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THREE PROJECTS FOR OUR TIME

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BOOKS
		Massimo Lollini, Le muse, le maschere e il sublime. G.B. Vico e la poesia nell'età della "ragione spiegata". Napoli:Guida, 1994.
		This book studies Vico’s reflection on the evolution of poetry, poetics and rhetoric from Renaissance to Baroque. Vico believes that poetry, having lost its mythological origins, no longer has any eternal or fixed content. This process was particularly acute in the baroque period. The emergence of the mask as an emblem of Baroque culture testifies, as Vico writes, to the loss of the perception of nature as divine substance, producing a loss both of the constitutive referentiality of language and of its supposed “natural” origin. [Index]


		Massimo Lollini, Il vuoto della forma.Scrittura, testimonianza e verità.Genova: Marietti, 2001.
		In my second book first I examine the formation of a philosophical and religious idea of testimony in antiquity by focusing on some selected texts from Plato, the Bible and Augustine. Then I study the emergence of the literary notion of testimony by analyzing crucial works by Dante and Petrarch. The modern and contemporary part of the book concentrates on the philosophical notion of testimony developed by Emmanuel Levinas and on the “testimonies” of important writers of the XXth century such as Renato Serra, Luigi Pirandello, Antonio Gramsci, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Paul Celan. [Index]


		Massimo Lollini And David Castillo (Eds). Reason and Its Others. Italy, Spain, and the New World. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.
		By exploring manifestations of normative and non-normative thinking in the geopolitical and cultural contexts of Early Modern Italy, Spain, and the American colonies, this volume hopes to encourage interdisciplinary discussions on the early modern notions of reason and unreason, good and evil, justice and injustice, center and periphery, freedom and containment, self and other. We still dream early modern dreams (Reason, the Subject, the Nation, the Modern World), and we are still haunted by the void at the center of it all.. [Index]


		Massimo Lollini-Norma Bouchard (Eds). Reading and Writing the Mediterranean: Essays by Vincenzo Consolo. Toronto UP, 2006.
		Vincenzo Consolo is counted by many critics among the most significant voices in contemporary world literature. This volume makes available for the first in English an edited and annotated volume of Consolo’s short stories, essays, and other writings pertaining to the diverse cultures and histories of Sicily and the Mediterranean basin. [Index]


		Massimo Lollini (Ed.), L'autobiografia nell'epoca dell'impersonale, Bologna: Il Mulino, "Intersezioni" (December 2007).
		This collection of essays shows how in the age of the impersonal autobiography is characterized by the proliferation of the narrative persons. Autobiography in our time becomes theoretically and practically aware that the psychological self and the first person are non longer able to come to terms with the complexity of the autobiographical subject. In the introduction Lollini holds that the proliferation of the narratives persons, the emergence of the other within autobiographical discourse and the search for a neutral narrative in the third person are phenomena confirming the difficulty and the new problematic nature of the narrative identity. [Index]