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A Double Review of "Paolina's Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova's Venice" by Larry Wolff and "Venice: A New History" by Thomas F. Madden

The presentation of the body in early imperial Rome can be viewed as the manipulation of a semiotic language of dress, in which various hierarchies that both defined and limited human experience were entrenched. The study of Roman self-presentation illuminates the intersections of categories of identity, as well as the individual's desire and ability to resist essentializing views of Romanness (Romanitas), and to transform destiny through transforming identity. These categories of identity include gender; sexuality or sexual behavior; social status; economic status; ethnicity or place of origin; religion; and age. Applying the model of a matrix of identity deepens our appreciation for the work of self-presentation and its ultimate purposes. In this paper the practices and products used by Romans are described as vital indicators of self-identification, and as segues into Roman social semiotics, providing a more complete view of the possibilities for life in early imperial Rome. In the introduction, the use of queer theory and the function of the matrix model are outlined. Haircare, the maintenance of facial and bodily hair, the use of cosmetics, perfumes, skincare products, and beauty tools, the accessorizing of the body with jewelry, color, and pattern, and the display of these behaviors are examined in the main body chapters. The conclusion discusses the relevance of the matrix model to self-presentation studies in general and possible future uses.

The scholarly consensus is that the early essays “Il mare dell’oggettività” and “La sfida al labirinto” are two of the most important Italo Calvino wrote on his literary poetics, influencing the metaphors and problematics of his entire corpus: the sea of objectivity, the labyrinth, chaotic flux, a rational cogito subjectivity, binary oppositions etc. The essays were made available to a general public in the collection Una pietra sopra in 1980, part of a selection of texts handpicked by Calvino himself. Curiously, the 1986 English translation titled The Uses of Literature does not contain these important and influential essays, making them unavailable to an Anglophone audience. These essays are here now translated, accompanied by a critical commentary by the translator about their relevance and importance to Calvino’s corpus. The problematics discussed in these essays would re-emerge, with remarkable consistency, in the metaphorical imagery Calvino deployed throughout his career. Nevertheless, Calvino evolves the problematics significantly throughout his career, almost inverting his original stance. Rather than this being an inversion, however, the translator argues that Calvino’s evolution represents a dialectical movement propelled by contradiction, and that therein lies the actual poetics or the stylized mode of thought that these essays inaugurated. Viewing the essays in this light renders them, and Calvino’s entire corpus, ripe for dialogic encounter and collision with otherwise parallel philosophical traditions and schools of thought.

Leonardo Bruni published one of his most widely copied translations, Xenophon's pro-monarchical Hiero, shortly before he penned his more famous original works, his Dialogues and Panegyric to the City of Florence. Scholars have traditionally focused on the political ideas present in these original treatises; yet, despite the centrality of political ideas to the Hiero, its temporal proximity to these works, and its enormous popularity (the work exists in 200 fifteenth-century manuscripts), scholars have neglected to offer a full assessment of Bruni's translation in the context of these works. Bruni's translation of Xenophon's Hiero fit into a debate in early fifteenth-century Florence about Julius Caesar and the Florentine poet Dante. The two major thinkers in the debate, Bruni and Coluccio Salutati, agreed that a distinction had to be made between kings and tyrants based on legal claim and quality of rule. The Hiero reinforced this assumption. The two men disagreed, however, about which category applied to Julius Caesar and what this meant for the reputation of Dante.

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This thesis aims to understand Wolf-Rehfeldt’s place in the unofficial art world of the GDR by examining her work in light of her status as a clerical worker with social rather than professional ties to the art world. She stands out within the East German Mail Art context, not just for her inventive use of a typewriter to create abstract figurations, but for the way she used it to interject considerations of gender and power into a network of artists overwhelmingly dominated by men with her open-ended Typewritings.” Through historical research and close readings of her work, this study uncovers how Wolf-Rehfeldt's Typewritings indicate that Mail Art was a space to share stylistic experiments, and her sophisticated treatment of feminist and abstract themes. My research reveals that the record of who was involved in the GDR’s experimental art scene is incomplete, with still more to be found. A deeper look at Wolf-Rehfeldt’s background confirmed that she was more enmeshed in Mail Art than the historical record indicates, suggesting the need for further study on the influence and involvement of women in the movement.

Humanism and ritual combined to establish a new foundation for the Florentine Republic in the fifteenth century. Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People was at the center of this new foundation. In 1428 and again in 1439, Bruni formally presented portions of his History to the Florentine government in the midst of crucial events in Florentine foreign affairs. For example, Bruni’s book presentation in 1428 occurred in the midst of rituals celebrating peace between Florence and Milan. During the celebration, a procession behind the sacred icon of Our Lady of Santa Maria Impruneta paused at the government palace. At that moment, Leonardo Bruni formally announced the peace, gave an oration, and presented a volume of his History to the Florentine governors. Following the presentation, trumpets sounded and the procession began anew. In this ritual, Bruni’s History became a key ritual object. On the most basic level, Bruni’s book served as a tangible, physical reminder of the peace for future rulers of the Florentine Republic. Yet, Bruni’s History provided much more than a material memento of a monumental moment. The content of the work created a Florence that was founded free and, after several battles against tyrannical oppressors, had once again become free. By creating a new foundation and history of Florence, the Florentines could add new authority and legitimacy to its dealings with the world outside its walls. This article will examine the rituals surrounding the presentation of Bruni’s work combined with a close literary analysis of the History itself. Through this investigation, the article will examine how and why the Florentines sought to refound their city in an official Latin history by establishing its independence from outside powers, particularly the Roman and Holy Roman Emperors.

There is a conceptual resonance between the rhizomatic habit in the world of plants and the perennial errancy in the (meta)physical world of man traversed by Mohammed Dib’s writing. In so far as reflective research and the practice of translation can ‘mirror’ the surface of their object, this project is a rhizomatic endeavour. It is a fragmentary journey into the desert, in search of the mysterious at’lāl, the trace of the sign, drawn and effaced and redrawn again by Mohammed Dib to reveal ephemeral truths about the self and its others. Dib’s focus migrates from early realist ‘socio-ethnographic’ novels in the 1950s to metaphysical explorations described by critics as ‘hermetic’, ‘mystical’ or ‘surreal’. The historical and the mystical, however, are two facets of the same inexorable acts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in a precarious, often oneiric, universe. The ‘visions’ expressed in his poetics are couched in the elemental vocabularies of light and shadow, fire and water, space and duration and draw their substance from Sufi mystical scholars and poets. I posit that Dib’s nomadic contemporary writing arises from the place that lies between the sensible and the intelligible in Sufi mysticism, in a secular transposition of the Sufi Imagination: Dib neither constructs nor deconstructs. Rather, his singular style serves to hone an acutely experiential expression. Further, there is a sense in which each ouvrage is a heterotrope whereby his poetry and prose collections are inextricably embedded in each other, thus one is always in the middle of his universe. The ubiquitous entry point to this universe lies in the middle of his metaphorical desert, an aesthetic landscape stripped of idiocultural signification. Central to its lines of flight is the sign, both ephemeral and enduring, and what is enveloped in the sign is the non-signifying impact of its expression. I argue that Dib’s perennial re-assembling of ‘ces chaînes aux mailles d’acier qui sont mots’ (those chains with links of steel that are words) doesn’t so much ‘give rise to thought’ as ‘give rise to affect’.