Category: Belfagor

By Jeffrey Schnapp.

(Saturday, March 16, 2024, 5 p.m., Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa)

The talk focuses on the theme of freedom not so much with respect to the content of books as to the book as an evolving material container. In nearly six centuries of history, the book has proven to be a powerful laboratory for the fusion and dissemination of data and meaning. In the context of the digital revolution and the development of powerful generative artificial intelligence tools that are already profoundly changing current models of textual production and reproduction, such a laboratory will continue to play a central role within our communication ecosystem. Continue reading “Book and Freedom: Changing Codes. The book between page and pixel”

Elisabetta Benigni

(Friday, March 15, 2024, 4 p.m., Sala Liguria, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa)

The talk will start with a brief excursus on the history of censorship and book circulation in the Arab world from the medieval period until modernity. Afterwards, attention will be brought to the case of Egypt and texts written by detained authors from the 1940s onward will be presented. The talk is intended to reflect on the meaning of writing in the condition of imprisonment in the Arab world, in Egypt in particular, and how practices of censorship (or lack of censorship) have characterized the control of the publishing market and, even today, strongly condition written expression. Texts by female prisoners and detainees belonging to different political currents will be discussed, and attention will be paid to how the concept of freedom took shape precisely through writing during political detention and what the reading public’s expectations of this literature are.

Unlike the vast majority of history scholars, Eric Hobsbawm had a huge, global audience, a literary agent (the same as John Le Carré), a devoted personal editor, publishing houses that paid him advances with five zeros, and many newspapers and television programs at his disposal. He wrote “interesting books” as the communist movement – the community he had chosen for himself – split and then disappeared. Continue reading “A new book on Eric Hobsbawm”

We publish the paper that Daniela Steila, historian of philosophy and Slavist of the University of Turin, wrote for our site, about the personal library of Giovanni Mastroianni (1921-2016), historian of philosophy, philologist, Slavist, “pioneer of studies on Russian-Soviet thought”. Continue reading “The library of Giovanni Mastroianni donated to the University of Turin”

Scholars of the history of journalism and Italy in the contemporary age have a new source from which to draw for their research. A little more than a year after his death, Massimo Bordin’s archives have been completely restored by Dr. Andrea Maori, a freelance archivist and former collaborator of the Radio Radicale archives. Continue reading “Radio, newspapers and books: the Massimo Bordin’s archives”

There will certainly be Zerocalcare, in a book on Italian intellectuals of the new millennium, that someone will write sooner or later (the first to be greatly surprised will be him). Continue reading “Zerocalcare, Gramsci and Draco Malfoy’s unusual quote”