"In our highly literate culture, orality is all-pervasive. Different kinds of media and performance - theatre, film, television, story-telling, structured play - make us ask what is the relation between improvisation and premeditation, between transcription and textualization, between rehearsal, recollection and re-narration. The challenge of writing down what is spoken is partly technical, but also political and philosophical. How do young writers represent the spoken language of their contemporaries? What are the rules governing the transcription of oral evidence in fiction and non-fiction? Is the relationship between oral and written always a hierarchical one? Does the textualization of the oral destroy, more than it commemorates or preserves, the oral itself? Twelve wide-ranging essays, the majority on contemporary Italian theatre and literature, explore these questions in the most up-to-date account of orality and literacy in modern Italian culture yet produced. With the contributions: Michael Caesar, Marina Spunta- Introduction Michael Caesar- Voice, Vision and Orality: Notes on Reading Adriana Cavarero Arturo Tosi- Histrionic Transgressions: The Dario Fo-Commedia dell'Arte Relationship Revisited Gerardo Guccini- Le poetiche del 'teatro narrazione' fra 'scrittura oralizzante' e oralita-che-si-fa-testo Richard Andrews- Composing, Reciting, Inscribing and Transcribing Playtexts in the Community Theatre of Monticchiello David Forgacs- An Oral Renarration of a Photoromance, 1960 Alessandra Broccolini- Identita locali e giochi popolari in Italia tra oralita e scrittura Marina Spunta- The Facets of Italian Orality: An Overview of the Recent Debate Kate Litherland- Literature and Youth in the 1990s: Orality and the Written in Tiziano Scarpa's Cos'e questo fracasso? and Caliceti and Mozzi's Quello che ho da dirvi Elena Porciani- Note su oralita e narrazione inattendibile Marco Codebo- Voice and Events in Manlio Calegari's Comunisti e partigiani: Genova 1942-1945 Hanna Serkowska- Oralita o stile? La trasmissione orale e le modalita narrative ne La Storia di Elsa Morante Catherine O'Rawe- Orality, Microhistory and Memory: Gesualdo Bufalino and Claudio Magris between Narrative and History"

In our highly literate culture, orality is all-pervasive. Different kinds of media and performance - theatre, film, television, story-telling, structured play - make us ask what is the relation between improvisation and pre-meditation, between transcription and textualization, between rehearsal, recollection and re-narration.

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.

Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the diverse spoken languages of Italy. The second group of essays studies the influence of speech on the written word and reveals that, as fourteenth-century Tuscan became accepted as a literary standard, contemporary non-standard spoken languages were seen to possess an immediacy that made them an effective resource within certain kinds of written communication. The third part considers the roles of orality in the worlds of the learned and of learning. The book as a whole demonstrates that the borderline between orality and writing was highly permeable and that the culture of the period, with its continued reliance on orality alongside writing, was often hybrid in nature.

Although fictional responses to Caravaggio date back to the painter's lifetime (1571-1610), it was during the second half of the twentieth century that interest in him took off outside the world of art history. In this new monograph, the first book-length study of Caravaggio's recent impact, Rorato provides a panoramic overview of his appropriation by popular culture. The extent of the Caravaggio myth, and its self-perpetuating nature, are brought out by a series of case studies involving authors and directors from numerous countries (Italy, Great Britain, America, Canada, France and Norway) and literary and filmic texts from a number of genres - from straightforward tellings of his life to crime fiction, homoerotic film and postcolonial literature.

The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat politician, Aldo Moro, marked the watershed of Italy's experience of political violence in the period known as the 'years of lead' (1969-c.1983). This uniquely interdisciplinary volume explores the evolving legacy of Moro's death in the Italian cultural imaginary, from the late 1970s to the present. Bringing a wide range of critical perspectives to bear, interventions by experts in the fields of political science, social anthropology, philosophy, and cultural critique elicit new understandings of the events of 1978 and explain their significance and relevance to present-day Italian culture and society.