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Tunnel REvision

Tunnel REvision: The Trento Tunnels

May 18, 2013

a cura di Jeffrey T. Schnapp e Giuseppe Ferrandi
Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino

ELOISA MORA – Le Gallerie della memoria 

“Come siamo capitati in questo tunnel, proprio non lo so... ma la invito a riflettere: ci muoviamo su rotaie, il tunnel deve dunque portare da qualche parte. Nulla dimostra che nel tunnel vi sia qualcosa di fuori posto, tranne il fatto che non finisce mai”: così Friederich Dürrenmatt dava voce all'incubo dello studente svizzero protagonista del suo racconto Il tunnel, cronaca della fatale deviazione ferroviaria del treno Berna-...

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Digital_Humanities book cover

Digital_Humanities

May 5, 2013

by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp 
MIT Press, 141 pp., $16.00

 

JULIANNE VANWAGENEN - Form or content? Both

I was reading Digital_Humanities on a Saturday evening just as my roommates and a group of friends were preparing to go out. As they put on their boots and scarves in the front hall, one member of the group commented on the book, specifically on page spreads 72-73 and 74-75: “Wow! That’s cool! What are you reading?” The poignancy of the moment was not lost on me....

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Les abus de la mémoire

Les Abus de la mémoire

February 2, 2013
di Tzvetan Todorov
Arléa, 61 pp., € 5.00
 
DALILA COLUCCI
 
Appassionato studio sulle delicate questioni della memoria e dell’oblio nelle società occidentali alle soglie del secondo millennio, Les Abus de la Mémoire gioca la sua partita teorica sul pericoloso crinale tra due condizioni limite dell’atto del ricordare: quella che lo vede minacciato e quella opposta della sua sacralizzazione. Entrambe sono, a ben guardare, vicendevolmente implicate, essendo il culto odierno della memoria risultato...
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barthes métier marty

Roland Barthes, le métier d'écrire

January 26, 2013

by Éric Marty 
Seuil, 335 pp., 23.30 €

JOHN D'AMICO - « Images » de Roland Barthes 

Roland Barthes, le métier d’écrire, paru en 2006 aux Éditions du Seuil, est qualifié d’« essai », genre assez vague pour permettre à son auteur, Éric Marty, d’englober sous cette étiquette trois chapitres de nature très différente, qui construisent un portait hybride. Malgré leur hétérogénéité générique, ces trois parties distinctes forment un ensemble fragmentaire cohérent qui vise à créer « une image » – ou...
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In Your Face: Professional Improprietes and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy book cover

In Your Face: Professional Improprietes and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy

October 9, 2012

by Douglas Biow
Stanford University Press, 246 pp., $19.95

DAN TURELLO

The ideals of grace and ease were ones that came to find great success and cultural currency during the Renaissance, in great measure thanks to the writing of Baldassarre Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, in which he describes the virtues of sprezzatura, the art of concealing the efforts behind one’s striving, so as to make it appear facile. The Galateo, by Giovanni della Casa, with its notion of proper manners and correct conduct specific to all occasions, is also a product of this time....

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Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis

Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis

October 3, 2012

by Letizia Modena
Routledge, 267 pp., $146.00 ($99.75 ebook)

DAN TURELLO 

“If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks.” It is one of Marco Polo’s accounts to the Kublai Khan, from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The Kublai Khan, wrote Calvino in the introduction, was viewing an empire that was “an endless, formless ruin,” in which “corruption’s...

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una lama di luce

Una lama di luce

October 3, 2012
by Andrea Camilleri
Sellerio, 271 pp., € 14.00 (€ 10.00 ebook)

 

ELGIN KIRSTEN ECKERT 

Montalbano suffers from extreme loneliness. Long gone are the days in which he welcomed the peace and quiet of his beachfront home and reveled in the solitude of evening meals enjoyed in silence on his terrace. He yearns for someone by his side, somebody with whom to share his daily rituals. Even a lunch meeting with his historic nemesis, police commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi, at a mediocre restaurant while talking about police business...
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Electronic Information Age Book

The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback

May 15, 2012

by Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels
Princeton Architectural Press, 216 pp., $19.95

JOHN WELSH - The Message of the Book

 

By dawn’s early light a young couple neck on Avenue A in New York’s lower East Side. In her left hand she holds a paperback copy of The Electric Information Age Book. Now available! It’s the book of the year: a true story about the history of the future. The real...
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storia culturale

Storia culturale della fotografia italiana. Dal Neorealismo al Postmoderno

May 13, 2012

by Antonella Russo
Einaudi, 428 pp., ill., € 35.00

CECELIA OLIVERIO 

Though the mere reference to the term “cultural history” is sometimes enough to push even the most tolerant of history buffs toward an apoplectic anxiety, fear not Antonella Russo’s ever so meticulously curated history of photography. For a bricolage of findings on post-World War II Italian photography or an ode to methodological eclecticism this book is most certainly not. Cultural insofar as the rich and nuanced picture of Italian photography that is achieved by Russo is...

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future of nostalgia

The Future of Nostalgia

May 11, 2012

by Svetlana Boym 
Basic Books, 404 pp., $22.00 

CHRISTOPHER BROWN - Riddles for Longing

“Somewhere on the frontier, the ghost of Dostoevsky meets the ghost of Mickey Mouse. Like the characters from The Possessed, they exchange wry smiles.” Thus concludes the first chapter of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, uniting in a hypothetical world two seemingly disparate figures, and yet both represent nations —the United States and Russia —built on modern foundations of transcending history and memory. As a professor of...

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