s novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), in which the precariousness of both the WWII and the post- 9/11 world is spasmodically controlled by the characters��� ambiguously ���rigid��� search through history and by a formal coherence, in overlapping narratives and simultaneous, conflictual times and spaces, that intertwine lives in a mess of form and content. This article aims to analyse these modulations of classical order and Uranian and/or post- war mess. Both such order and mess are arguably outcomes of disordered consciences and of attempts at using objects and myths to shape a suspect, often hostile, reality. This reading will tease out similar patterns in the representation of ���messiness��� in contemporary British and American literature dealing with ���minoritarian subjects���., Anglistica AION: An Intersciplinary Journal, Vol 20 No 1 (2016): Making Sense of Mess: Marginal Lives, Impossible Spaces

The health status of an emerging Posidonia oceanica meadow, subject to high human impact, was studied. Biometric variables, heavy metals, PAHs and C, N, P contents were determined in sediment and seagrass samples. The meadow was found to grow under oligotrophic conditions and an increase in nutrient content was only recorded in autumn. In sediment, Hg exceeded its ERL (effects range low) and sometimes also its ERM (effects range medium), and Cu was close to its ERL. In leaves, Hg and Cu were relatively high but below their respective ERLs. Sediments close to the meadow were heavily contaminated with pyrolytic PAHs, some of which exceeded their ERLs. P. oceanica did not show major accumulation of PAHs, lighter molecules predominating. Despite 40 years of intense human activity, meadow growth dynamics and contaminant accumulation did not suggest that the meadow was regressing.

Il genere romanzo ha potuto esplorare, con le sue possibilità specifiche, i dinamici spostamenti di senso e le aspettative che la figura di Cristo, un “personaggio” strettamente codificato dai Vangeli, ha di volta in volta ispirato in contesti diversi. Il punto di partenza è l’esame di costanti e varianti nella rappresentazione della figura di Gesù nel discorso sviluppatosi in un arco di tempo che va dagli ultimi decenni dell’Ottocento sino alla fine del secolo scorso (Renan, Wallace, Papini, Mauriac, D. H. Lawrence, Moore, Graves, Kazantzakis, Artaud, Moorcock, Bulgakov, Endō, Saramago), riscritture che hanno reinterpretato i dati storici e religiosi per trasformarli in qualcos’altro: epitome, metafora, correlativo oggettivo, capro espiatorio.L’intento è qui quello di prendere in esame alcuni testi letterari e film anglo-americani degli ultimi decenni, che hanno fatto dell’ironia o dell’esplicito riso gli strumenti per riscrivere in maniera eterodossa, ma solo apparentemente blasfema, la vita di Gesù, tra Vangeli canonici e apocrifi, rendendola materia nuova, ipostasi euforica e vitale, dopo l’anticristo nietzschiano, dopo che la sua figura è diventata, nell’Ottocento, hegeliana (Strauss), proto-comunista (Sauriac e Lynn Linton), positivista (Renan). In particolare, si prenderanno in esame i due romanzi The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), di Christopher Moore, e The Second Coming (2011) di John Niven, e si farà riferimento ai classici del cinema di genere, Life of Brian (1979) dei Monty Python, e Dogma (1999), diretto da Kevin Smith. In queste opere degli anni duemila Cristo è ancora un personaggio che deve compiere, in un modo o nell’altro, il suo destino; questi testi rappresentano vere e proprie theological fictions, costruzioni complesse che mirano a disegnarsi, in un modo efficace, una via di salvezza tranquillizzante, un paradiso su misura., The novel genre has explored – with its peculiar possibilities – the dynamic changes, in significance and expectations, that the figure of Christ, a “character” strictly codified in the Gospels, has inspired again and again in different contexts. The starting point is the examination of constants and variants in the representation of Christ in the discourse developed in the period that stretches from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the end of the last century (Renan, Wallace, Papini, Mauriac, D. H. Lawrence, Moore, Graves, Kazantzakis, Artaud, Moorcock, Bulgakov, Endō, Saramago) – rewritings that have reinterpreted historical and religious facts in order to transform them into something else: epitome, metaphor, objective correlative, scapegoat.The aim of this paper is to analyse a number of British and Anglo-American literary texts and films of the last decades which have used irony or explicit laughter as instruments for retelling in heterodox – but only apparently blasphemous – ways the life of Jesus, between canonical and apocryphal Gospels, making it new material, euphoric and vital hypostasis. This was possible only after the appearance of Nietzsche’s antichrist, after the figure of Christ had become, in the nineteenth century, Hegelian (Strauss), proto-communist (Sauriac and Lynn Linton) and positivist (Renan). In particular, two texts will be analyzed: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), by Christopher Moore, and The Second Coming (2011) by John Niven, and also classic films such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), and Dogma (1999), directed by Kevin Smith. In these works of the twenty-first century, Christ is still a character who has to fulfil his destiny, in one way or another; these texts represent real theological fictions, complex constructions that want to draw, in an effective way, a reassuring road to salvation, a customised paradise.

Coralligenous habitat is one of the most important and sensitive habitats of the Mediterranean Sea and several different sampling procedures are currently used in the ecological investigations of coralligenous assemblages. This study aimed to assess the efficacy of different methods in detecting anthropogenic impacts on coralligenous habitat. In particular, the choice of sampling methods, the level of taxonomic resolution, the sampling area, the number of replicates and the spatial scales for detecting possible impacts were evaluated. Results showed that photographic samples larger than 1800 cm2, numbers of replicates larger than 10, the use of taxa and morphological groups as assemblage descriptors, and sampling designs with a high replication at small spatial scales are a valid methodological procedure in impact evaluation studies based on coralligenous assemblages., El hábitat coralígeno es uno de los más importantes y sensibles del mar Mediterráneo y actualmente se pueden aplicar varios métodos de muestreo en las investigaciones ecológicas de las comunidades macroalgales coralígenas. El objetivo del presente estudio es evaluar la efectividad de los diferentes procedimientos para detectar el impacto antrópico sobre el hábitat de coralígeno. Se evaluaron en particular la elección de los métodos de muestreo, el nivel de resolución a la que los taxones tienen que ser identificados, la superficie de muestreo, el número de repeticiones y las escalas espaciales adecuadas para la investigación de los posibles impactos. Los resultados indican que muestras fotográficas de 1800 cm2, un número de repeticiones mayor que 10, el uso de taxones y grupos morfológicos como descriptores y diseños de muestreo con una alta replicación asociada a pequeñas escalas espaciales pueden representar elementos metodológicos válidos en los estudios de evaluación de impacto basados en las comunidades coralígenas.

This essay aims at expressing possible interpretations of how coincidences are represented in contemporary fiction and film. In particular, I will focus on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams, and on A Serious Man, a 2009 film written and directed by the Coen brothers. The formulation of coincidental patterns in these works is analyzed taking into account the famous studies on plot and case in the novel by Peter Brooks and Erich Köhler, and also giving examples from other relevant literary texts. The analysis shows that in some contemporary fiction coincidences play the role of “gods’ wink”, a sort of refuge for post-postmodern desire for the metaphysical or just fictional sacred in literature, a new pleasure in depicting chaotic order., Status Quaestionis, No 4 (2013): Coincidenza & provvidenze