Investigazione e caos nei gialli postmoderni

This paper is devoted to a comparison, leading to possible intersections and cross-fertilization, between the evolutions of mathematics and literature of the 20th century through the analysis of the concepts of deterministic chaos and complexity on the one hand, and detective and noir stories, from classical investigation novels to metaphysical thrillers in postmodern literature on the other

Philosophy at Cambridge, Newsletter of the Faculty of Philosophy

Philosophy Newsletter. Articles by: Edward Craig - From the Chairman. Simon Blackburn - Writing about sin. Alex Oliver and Dominic Scott - The Forum for Philosophy in Business. Hallvard Lillehammer - Cambridge Centenary Conferences. Richard Gregory - A Student's View to Cambridge Philosophy Post-Wittgenstein, 1947-49. Recollections by Sir Michael Scholar, Richard Fres, Ian Hacking and Lord Cobbold. Timothy Smiley - Popper and the Poker. Faculty New

The Spatial Dimension of Narrative Understanding. Exploring Plot Types in the Narratives of Alessandro Baricco, Andrea Camilleri and Italo Calvino

The thesis explores the hypothesis that some plots might rely on spatiality as an organising principle that impacts on the narrative structure and, consequently, on the strategies adopted by readers to understand them. In order to lay the grounding for a spatially-oriented approach to narrative understanding, this study pursues both a theoretical line of inquiry and an applied line of inquiry in literary criticism. A cognitive stance on the nature of thought as non-propositional (Johnson-Laird 1983) and of the mind as embodied (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Varela et al. 1993) provides the theoretical point of departure for the subsequent identification of a range of principles and frameworks that can be implemented to support a spatially-oriented interpretation according to the specificities of narratives. The three case studies provided by Alessandro Baricco’s City, Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano crime series, and Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore illustrate how a spatially-oriented perspective can add new interpretive angles and an unprecedented insight into the ways narratives achieve a coherent structure. At the same time, the case studies serve to extrapolate a set of features that constitute the preliminary criteria for assessing whether it would be fruitful to apply a spatially-oriented approach to a specific narrative. Baricco’s, Camilleri’s and Calvino’s works represent three plot types in which spatiality impinges in three different ways on the narrative, which, as I will show, can be epitomised by the image schemata of map, trajectory, and fractal. Far from simply referring to objects which plot is compared to, these images indicate procedural techniques and strategies of sense-making that a certain type of narrative is designed to prompt in the reader through textual cues. The study, in fact, builds on and advances a notion of plot to be analysed as a process rather than a given structure, something that readers understand as they read, and not retrospectively only

Pics, Fingerprints and Pigmies: appropriazioni, narrazioni e attribuzioni della criminologia britannica dell’Ottocento

Nel periodo finale dell’era vittoriana nell’ambito della letteratura inglese si moltiplicarono gli esempi di crime narratives, gettando anche le basi di quello che sarebbe poi stato identificato come il genere della detective fiction. Il secolo vittoriano aveva altresì visto il fiorire e il codificarsi – grazie al dominio britannico di terre e mari e allo stimolo di nuove tecnologie di indagine – di nuovi campi del sapere: l’esplorazione, la geografia, la cartografia avevano, infatti, presto potuto avvalersi del nuovo strumento fotografico per produrre documentazioni considerate “oggettive” e lo stesso accadde poi con le nuove discipline dell’etnografia e dell’antropologia, che cominciarono ad illustrare con foto le proprie descrizioni narrative o si avvalsero di esse per misure antropometriche. Sul finire del secolo erano state dunque poste le premesse per la codificazione della criminologia: misurare e classificare un corpo umano poteva ben servire per prevenire e controllare il crimine e garantire sicurezza ai cittadini e ai confini dell’Impero. Havelock Ellis pubblicò il suo The Criminal nel 1890, Francis Galton pubblicò Finger prints nel 1892, ma la sperimentazione della classificazione dei criminali tramite impronte digitali era stata già da tempo avviata nelle colonie indiane. Di tutto ciò, e di come l’Impero britannico poteva servirsi delle scienze per costruire e definire l’identità dell’alterità criminale, si trova traccia nelle storie di Sherlock Holmes: e se è vero che le crime narratives sono culturalmente marcate e possono servire per far emergere diversità culturali, ciò è particolarmente vero in queste storie prodotte all’apice della gloria della cultura vittoriana. In esse fatti e finzione, diritto e scienze sociali, medicina e antropologia si intrecciano senza soluzione di continuità in un prodotto letterario di genere. Possono descrivere – ma anche creare – identità e sottoculture criminali. Tipici sono i casi dei pigmei delle isole Andamane, degli indiani, dei thugs. In questo intervento ci si propone di analizzare, a partire primariamente da alcune storie di Sherlock Holmes ma anche da altri esempi coevi di detective stories, come antropologia, antropometria, fotografia, criminologia, medicina entrino a far parte di un gioco letterario teso a soddisfare i gusti del pubblico vittoriano creando figure e miti di un patrimonio dell’immaginario occidentale che persistono ancora oggi

Human Minds and Animal Stories

The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands of participants, texts representing various genres and national literatures, and the cooperation of an internationally-acclaimed bestselling author. Combining psychological research with insights from animal studies, ecocriticism and other fields in the environmental humanities, the book not only provides evidence that animal stories can make us care for other species, but also shows that their effects are more complex and fascinating than we have ever thought. In this way, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of relations between literature and the nonhuman world as well as to the study of how literature changes our minds and society. "As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story." - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animal

Human Minds and Animal Stories

The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands of participants, texts representing various genres and national literatures, and the cooperation of an internationally-acclaimed bestselling author. Combining psychological research with insights from animal studies, ecocriticism and other fields in the environmental humanities, the book not only provides evidence that animal stories can make us care for other species, but also shows that their effects are more complex and fascinating than we have ever thought. In this way, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of relations between literature and the nonhuman world as well as to the study of how literature changes our minds and society. "As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story." - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animal

Cosmopolitan criminality in modern British literature

Advances in cosmopolitan mobility, hybridity, and transnationalism during the modern age contributed to new criminal identity formations and classifications of crimes. This dissertation examines modern British fiction’s construction of cosmopolitan criminality at a time of increased awareness of the intensifying influences outlaws and foreigners had on English culture. Cosmopolitan criminals populated new genres of crime fiction such as Victorian slum literature, Edwardian and late-modernist thrillers, detective fiction, and anarcho-terrorist narratives. I demonstrate how this crime fiction shaped cultural, legislative, and public reactions to criminal outsiders and rendered new types of foreign and international crimes visible to an anxious British public. This study advances our understanding of how cosmopolitan criminality became an important literary subject for indicating symbolic and material threats of transnational modernization and tested legal and cultural standards of normalcy couched as Englishness. I recover the many iterations and uses of cosmopolitan criminality from the mid-Victorian to late-modernist periods in order to show that foreign crime was a central concern for modern British authors. Chapter one examines the cosmopolitan criminal’s emergence as an atavistic, foreign menace comprising a “criminal race” in Victorian slum literature, such as in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago. I read slum literature’s association of cosmopolitan features with criminality as a way English authors distinguished an honest, English working-poor under threat from degenerate cosmopolitan criminals in the slums. Chapter two focuses on cosmopolitan crimes carried out by anarchists and terrorists in late-Victorian and Edwardian crime narratives by Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and G. K. Chesterton. Against the legislative backdrop of new anti-Aliens Bills and a general suspicion of cosmopolitanism these authors satirize cosmopolitan criminals and crimes to critique anti-cosmopolitan fervor in England. Chapter three reads Graham Greene’s late-modernist thrillers of the 1930s as foregrounding poetic justice as an alternate means for thinking about social justice. Subverting classic thriller tropes, Greene dramatizes the social imbalances that thwart justice for the economically disadvantaged and protect the crimes of the social and economic elite

Representing the human condition: a comparative study of the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino

The thesis aims to explore the issue of representation and its limits in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvin. It focuses on the authors' treatments of the relationships between representational practices and the constraining limits of the human condition in perceiving reality. The introduction aims to discuss the methodology of the thesis and the theoretical positions of contemporary theorists regarding these relationships in order to contextualise and place the thesis in perspective. The conflictual tension between representation and the human condition will then be organised around five major themes, i. e. language, cognition, hermeneutics, spatial forms, and games, each of which will be a focal point of a chapter. While the first two chapters set out to describe how language and cognition prevent humans from attaining the real in its absolute state, the next three chapters will mainly discuss the implications and consequences of the unattainable real and human inadequacies. Each of these five chapters, in its different yet interconnected direction, features an extensive discussion of the issue of representational limits and a comparative analysis of what the authors manage to do in face of the issue. A final conclusion will summarise the similarities and differences in the ways both authors deal with the critical interactions between representation and the limits of the human condition

Hands-on Science. Celebrating Science and Science Education

The book herein aims to contribute to the improvement of Science Education in our schools and to an effective implementation of a sound widespread scientific literacy at all levels of society