Papers by Paolo Saporito
Ecologia e lavoro: Dialoghi interdisciplinari, a cura di: Carlo Baghetti, Mauro Candiloro, Jim Carter, Paolo Chirumbolo, Maria Luisa Mura, Mimesis, 2023
Italy and the Ecological Imagination: Ecocritical Theories and Practices, edited by Damiano Benvegnù and Matteo Gilebbi, Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2022
Drawing on eco-centric definitions of performativity (Barad; Iovino and Oppermann) and engaging w... more Drawing on eco-centric definitions of performativity (Barad; Iovino and Oppermann) and engaging with cinematic and literary accounts of on-foot explorations of the environment, this paper develops a post-anthropocentric conception of walking that contributes to recent scholarly efforts (Past; Fratus). The corpus for this analysis includes Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961), Wu Ming 2’s Il sentiero degli dei (2010) and Alessandro d’Emilia’s documentary, Dusk Chorus (2016).
Ticontre, no. 15 (2021), 2021
Nella recente evoluzione degli studi riguardanti la letteratura del lavoro, la form... more Nella recente evoluzione degli studi riguardanti la letteratura del lavoro, la forma breve e “precaria” del racconto è stata riconosciuta come particolarmente adatta ad affrontare il tema della precarietà lavorativa. Il seguente contributo si propone di allargare gli orizzonti di questi studi in senso eco-critico analizzando la raccolta Uomini, boschi e api (1980)di Mario Rigoni Stern. La raccolta, pubblicata alla fine di un decennio in cui emersero i primi dibattiti sulla questione ambientale, riflette sulle ecologie precarie in cui esseri umani e non-umani appartenenti all’ecosistema montanaro dell’Altopiano di Asiago sono costantemente coinvolti. Esplorando questo microcosmo messo a repentaglio dallo sviluppo industriale e turistico, Rigoni Stern afferma la necessità di rifondare i rapporti tra umano e non-umano su nuove basi etiche, verso gli orizzonti sostenibili di un’economia circolare.
gender/sexuality/italy, 7, 2020
What does it mean to engage in collaborative practices? How do these practices ensure the sustai... more What does it mean to engage in collaborative practices? How do these practices ensure the sustainable management of diversity we need in order to counter contemporary forms of discrimination? This paper reflects on these issues and proposes answers to these questions by analysing two case studies: the Italian writing collectives Wu Ming and Joana Karda. The two groups enact collaborative practices that deconstruct conceptual dualisms (i.e. subject/object; self/other) and question hyper-individualised conceptions of subjectivity characterising contemporary neoliberal society. While Joana Karda’s members ground these practices in the availability to yield (“rinunciare”) one’s views and welcoming others, Wu Ming focus on the intensification of their internal diversity and the creation of complex, inclusive solutions able to express the views of all the members. The two case studies ultimately reveal that there are no pre-packaged instructions for the smooth functioning of collaborative practices. These practices and their ethical, social and political potential must be constantly co-sought, co-experimented and co-engendered through a tireless and situated engagement.
Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity, edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
This essay analyzes Michelangelo Antonioni’s films L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and L’ecli... more This essay analyzes Michelangelo Antonioni’s films L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and L’eclisse (1962) in order to discuss the relationship between their female protagonists, the material dimension of the environment and the camera. Anna’s disappearance in L’avventura establishes both the camera and the environment as agential subjects, calling for a posthumanist reading of their relationship with the female bodies in the other two films. In fact, Lidia and Valentina, in L’avventura, react to their alienated condition entering trans-corporeal time-spaces where they open their bodies to the material vibrancy of matter, but only L’eclisse problematizes the material-discursive divide, opposing Vittoria’s openness to matter to financial discursive practices. In the time-space of the ending of the film, the camera finally reifies the female characters’ embodied ethical sensibility, investigating the material dimension of the environment in a posthumanist perspective.
Journal of Posthuman Studies, 2019
Posthumanist approaches to Cinema and Film Studies have so far focused on the posthuman theoretic... more Posthumanist approaches to Cinema and Film Studies have so far focused on the posthuman theoretical potential of film content, rather than cinematic form and filmmaking practices. The essay develops a posthumanist approach to these practices by focusing on a case study: the interaction between hand-cranked camera and human operator in the first decades of the XX century. Drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and Jane Bennett’s definition of vibrant matter, I argue that this interaction constitutes a manifestation of material-discursive processes that decenter the anthropos and enact performative entanglements between human and non-human agencies. Early descriptions of the technological affordances of the hand-cranked camera, informed by anthropocentric and humanist perspectives, reduce the material constitution of this instrument to its role in the discursive practices of cinema industry. The essay deconstructs these accounts from a posthumanist perspective and develops situated epistemic and ethical reflections that stem from a material-discursive description of the nonhuman instrument and its interaction with the human operator.
Quaderni d'italianistica, 2018
Focusing on the interaction between the temporal dimension of on-line and off-line practices, the... more Focusing on the interaction between the temporal dimension of on-line and off-line practices, the paper argues that the material hybrid status of the e-book, digital interface also available off-line, can be functional to cultural projects that aim to make the user critically reflect upon the relationship between on-line and off-line experiences. The relationship between Wu Ming’s blog Giap and the e-book Giap: L’archivio e la strada is the object of this paper's analysis. The relation between the e-book, which collects a selection of blog posts appearing on Giap between 2010 and 2012, and the blog represents a meaningful case study because the format of the former both preserves and loses several features of the blog posts, making the transmedia interaction between blog and e-book more complex than the initial appearance would suggest. The e-book, by selecting and ordering the blog posts, restructures the temporal dimension of both the texts and the act of reading, slowing down the never-ending and fast-paced flux of content that appears on-line. This transmedia operation, moving from the on-line to the off-line world, but maintaining the portability of a digital format, influences the experience of the reader towards a more thoughtful and critical approach to its content and the reading experience itself. The paper frames this operation into Wu Ming’s cultural project, primarily aimed at sabotaging and undermining the rhythm of life, production, and consumption imposed by capitalist digital economy.
An introduction to the literary works and forms of activism of the Italian writing collective Wu ... more An introduction to the literary works and forms of activism of the Italian writing collective Wu Ming.
Offstream: Minority and Popular Cultures, 2019
In the novel 54 (2002) and the documentary 51 (2012), both set in early 1950s Italy, Wu Ming revi... more In the novel 54 (2002) and the documentary 51 (2012), both set in early 1950s Italy, Wu Ming revise mainstream representations of communist supporters influenced by both the propaganda of the Christian Democrats and the narrow-minded cultural approach of the Italian Communist Party. The representation of communist culture in 51 deconstructs ideological stereotypes and reveals that communists were not a "red menace" for the rest of the nation with which they shared values and life pleasures. Moreover, in 54, the Aurora bar community of communist supporters is an example of horizontal social relations, not influenced by the hierarchical structure of the party, where the individual and collective dimensions peacefully coexist. However, 51 and 54 also show how communist supporters marginalized women from political participation and embraced nationalist slogans, contradictorily embodying rightist values. Wu Ming revise mainstream accounts to reveal the emancipatory potential of communist popular culture, but also to call for a critical reflection on its ambiguous conformist character.
Modern Italy, 2018
This article studies post-war Italy’s forgetful attitude towards its Fascist past by interpreting... more This article studies post-war Italy’s forgetful attitude towards its Fascist past by interpreting a political measure, the Togliatti amnesty (1946), and 1950s film censorship as ‘institutionalised forms of (…) amnesia’ (Ricoeur 2004, 452). The amnesty, which erased the Fascists’ legal responsibility for war and political crimes, represented the first act of oblivion of the Republican political establishment, embodying a forgetful mindset that influenced Italian culture through institutional instruments like film censorship. In 1950s Italy, censorship acted as a further form of institutionalised amnesia aimed at erasing from films the traces of the compromising continuity between the Fascist past and the democratic present. The story of the making and unmaking of the Italian episode of I vinti by Michelangelo Antonioni is a meaningful example of this dynamic. Producers and government commissioners censored the plot and changed it from a story about a neo-fascist militant to one about a young bourgeois who smuggles cigarettes. However, Antonioni resisted the institutional imposition to forget by choosing locations where the material dimension of the landscape still embodied the Fascist legacy of the country.
This short essay shows how, in Ernest Hemingway’s story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", the author... more This short essay shows how, in Ernest Hemingway’s story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", the author pays attention to the connection between men, their perception of reality and their need of communication. The essay is based on a close analysis of the characters' points of view. It starts from an evaluation of a Warren Bennet’s contribution concerned with irony and reveals how, in a sort of way, it is supposed to be read as serious and dramatic what Bennet considers as ironic. This misunderstanding is caused by not having properly taken into account the perspective through which the story is narrated, which is the older waiter’s one.
Books by Paolo Saporito
As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals, inanimate
entities an... more As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals, inanimate
entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.
Book Reviews by Paolo Saporito
Annali d'Italianistica, 2021
By examining in detail how, in the decades after WWII, the proliferation of visual mass media con... more By examining in detail how, in the decades after WWII, the proliferation of visual mass media contaminated approaches to painting, music and photography, and by illuminating the intermedia exchanges through which Michelangelo Antonioni's films critically absorbed the impurity of these approaches, Matilde Nardelli demonstrates that the director's renewal of cinema in the 1960s should be understood against the backdrop of this hybridisation and Antonioni's constant confrontation with the role of the "mass image" (13) in Western cultures and societies. Explicitly challenging a long tradition of scholarship that championed Antonioni's films as the most innovative manifestations of an anti-narrative, and held that his films purified cinema with a distinct position among the other arts, Nardelli shows that these films rather embody different degrees of impurity resulting from the cross-pollination between artistic, technological and scientific innovations and the cinematic form. Nardelli's analysis of the relationship between Antonioni's films and postwar painting in chapter 1 ("Impure Pictoriality: The Matter of Painting," 19-51) lays the groundwork for the arguments developed in the subsequent four chapters. Film scholars have so far framed Antonioni's bi-dimensional, empty shots inspired by abstract painting within the attempt to cleanse the medium of its massmedia connotations (e.g., those of Hollywood) and, paradoxically, express the essence of the cinematic (19-22). Nardelli shows, however, that the approaches to painting from which Antonioni absorbed "contemporary visualities" (28) were in themselves impure as a result of their exposition, and reaction, to mass media. From Alberto Burri's plastics, Robert Rauschenberg's pop art and Mark Rothko's coloured canvases, Antonioni did not assimilate a modality of disengagement from reality aimed at articulating the specificity of an artistic form. Rather he assimilated these artists' commitment to self-critically expose the material grounds of their medium; problematize these grounds' entanglement with processes of commodity production and circulation; and question fast-paced viewing experiences offered by mass media. This process of assimilation, particularly evident in the use of colour in Deserto rosso (1964), provided Antonioni with the conceptual means to pursue a "critical intermediality" in the cinematic domain (11, 45). As Nardelli explains in the introduction, this pursued intermediality consists in Antonioni's cinema's "openness to both established and emerging art and mass media forms, which it both absorbs and resists" (11). For
Sante Matteo. Il secondo occhio di Ulisse. Saggi di letteratura e cultura italiana. A cura di Sil... more Sante Matteo. Il secondo occhio di Ulisse. Saggi di letteratura e cultura italiana. A cura di Silvia Carlorosi, Maria Silvia Riccio e Simone
Conference and Event Organization by Paolo Saporito
UCC Eco-Humanities Research Group, 2022
The University College Cork Eco-Humanities Research Group hosted this online inter-disciplinary w... more The University College Cork Eco-Humanities Research Group hosted this online inter-disciplinary workshop to explore diverse notions of the agency, ontology and epistemology of the non-human, or ‘more-than-human,’ in the context of contemporary ecological crisis.
Workshop Organising Committee:
Crystal Addey (Classics, University College Cork); Caitríona Ní Dhúill (German, University College Cork); Tomas Buitendijk (Earth Institute, School of Biology and Environmental Sciences, University College Dublin); Hanna Bingel-Jones (German, University College Cork); Kevin McNally (Music, University College Cork and The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick); Maureen O’Connor (English, University College Cork); Paolo Saporito (Film and Screen Media, University College Cork).
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, McGill University, 2021
A series of lectures on Italian cinema, literature and culture.
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Papers by Paolo Saporito
Books by Paolo Saporito
entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.
Book Reviews by Paolo Saporito
Conference and Event Organization by Paolo Saporito
Workshop Organising Committee:
Crystal Addey (Classics, University College Cork); Caitríona Ní Dhúill (German, University College Cork); Tomas Buitendijk (Earth Institute, School of Biology and Environmental Sciences, University College Dublin); Hanna Bingel-Jones (German, University College Cork); Kevin McNally (Music, University College Cork and The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick); Maureen O’Connor (English, University College Cork); Paolo Saporito (Film and Screen Media, University College Cork).
entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.
Workshop Organising Committee:
Crystal Addey (Classics, University College Cork); Caitríona Ní Dhúill (German, University College Cork); Tomas Buitendijk (Earth Institute, School of Biology and Environmental Sciences, University College Dublin); Hanna Bingel-Jones (German, University College Cork); Kevin McNally (Music, University College Cork and The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick); Maureen O’Connor (English, University College Cork); Paolo Saporito (Film and Screen Media, University College Cork).
FIFA Connexions is an opportunity to create contacts, synergies, and stimulate the production of new projects. It brings together local and international players and presents innovative tools instrumental to the production and distribution of art films and documentaries in 2020. Liaising with local and international academic researchers and culture stakeholders, FIFA will showcase different case studies about organizations that have adopted particularly relevant and innovative business models in the digital age.
The aim is to foster networking and collaboration opportunities for all the participants in the activities of FIFA Connexions. We hope that researchers, artists, students and the general public will take advantage of this initiative and meet the professionals invited to the 38th edition. FIFA Connexions will be for the audience a unique experience of encounter with prestigious personalities who never gathered in the same place before.
The “Long 1950s: Popular Culture and the (Un)Making of Italian Identity” is the title of a series of conferences that want to investigate the Italian past critically. Italian popular culture of the 1950s will be the protagonist of these talks, the same culture that many Italian immigrants will take around the world. Especially in Canada, especially in Montréal.
Scholars, filmmakers, architects and writers from all over the world will wonder how we can re-think this long decade, often described as silent, and make it speak more loudly. The 1950s have many things to say about both the Italian past, when Italians chose how to remember what they had been, fascists, partisans or just and stereotypically “brava gente”, and the Italian present, where the tendency to forget and disregard the troublesome is still alive. Against this hiding trend, our aim is to open popular culture to a critical analysis made of personal and social memories, media and objects that populated Italy at that time and whose stories are not to be misinterpreted anymore.
Italians’ private and collective memory, affected by this “respectability-making” amnesia, would be deprived, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, of “the salutary identity crisis that permits a lucid re-appropriation of the past and of its traumatic charge”. This is why we need to remember, this is why we need to revisit the process by which Italians both made and unmade their own identity.
Professor Eugenio Bolongaro, McGill University
Professor Giuliana Minghelli, McGill University
Paolo Saporito, PhD student, McGill University
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/languages/newsandevents/italianstudiesconference