Status Quaestionis

Pronom on et construction de l’ethos dans le discours politique. Analyse sémantico-argumentative et quantitative des discours du président nigérien Issoufou

2026-06-30T13:46:48+00:00

The study aims to observe how the different uses and values of the French pronoun ‘on’ contribute to the process of constructing presidential ethos in political discourse. Two hypotheses are put forward: the first is that ‘on’ can be an effective linguistic device for political leaders to construct specific argumentative strategies with regard to their co-speakers; the second is that the argumentative functions and presidential ethos conveyed by this pronoun can vary depending on whether the head of state is addressing citizens or the political class. These hypotheses will be tested using a corpus of speeches delivered by former Nigerien head of state Mahamadou Issoufou. The different uses of the pronoun will be classified and quantified in a descriptive grid specifically designed for the analysis of the argumentative functions of ‘on’ in political discourse. The usefulness of a multifactorial approach to the interpretation of this pronoun will also be defended.

Everyday Media, Everyday English: A Diary Study of Informal Exposure to English Input among Italian University Students

2026-06-30T14:34:36+00:00

While diary methods have often been used in second language acquisition (SLA) research as pedagogical tools for second language (L2) learners, their potential as systematic data collection instruments has been explored less frequently. In this work, diary methods are applied to document 19 Italian university students’ informal exposure to English input over a 12-month period. Online logs were used to track participants’ weekly exposure to a range of informal English input, such as audiovisual products, social networks, video games, music and live interactions. Findings reveal individual variation in both quantity and type of media engagement, with social networks, audiovisual content and music emerging as the most frequent sources of L2 input across the sample. These results provide detailed profiles of participants’ informal encounter with English and highlight the relevance of diary methods for documenting media-based exposure beyond the classroom.

Modalità dello choc ne La città dalle 100 meraviglie di Filippo de Pisis: per una metafisica ‘minore’

2026-06-30T15:58:42+00:00

This paper describes the specific nature of the metaphysical poetics developed by Filippo de Pisis between the 1910s and 1920s, through an analysis of La città dalle 100 meraviglie, focusing primarily on the dynamics of choc. The discussion centers specifically the configuration of space-time coordinates and the narrative voice, examining an ‘epiphanic’ episode from the chapter Della morìa.

Tikkun olam: cumuli da una memoria materiale. Rombo di Esther Kinsky

2026-06-30T16:53:33+00:00

Whether the concept of familiarity to a place can appear in opposition to that of disorientation, some environmental and social realities tell a different story, of a domestic feeling to disturbance. With the concepts of Störung and Gestörtes Gelände, contemporary German poet and writer Esther Kinsky attempts to shed light on the creative and vital implications of disturbance and disruption within a collective understanding of the environment. This is what takes place in Rombo (2022), set in a village Friuli during and after the earthquakes that struck the region in May and September 1976. The experience of the seismic shocks creates a new level of disturbance in the human and non-human inhabitants of the region, which is now tangible in folds and piles of rubble. an accumulation due to plasticity which not only is material but also mnemonic. The article aims to analyse the topics of domesticity, disorientation and Störung with reference to the form of the fold, which recurs in Kinsky’s descriptions of the landscape as well as in the experiences of the Friulan inhabitants in the novel Rombo.

Spectacular Transience, or, How to Undermine a Military Triumph on the Early Modern English Stage

2026-06-30T16:56:46+00:00

This article examines the interpretation and refashioning of the Roman triumph motif within the theatrical culture of early modern England, contrasting its close connection with royal ceremonies and self-display against its paradoxical and ambivalent representation concerning fictional rulers in plays. It argues that the military triumph, with its associated martial imagery, enters into a dialogue with the triumphal discourse of masque-like entertainments and plays, yet is rarely, if ever, realized onstage. Through an analysis of texts ranging from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V, and Julius Caesar back to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and extending to the triumphal masques of the Stuart kings, the essay demonstrates a progressive dematerialization of the military triumph. Instead of a concrete celebration of military victory, the triumph becomes a site of memory, aspiration, foreboding, and ultimately, a powerful cultural signifier used to explore themes of power, identity, and the ephemeral nature of royal power. The study reveals how the absent or transformed triumph in these theatrical contexts paradoxically gains lasting resonance in the cultural imagination, often glorifying the imagined captive or highlighting the performative and ultimately transient nature of monarchical power, as seen in the Stuart era’s shift towards peaceful and allegorical triumphs in their masques and royal self-representation.

Niccolò Scaffai, Sotto l’inesauribile superficie delle cose. Il paradigma della profondità nell’immaginario dell’Antropocene, Sansepolcro, Aboca, 2025, 180 pp., € 24.00

2026-06-30T13:53:52+00:00

“La superficie delle cose è inesauribile”: in Palomar (1983) di Calvino, la formula definisce la vocazione conoscitiva del protagonista, quel “dispositivo ottico” (15) che punta lo sguardo sulla realtà visibile nella speranza di coglierne la natura profonda. Niccolò Scaffai la riprende rovesciandola a partire dal titolo: ciò che il libro si propone di indagare non è la superficie bensì la profondità che la sostiene, perché, “per cogliere i legami che ci connettono […] con l’insieme dei fenomeni e processi da cui dipendono l’esistenza biologica e l’organizzazione sociale nostra e delle altre specie, occorre dirigere lo sguardo […] verso il basso, volgendo le nostre facoltà speculative verso la profondità” (16).

Claudia Cerulo, Auditory Perception in Twentieth-Century Self-Narratives: Oto-bio-graphical Subjects, New York-London-Dublin, Bloomsbury Academic, 2026, 217 pp., $ 108.00

2026-06-30T17:00:14+00:00

Con Auditory Perception in Twentieth-Century Self-Narratives: Oto-bio-graphical Subjects, Claudia Cerulo offre un contributo di notevole rilievo all’intersezione fra teoria dell’autobiografia, sound studies, psicoanalisi e filosofia contemporanea. Il volume si propone di indagare il rapporto tra percezione uditiva e scrittura di sé nella letteratura europea del Novecento, assumendo come ipotesi di fondo che la dimensione acustica non costituisca un semplice elemento tematico o decorativo del discorso autobiografico, ma possa invece configurarsi come vero e proprio principio formale, cognitivo e simbolico di organizzazione della soggettività narrativa.

Giuseppe Ferrulli (a cura di), «Arrivederci tra dieci anni?». Il carteggio Fortini-Rossanda (1951-1993), con un saggio di Monica Marchi, Firenze, Firenze University Press, 2024, pp. 144, € 23,00

2026-06-30T17:07:27+00:00

Nell’ambito delle iniziative promosse dal Centro Interdipartimentale di ricerca Franco Fortini, la collana Carteggi e materiali accoglie l’edizione della corrispondenza epistolare dello studioso senese con Rossana Rossanda, curata da Giuseppe Ferrulli e corredata da un contributo di Monica Marchi. Il volume prosegue il lavoro filologico ed ermeneutico sulle scritture fortiniane, ma dialoga anche con il dibattito critico sviluppatosi negli ultimi anni intorno all’eredità intellettuale e politica di Rossanda. Entrambi personaggi di spicco del panorama culturale del Novecento italiano ed europeo, essi coltivano una corrispondenza costante che, iniziata nel dicembre 1951, si prolunga fino al novembre 1993, a pochi mesi dalla scomparsa dello scrittore.

Silvia Cucchi, Storia di un’ambivalenza. Sul diario di Carla Lonzi, Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 2025, 199 pp., € 20,00

2026-06-30T17:16:42+00:00

All’incrocio tra critica genealogica e critica del testo, il volume di Silvia Cucchi, pubblicato nel 2025 per Edizioni ETS, propone un’indagine sull’opera omnia di Carla Lonzi, Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista. Al fine di restituire la connivenza tra elaborazione teorica e pratica scrittoria, l’autrice ricostruisce l’excursus della produzione lonziana da una prospettiva letteraria, soffermandosi in particolare sulla natura stilistica del genere diaristico.

I confini del lavoro, il lavoro dei confini

2026-06-30T13:34:59+00:00

This introduction presents the contents of this special issue, the series of research initiatives that led to its elaboration (in particular, the different stages in the development of the OBERT - Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail) and some theoretical and critical reference points that are essential for bringing the topic into focus. Finally, it summarises the main research questions that each contribution addresses.

“Sopportava quel mestiere, non l’amava”. Forme del lavoro tra città e campagna in Ciau Masino di Cesare Pavese

2026-06-30T13:41:58+00:00

This article aims to analyse the ways in which work is depicted in the “prosimetrum” Ciau Masino, a curious early lyrical-narrative experiment by Cesare Pavese, dating from between 1931 and 1932. In particular, it will highlight how the theme of work – central to Pavese’s entire production – is also presented in this work as a source of substantial contradiction and irreconcilable conflict, oscillating between its positive connotation as a fundamental and indispensable value of human existence and its more strictly alienating and degrading dimension, especially in relation to manual labour and farm work.

De part et d’autre de la frontière franco-italienne

2026-06-30T14:09:46+00:00

This article analyses literary narratives concerning Italian migrant workers on both sides of the border between France and Italy through two works by François Cavanna and Tina Merlin. By comparing the personal perspectives and socio-historical contexts presented in their accounts, the study highlights the similarities and divergences between these narratives. Cavanna and Merlin both use language, objects, bodies, and traditions to give voice to otherwise hidden from view migrant workers. This analysis compares two accounts of the same phenomenon of unskilled labor migration, placing particular emphasis on the influence that the border perspective exerts on these narratives. Ultimately, the article aims to showcase the political and sociological significance of both literary works.

Scioperi queer. Energia-lavoro dell’attenzione e linee di fuga

2026-06-30T14:12:58+00:00

If the Fordist formula for the social factory of early cognitive capitalism might be “machine + attention = production” (Petri 1971), value extraction exploits not only hybrid forms of reproductive labour – elemental, animal, machinic –, but also their capacity to distract and get distracted. This article questions distractibility as a queer form of attentional work refusal, both accomplice and disruptor of habits’ automatisms. Tracing a line from the echoes of feminist vindications of Wages for Housework/Global Women Strike and Wages Due Lesbian/Queer Strike to their re-enactment in contemporary attention artivism and practice-based research, this ability emerges as an unavoidable yet radically ambiguous set of tendencies that, standing apart from wakeful vigilance, borders on the threshold between states, strategies and tactics, lines of capture and flight.

Rifiutare il lavoro come forma di resistenza

2026-06-30T14:20:30+00:00

This article examines the relationship between contemporary Italian fiction and the world of labour, understood as symptomatic of broader political and social tensions. Drawing on Giorgio Falco’s Ipotesi di una sconfitta (2017) and Daniele Zito’s Robledo (2017), it argues that both authors anticipate and deploy quitting as a device to contest post-Fordist labour dynamics and current configurations of power. Furthermore, it shows how both texts, rather than adhering to traditional models of political engagement, develop bottom-up strategies of literary agency that operate on individual reader consciousness, foregrounding the self as a site of dissent in a post-ideological era. The analysis also addresses the formal strategies through which these novels combine documentary realism, irony, and metafictional devices in order to respond to the epistemological instabilities of the post-truth condition.

Prospettive sul lavoro a confronto: Nesi, Trevisan, Brera

2026-06-30T14:20:55+00:00

The theme of work has experienced a notable revival in Italian literature since the late 1990s, gaining considerable prominence in literary discourse. Novels exploring industry, finance, and economics have achieved significant recognition, receiving prestigious literary awards or nominations. This study aims to analyze a selection of such novels in order to shed light on the representation of various figures of workers in contemporary Italy, focusing on the labor narratives of three authors who have become particularly visible over the past decade: Edoardo Nesi, a former industrialist; Vitaliano Trevisan, known for his autofictional writing centered on his own working experiences; and Guido Maria Brera, a professional investor and author. The analysis of their distinct perspectives on work aims to offer new insight into diverse working positionalities and to show how contemporary Italian literature represents the shift between center and periphery across various sectors of the economy.

Emancipazione economica e alienazione simbolica

2026-06-30T14:26:11+00:00

The article examines the portrayal of work in Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo on both a material and a symbolic level. Drawing on Riccardo Castellana’s recent study and building upon the strand of Verga scholarship focused on the author’s ideology, this study offers an interpretation of the novel by focusing on key themes related to labour. As a cornerstone of an emerging bourgeois class striving for hegemony, labour serves as a metonym for modernity and its consequences. Specifically, the article explores the manifestations of work within the novel by analysing the internal conflicts of its protagonist – who ultimately pays the price for economic success at the cost of his sense of self.

“University Wits”: Alienazione e lavoro intellettuale in quattro romanzi contemporanei

2026-06-30T14:27:02+00:00

This article examines four contemporary Italian novels, published between 2010 and 2021, devoted to the representation of intellectual alienation. Its aim is to investigate the conditions of both material and symbolic precarity that characterize intellectual careers, with particular attention to the gap between the expectations associated with a humanistic education and the actual opportunities for professional recognition and fulfillment. The novels under consideration are Scompenso (2010) by Andrea Sartori, Perciò veniamo bene nelle fotografie (2012) by Francesco Targhetta, Il pieno di felicità (2019) by Cecilia Ghidotti, and La vita adulta (2021) by Andrea Inglese. After outlining the challenges of cultural labor in contemporary Italy, drawing on Lucio Argano’s study of Italy’s cultural sector, the article adopts Melvin Seeman’s theoretical framework of alienation, centered on the subjective perspective of social actors and first proposed in his seminal article On the Meaning of Alienation (1959). It then analyzes the four novels by combining literary analysis with a sociologically informed interpretive approach, examining how the different forms of alienation identified by Seeman are reflected in the characters› trajectories and representations.

“È una realtà disperante, ma è quella del mondo moderno”

2026-06-30T14:30:13+00:00

Il padrone (1965) and Il crematorio di Vienna (1969) are the two books with which Goffredo Parise enters a new phase in his artistic parabola, leaving behind the “Vicentine triptych” of the previous decade. By the early 1960s, Parise is embracing a neo-darwinian vision of individual and collective existence, which reverberates powerfully in the poietic motifs of his coeval texts. In these works, the thematized alienation germinates from man’s biological substratum, in which the law of the fittest and natural selection are inscribed. The primary objective of the essay is to analyze the original authorial posture with which Parise decides to interrogate narratively the process of reification set in motion in the advanced stage of the neocapitalist system. Secondly, attention will be focused on the formal modes, expressive instances and thematic cores through which Il crematorio’s short stories incorporate in their internal structures an ambivalent and yet fruitful dialectic between historicizing discourse and broadening in a universal sense of the bio-constrictive subtext.

Engineers of the Soul and Shock Workers in Search of a Contact Zone: Class Relations in the Soviet Production Novel

2026-06-30T14:30:25+00:00

Industry, factories and construction sites, were one of the principal themes of Soviet fiction; it might even be described as a sub-genre in its own right, what they never liked to call, and nevertheless kept on calling, the ‘production novel’. Depictions of manual work as something pleasurable, something that is carried out with enthusiasm, are a cliché in novels of this kind. Rarely, however, is a factory worker the leading character here: in the plot the central role is assumed by engineers, directors, Party organisers, while the real workers appear as occasional figures, more often than not as a sort of noble savage, somebody whom the writer might have met during visits to the factories (the only worker-hero achieving fame, Gleb Chumalov, from Gladkov’s Cement, is in fact a worker turned Party functionary). The birth throes of the “production novel” emerge during the turmoil of the first five-year plans, when the dictatorship of the Proletariat was approaching its demise, and all “proletarian” literary organisations had been shut down by the CC decree convening the first Soviet writers’ congress (in which their Union was to be founded). These organisations, in any case, were mostly comprised of writers of petty bourgeois origins – the repeated “call-ups” of factory workers into literature had little or no effect. In the same years engineers and technicians, previously stigmatised as “bourgeois specialists”, were being rehabilitated in the Soviet discourse. In Stalin’s Soviet Union workers were seen as the Other; this came to be at the end of a particularly interesting debate. Among the alternatives, Sergei Tret’iakov’s avant-garde proposal of a “literature of fact”, in which the redefinition of the social function of the writer implied a totally new idea of literature, wherein, in Walter Benjamin’s reading, “work itself has its turn to speak”.

Implicated and “Unwilling” Labours of Mediterranean Migration in Francesca Mannocchi’s Io Khaled vendo uomini e sono innocente (2019)

2026-06-30T14:34:24+00:00

Using as its lens Francesca Mannocchi’s second-hand autobiography of a Libyan people trafficker, Io Khaled vendo uomini e sono innocente (2019), this article examines the position of the trafficker within the intersecting regimes of labour in the Mediterranean in the C21st. Khaled’s testimony challenges the reader to reflect critically upon how a citizen of Libya might construct agency within an environment of relentless oppression by means of exploitative labour. This challenge is contextualized within research across disciplines into the complex border that the contemporary Mediterranean Sea has been made to constitute (De Genova 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) and in response to a forensic oceanography study by Heller and Pezzani (2017) identifying the sea itself as being implicated as an ‘unwilling killer’, like Khaled, in this externally-generated field of tension. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability (2016), the article posits trafficking, like migrant mobility, as a basis for acts of resistance.