California Italian Studies

Realizzato all’indomani della contestazione francese del maggio 1968, l’Igloo di Mario Merz, intitolato Objet cache-toi, era una peculiare combinazione tra il linguaggio della protesta—il titolo derivava da un graffito apparso in quel periodo sui muri della Sorbona—e la dematerializzazione dell’arte post-minimalista. L’articolo prova a comprendere le strategie di opposizione alla civiltà dei consumi e al feticismo delle merci messe in atto dall’Arte Povera e da Merz in parallelo al movimento del Sessantotto, ponendole a paragone con una particolare tipologia del modernismo artistico in Italia e le interpretazioni storiografiche degli slogan sessantotteschi. 

Created in the aftermath of the French protests of May 1968, Mario Merz's Igloo, titled Objet cache-toi, was an unusual blend of protest language—the title was inspired by graffiti that appeared on the walls of the Sorbonne at that time—and the dematerialization of post-minimalist art. This article compares Arte Povera and Merz's strategies of opposing consumerism and commodity fetishism with a specific strand of Italian artistic modernism and the historiographical interpretations of the 1968 slogans.

This article explores the relationship between Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)—French historian, theologian, and anthropologist—and the contemporary Italian academic milieu, with a particular focus on his engagement with semiotics and mysticism. On the one hand, Certeau took an active role in the scholarly and research initiatives promoted by the International Center for Semiotics and Linguistics in Urbino, where he revisited, developed, and articulated the central themes of his work. On the other, he found especially fertile ground for dialogue with Italian scholars on the subject of mysticism. Concentrating primarily on the network of relationships that emerged during the 1970s, the article also reconstructs the main trajectories through which Certeau’s thought was received and interpreted in Italy during his lifetime and afterward.

The quantitative and qualitative broadening of the Italian poetic field in the 1970s, which occurred in response to the profound coeval socio-cultural changes (mass schooling, proletarianization of culture, emergence of new political-poetic and social subjects), requires literary critics interested in reconstructing the poetic framework of the decade to substantially update their tools of inquiry. The idealistic, inductive and often "monofocal" approach most frequented by Italian academic criticism, accustomed to treating the text as an autonomous organism and ignoring its correlations with its historical and material context of reference, has so far revealed its inadequacy in accounting for the plurality of poetic and cultural experiences of those "hyper-historical" years, ending up by entrenching itself in an asphyxiated geo-editorial canon and in anachronistic trend categories that are hardly representative of the actual context of the decade under consideration. This paper aims to draw the methodological lineaments of a "bifocal" approach to the 1970s, namely one that reconciles context reconstruction and text analysis, sociological inquiry and stylistic-philological criticism, close and distant reading, based in particular on the operational model offered by Pierre Bourdieu's literary sociology (with forays into the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Pascale Casanova, Alain Viala and Franco Moretti). After briefly sketching the structural changes occurred in the post-sixty-eight historical-poetic landscape and reconstructing the terms, places and editorial modes of the critical debate around the poetry of the 1970s (paragraphs 1 and 2), this article proceeds to a theoretical reconnaissance around Bourdieusian notions of "field," "conflict" and "habitus" and then proposes an empirical application of them to the specific Italian poetic field of the decade (paragraphs 3 and 4).

Following legal disputes upon the death of Carmelo Bene (1937–2002), his archive was dispersed, and no inventory of the materials has ever been published. My article is a first attempt to organize the documents that were part of Bene’s original archive, reconstructing over fifty manuscript documents that are organized thematically and for each of which is provided a description of the material. My reconstruction of Bene's handwritten documents includes records that were subsequently lost, and also presents material related to projects for works that, although never realized by Bene, are nevertheless of extreme interest for a deeper understanding of his artistic production.