Robert S C Gordon
Biographic Data
| ID | 89148 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert S C Gordon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert S C |
| FAMILY NAME | Gordon |
| SIGNATURE | GORDON R S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Alberto Asor Rosa, 1933–2022
at the age of 89.He was an astonishingly prolific, capacious literary critic and historian, a militant Marxist cultural operator and essayist (and latterly a novelist), whose influence over close on 60 years of intense debate around literature, politics and their role in Italian history was second to none.At his height, he was a formidable presence, immediately recognisable with his baffi and gruff manner, at the heart of several intersecting net…
An intellectual at Mauthausen: Aldo Bizzarri between essay, fiction (and cinema)
This article offers an overview and analysis of the concentration camp writings of Aldo Bizzarri, an Italian political deportee at Mauthausen concentration camp during 1944-1945. Bizzarri had a varied career as a writer, essayist and cultural diplomat before deportation and as a journalist and writer after the war. He wrote two important books about his experiences at Mauthausen and also worked on a film with a concentration camp setting. His exp…
Luck stories: Stress-testing contingency and agency at the margins of post-war American literature
The article examines four mid-twentieth-century American works of literature that explore and tell stories with notions of luck. It argues that luck in these works is deployed as a means to ‘stress-test’ the possibilities and the resilience of human agency, in the face of the contingencies and uncertainties of the modern. Widely varying in form and genre, and in different ways flawed, neglected or marginal in their author’s work or in literary hi…
Formes hybrides dans la littérature italienne sur la Shoah
The essay presents a survey of the field of Italian-language Holocaust literature from the early postwar years to the present. It notes the parallel emergence of the two major axes of Holocaust writing, testimony and fiction, and describes the tensions and similarities between them. It then challenges the model for understanding Holocaust literature that is dominated by these two genres. The essay suggests that from the earliest written responses…
Beyond ‘Culture and Society
On page two of the Cambridge University Library copy of the 1975 hardback first edition of Will Wright's Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western,1 an enthused student has scribbled
Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium
Race
Whereas Hitler's Germany was centrally structured around a racial or racist ideology, a form of ‘Aryan’ anti-Semitism, Mussolini and the Italy of the ventennio were only marginally and latterly interested in questions of race, and then only for contingent or tactical reasons to do with Italy's political alignment with Nazi Germany. If the former was a ‘racial state’, the latter – even as it pursued, at times, an aggressive politics of race – was …
Notes on DVD commentaries
Notes on DVD commentaries
Fare testo in materia: Ugo Varnai, Comunità, and the Holocaust in 1950s Italian
The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi
of its poetic activity.Ott analyzes "Personae separate," "Due nel crepuscolo," and "Iride," producing fresh insights into poems that have been the subject of much critical attention.In her reading of such personae as Clizia, Annetta, Dora, and Iride, Ott privileges their role as emblematic of certain aspects of poetic discourse, as "incarnazioni di tre diverse poetiche" (186).In "Due nel crepuscolo" the "defec- tiveness" of language not only obst…
Notes on the screenplay of Ladri di biciclette
The Cambridge companion to Primo Levi
The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria , 27 January 2001
The article examines the first official, national Holocaust memorial day in Italy, the so-called Giorno della memoria (Day of memory), marked on the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 2001. It looks at the ways in which the day acted as a filter for issues of national collective memory and identity, in particular state and public negotiation of the legacy of Fascism, as well as addressing broader issues of Holocaust rem…
Which Holocaust? Primo Levi and the Field of Holocaust Memory in Post-War Italy
The article examines Primo Levi's role as the prime mediator of discussion and understanding of the Holocaust in post-war Italian culture. It sets out some of the issues at stake in dealing with 'national' memories of a 'transnational' event such as the Holocaust, as well as issues specific to the Italian case. It then situates Levi generally within the cultural sphere before moving on to analyse the particular shape he implicitly gave to the Hol…
Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics
Primo Levi was perhaps the most humane and eloquent writer of testimony to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. But he also went beyond testimony in his work, tackling many of the founding ethical questions of what it is to be human, 'how to live'. Whether in accounts of the concentration camps, essays, science-fiction, autobiography, poetry, or fiction, he always approached his writing with a questioning, ethically open and alert eye. This book explo…
A neo-rationalist tendency in the field of the literary intellectual in 1970s Italy: Vittorini, Sciascia, Ginzburg
The article examines a constellation of intellectuals working in 1960s and 1970s Italy who are neither aligned with the extreme political projects of those years nor symptomatic of the perceived collapse in relations between high culture and politics in this period. Instead, Vittorini, Sciascia and Carlo Ginzburg are taken as illustrations of a fertile 'neo-rationalist' tendency in culture-politics relations, at once a reprise of strands from the…
A neo-rationalist tendency in the field of the literary intellectual in 1970s Italy: Vittorini, Sciascia, Ginzburg
The article examines a constellation of intellectuals working in 1960s and 1970s Italy who are neither aligned with the extreme political projects of those years nor symptomatic of the perceived collapse in relations between high culture and politics in this period. Instead, Vittorini, Sciascia and Carlo Ginzburg are taken as illustrations of a fertile 'neo-rationalist' tendency in culture-politics relations, at once a reprise of strands from the…
The Art of Listening: Primo Levi's Ethics of Storytelling
This article examines Primo Levi's practice of and interest in storytelling as a form of ethical enquiry, based in the reciprocity and attention of the storytelling encounter, both in his Holocaust testimony and beyond. It pays particular attention to the book La chiave a Stella (The Wrench), which is examined as a sort of storyteller's manual. Through the book's all but unspoken subtext echoing Levi's own Holocaust narratives, the practice of st…
Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity
Pasolini contro Calvino: Culture, the canon and the millennium
This article offers an account of a recent debate in the cultural pages of the Italian press on a polemical work of literary criticism entitled Pasolini contro Calvino, in which the two authors are shown to represent emblematically different attitudes towards literature, cultural institutions and the culture industry in post-war Italy. The debate surrounding this claim is examined in substance, but also as an illustration of the workings of cultu…
Recent Work on Pasolini in English
Recent Work on Pasolini in English
Notes on the screenplay of Ladri di biciclette
The Art of Listening: Primo Levi's Ethics of Storytelling
This article examines Primo Levi's practice of and interest in storytelling as a form of ethical enquiry, based in the reciprocity and attention of the storytelling encounter, both in his Holocaust testimony and beyond. It pays particular attention to the book La chiave a Stella (The Wrench), which is examined as a sort of storyteller's manual. Through the book's all but unspoken subtext echoing Levi's own Holocaust narratives, the practice of st…
Pasolini contro Calvino: Culture, the canon and the millennium
This article offers an account of a recent debate in the cultural pages of the Italian press on a polemical work of literary criticism entitled Pasolini contro Calvino, in which the two authors are shown to represent emblematically different attitudes towards literature, cultural institutions and the culture industry in post-war Italy. The debate surrounding this claim is examined in substance, but also as an illustration of the workings of cultu…
Recent Work on Pasolini in English
Recent Work on Pasolini in English
Pasolini contro Calvino: Culture, the canon and the millennium
This article offers an account of a recent debate in the cultural pages of the Italian press on a polemical work of literary criticism entitled Pasolini contro Calvino, in which the two authors are shown to represent emblematically different attitudes towards literature, cultural institutions and the culture industry in post-war Italy. The debate surrounding this claim is examined in substance, but also as an illustration of the workings of cultu…
Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity
The Art of Listening: Primo Levi's Ethics of Storytelling
This article examines Primo Levi's practice of and interest in storytelling as a form of ethical enquiry, based in the reciprocity and attention of the storytelling encounter, both in his Holocaust testimony and beyond. It pays particular attention to the book La chiave a Stella (The Wrench), which is examined as a sort of storyteller's manual. Through the book's all but unspoken subtext echoing Levi's own Holocaust narratives, the practice of st…
Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics
Primo Levi was perhaps the most humane and eloquent writer of testimony to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. But he also went beyond testimony in his work, tackling many of the founding ethical questions of what it is to be human, 'how to live'. Whether in accounts of the concentration camps, essays, science-fiction, autobiography, poetry, or fiction, he always approached his writing with a questioning, ethically open and alert eye. This book explo…
A neo-rationalist tendency in the field of the literary intellectual in 1970s Italy: Vittorini, Sciascia, Ginzburg
The article examines a constellation of intellectuals working in 1960s and 1970s Italy who are neither aligned with the extreme political projects of those years nor symptomatic of the perceived collapse in relations between high culture and politics in this period. Instead, Vittorini, Sciascia and Carlo Ginzburg are taken as illustrations of a fertile 'neo-rationalist' tendency in culture-politics relations, at once a reprise of strands from the…
A neo-rationalist tendency in the field of the literary intellectual in 1970s Italy: Vittorini, Sciascia, Ginzburg
The article examines a constellation of intellectuals working in 1960s and 1970s Italy who are neither aligned with the extreme political projects of those years nor symptomatic of the perceived collapse in relations between high culture and politics in this period. Instead, Vittorini, Sciascia and Carlo Ginzburg are taken as illustrations of a fertile 'neo-rationalist' tendency in culture-politics relations, at once a reprise of strands from the…
The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria , 27 January 2001
The article examines the first official, national Holocaust memorial day in Italy, the so-called Giorno della memoria (Day of memory), marked on the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 2001. It looks at the ways in which the day acted as a filter for issues of national collective memory and identity, in particular state and public negotiation of the legacy of Fascism, as well as addressing broader issues of Holocaust rem…
Which Holocaust? Primo Levi and the Field of Holocaust Memory in Post-War Italy
The article examines Primo Levi's role as the prime mediator of discussion and understanding of the Holocaust in post-war Italian culture. It sets out some of the issues at stake in dealing with 'national' memories of a 'transnational' event such as the Holocaust, as well as issues specific to the Italian case. It then situates Levi generally within the cultural sphere before moving on to analyse the particular shape he implicitly gave to the Hol…
The Cambridge companion to Primo Levi
The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi
of its poetic activity.Ott analyzes "Personae separate," "Due nel crepuscolo," and "Iride," producing fresh insights into poems that have been the subject of much critical attention.In her reading of such personae as Clizia, Annetta, Dora, and Iride, Ott privileges their role as emblematic of certain aspects of poetic discourse, as "incarnazioni di tre diverse poetiche" (186).In "Due nel crepuscolo" the "defec- tiveness" of language not only obst…
Notes on the screenplay of Ladri di biciclette
Race
Whereas Hitler's Germany was centrally structured around a racial or racist ideology, a form of ‘Aryan’ anti-Semitism, Mussolini and the Italy of the ventennio were only marginally and latterly interested in questions of race, and then only for contingent or tactical reasons to do with Italy's political alignment with Nazi Germany. If the former was a ‘racial state’, the latter – even as it pursued, at times, an aggressive politics of race – was …
Notes on DVD commentaries
Notes on DVD commentaries
Fare testo in materia: Ugo Varnai, Comunità, and the Holocaust in 1950s Italian
Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium
Beyond ‘Culture and Society
On page two of the Cambridge University Library copy of the 1975 hardback first edition of Will Wright's Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western,1 an enthused student has scribbled
Formes hybrides dans la littérature italienne sur la Shoah
The essay presents a survey of the field of Italian-language Holocaust literature from the early postwar years to the present. It notes the parallel emergence of the two major axes of Holocaust writing, testimony and fiction, and describes the tensions and similarities between them. It then challenges the model for understanding Holocaust literature that is dominated by these two genres. The essay suggests that from the earliest written responses…
Luck stories: Stress-testing contingency and agency at the margins of post-war American literature
The article examines four mid-twentieth-century American works of literature that explore and tell stories with notions of luck. It argues that luck in these works is deployed as a means to ‘stress-test’ the possibilities and the resilience of human agency, in the face of the contingencies and uncertainties of the modern. Widely varying in form and genre, and in different ways flawed, neglected or marginal in their author’s work or in literary hi…
An intellectual at Mauthausen: Aldo Bizzarri between essay, fiction (and cinema)
This article offers an overview and analysis of the concentration camp writings of Aldo Bizzarri, an Italian political deportee at Mauthausen concentration camp during 1944-1945. Bizzarri had a varied career as a writer, essayist and cultural diplomat before deportation and as a journalist and writer after the war. He wrote two important books about his experiences at Mauthausen and also worked on a film with a concentration camp setting. His exp…
Alberto Asor Rosa, 1933–2022
at the age of 89.He was an astonishingly prolific, capacious literary critic and historian, a militant Marxist cultural operator and essayist (and latterly a novelist), whose influence over close on 60 years of intense debate around literature, politics and their role in Italian history was second to none.At his height, he was a formidable presence, immediately recognisable with his baffi and gruff manner, at the heart of several intersecting net…
Art (16 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · History (11 works) · Sociology (9 works) · The Holocaust (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Theology (7 works)