Robert A Rushing
Biographic Data
| ID | 1173706 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert A Rushing |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert A |
| FAMILY NAME | Rushing |
| SIGNATURE | RUSHING R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0009-0005-2905-5384 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
A Jazz Cosmicomics: Geometry, Perversion, Resonance
Italo Calvino has a widely recognized and significant position in Italian literature and culture as one of the masters of twentieth-century Italian letters, recognized for his intensely visual imagination and geometric formalism. This position, however, might actually understate Calvino’s significance, because his influence has been at least as significant outside of Italy as inside, and larger outside of literature than inside ( Invisible Cities…
Italian Detective Fiction in a European Context: National, International, Transnational
Detective fiction and place have always been tightly connected, both within the fiction itself and within the criticism. In this article, I look at French, Scandinavian and Italian crime fiction, with an eye not only to what a comparative analysis shows (traditionally rooted in a relatively static notion of national literatures that are assumed to be more or less “comparable” and thus in some sense equivalent) but—more importantly—to what an anal…
Calvino, Cerrone, and the Catacoustic: An “Echo-logical” Reading 1
Catacoustics (an ancient term for the science of reflected sound, briefly championed by Lacoue-Labarthe) in fact tells us that the echo is never a partial and degraded repetition: while it is true that an echo repeats only a portion of the original signal, it does so in a way that also conveys a huge quantity of additional information that was not in the original signal—information that effectively describes the larger space in which the sound re…
Toxicity: Making the Toxic Visible in Italian Cinema
This essay looks at two main questions. (1) Why is toxicity, despite its resistance to visualization in the documentary (according to Schoonover), so important in Italian film? As Roberto Esposito has argued, Italy has a long tradition of Italian thought characterized by a particular interest in the fragility and precarity of the human body and the body politic, part of biopolitical thinking; moreover, modern Italy has a tragic and all too well-e…
Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen
The Weight of History: Immunity and the Nation in Italian Science-Fiction Cinema
This paper argues that Italian sf films imagine a distinctly non-Italian future. This future is not simply, as in much global science fiction, one in which we have transcended nation states, but a future without Italians, one in which there is no trace of Italian characters. The philosopher Roberto Esposito argues that Italian thinking is distinctively Italian precisely in its lack of coherent national character, a lack that emerges from its esse…
Mad Men, Mad World
the New York Times online edition ran an interactive feature on what reviewer Alessandra Stanley, in an accompanying piece, called a "cultural phenomenon."The occasion was the season 4 premiere of Mad Men, scheduled to air nine days later.As most readers of this book know, Mad Men is an aMC television show about Don Draper, a fictional character who is creative director for Sterling Cooper, a fictional New York advertising agency in the 1960s.Wha…
Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and The 1960s
Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction
Detective or crime fiction was, for a long time, both understudied and undertheorized. While it may still remain undertheorized (outside of poor Poe's “Purloined Letter”), the last decade or so has seen a significant number of works addressing detective fiction as a central locus for the construction of race, class, gender, and nationality—in short, identity. The central premise of Investigating Identities is that a comparative approach is necess…
Gentlemen Prefer Hercules: Desire | Identification | Beefcake
Robert A. Rushing is an associate professor of Italian and of comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; he holds affiliate appointments in cinema studies and criticism and interpretive theory. His book, Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture, appeared in 2007. He has also published on Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Slavoj Žižek, psychoanalysis, and the television show Monk
Italo Svevo and Charlie Chaplin: Dramatic Irony and the Psychoanalytic Stance
The article takes off from a revealing slip in an article about Italo Svevo's novel, Zeno's Conscience, in which the Italian critic, Massimo Verdicchio, attempts to show that the novel is fundamentally philosophical, not psychoanalytic. In doing so, he misreads Svevo's indebtedness to Charcot as a debt to Charlie Chaplin's character Charlot. But when are we justified in calling such a misreading a Freudian slip? Can one legitimately claim to have…
Traveling Detectives: The "Logic of Arrest" and the Pleasures of (Avoiding) the Real
Alessandro Baricco's Seta: Travel, Ventriloquism and the Other
Alessandro Baricco's novel Seta (Silk) seems acutely aware of the Orientalist tradition of travel literature that it belongs to. Ultimately, Baricco seems to be critical of this model of identity and travel (encountering the Other only to banish it and re-affirm the Self) as narcissistic, a wholly imaginary encounter with difference. The dissipation of the threat is not at all effortless in Seta, and leaves deliberate and constant traces of its e…
La sua tragica incompiutezza: Anxiety, Mis-Recognition and Ending in Gadda's Pasticciaccio
Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) enjoys the dubious distinction of being perhaps Italy's greatest little-known writer of the twentieth century. He was an engineer by training, but a writer by vocation, and he published sporadically in literary journals and magazines in the 1930's; starting in the 1940's, however, he began to publish the works that established his reputation as one of Italy's great modernists, along with Svevo and Pirandello. His pr…
The Horizon of Literature: Epistemic Closure in Calvino's I NOSTRI Antenati
Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic
Il Cristallo E Il Mare: L' Enumeración Caótica E l'Epistemologia in Calvino E Gadda
Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction
Detective or crime fiction was, for a long time, both understudied and undertheorized. While it may still remain undertheorized (outside of poor Poe's “Purloined Letter”), the last decade or so has seen a significant number of works addressing detective fiction as a central locus for the construction of race, class, gender, and nationality—in short, identity. The central premise of Investigating Identities is that a comparative approach is necess…
Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic
Il Cristallo E Il Mare: L' Enumeración Caótica E l'Epistemologia in Calvino E Gadda
The Horizon of Literature: Epistemic Closure in Calvino's I NOSTRI Antenati
La sua tragica incompiutezza: Anxiety, Mis-Recognition and Ending in Gadda's Pasticciaccio
Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) enjoys the dubious distinction of being perhaps Italy's greatest little-known writer of the twentieth century. He was an engineer by training, but a writer by vocation, and he published sporadically in literary journals and magazines in the 1930's; starting in the 1940's, however, he began to publish the works that established his reputation as one of Italy's great modernists, along with Svevo and Pirandello. His pr…
Alessandro Baricco's Seta: Travel, Ventriloquism and the Other
Alessandro Baricco's novel Seta (Silk) seems acutely aware of the Orientalist tradition of travel literature that it belongs to. Ultimately, Baricco seems to be critical of this model of identity and travel (encountering the Other only to banish it and re-affirm the Self) as narcissistic, a wholly imaginary encounter with difference. The dissipation of the threat is not at all effortless in Seta, and leaves deliberate and constant traces of its e…
Traveling Detectives: The "Logic of Arrest" and the Pleasures of (Avoiding) the Real
Italo Svevo and Charlie Chaplin: Dramatic Irony and the Psychoanalytic Stance
The article takes off from a revealing slip in an article about Italo Svevo's novel, Zeno's Conscience, in which the Italian critic, Massimo Verdicchio, attempts to show that the novel is fundamentally philosophical, not psychoanalytic. In doing so, he misreads Svevo's indebtedness to Charcot as a debt to Charlie Chaplin's character Charlot. But when are we justified in calling such a misreading a Freudian slip? Can one legitimately claim to have…
Gentlemen Prefer Hercules: Desire | Identification | Beefcake
Robert A. Rushing is an associate professor of Italian and of comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; he holds affiliate appointments in cinema studies and criticism and interpretive theory. His book, Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture, appeared in 2007. He has also published on Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Slavoj Žižek, psychoanalysis, and the television show Monk
Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction
Detective or crime fiction was, for a long time, both understudied and undertheorized. While it may still remain undertheorized (outside of poor Poe's “Purloined Letter”), the last decade or so has seen a significant number of works addressing detective fiction as a central locus for the construction of race, class, gender, and nationality—in short, identity. The central premise of Investigating Identities is that a comparative approach is necess…
Mad Men, Mad World
the New York Times online edition ran an interactive feature on what reviewer Alessandra Stanley, in an accompanying piece, called a "cultural phenomenon."The occasion was the season 4 premiere of Mad Men, scheduled to air nine days later.As most readers of this book know, Mad Men is an aMC television show about Don Draper, a fictional character who is creative director for Sterling Cooper, a fictional New York advertising agency in the 1960s.Wha…
Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and The 1960s
The Weight of History: Immunity and the Nation in Italian Science-Fiction Cinema
This paper argues that Italian sf films imagine a distinctly non-Italian future. This future is not simply, as in much global science fiction, one in which we have transcended nation states, but a future without Italians, one in which there is no trace of Italian characters. The philosopher Roberto Esposito argues that Italian thinking is distinctively Italian precisely in its lack of coherent national character, a lack that emerges from its esse…
Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen
Toxicity: Making the Toxic Visible in Italian Cinema
This essay looks at two main questions. (1) Why is toxicity, despite its resistance to visualization in the documentary (according to Schoonover), so important in Italian film? As Roberto Esposito has argued, Italy has a long tradition of Italian thought characterized by a particular interest in the fragility and precarity of the human body and the body politic, part of biopolitical thinking; moreover, modern Italy has a tragic and all too well-e…
Calvino, Cerrone, and the Catacoustic: An “Echo-logical” Reading 1
Catacoustics (an ancient term for the science of reflected sound, briefly championed by Lacoue-Labarthe) in fact tells us that the echo is never a partial and degraded repetition: while it is true that an echo repeats only a portion of the original signal, it does so in a way that also conveys a huge quantity of additional information that was not in the original signal—information that effectively describes the larger space in which the sound re…
A Jazz Cosmicomics: Geometry, Perversion, Resonance
Italo Calvino has a widely recognized and significant position in Italian literature and culture as one of the masters of twentieth-century Italian letters, recognized for his intensely visual imagination and geometric formalism. This position, however, might actually understate Calvino’s significance, because his influence has been at least as significant outside of Italy as inside, and larger outside of literature than inside ( Invisible Cities…
Italian Detective Fiction in a European Context: National, International, Transnational
Detective fiction and place have always been tightly connected, both within the fiction itself and within the criticism. In this article, I look at French, Scandinavian and Italian crime fiction, with an eye not only to what a comparative analysis shows (traditionally rooted in a relatively static notion of national literatures that are assumed to be more or less “comparable” and thus in some sense equivalent) but—more importantly—to what an anal…
Art (11 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Literature (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Italian Literature and Culture (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (5 works) · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works)