Submissions

Other Criticism

By Other Criticism we mean the full awareness of the end of “literary criticism” as it was established in Western discourse from the second half of the 18th century until the end of the 20th.

As we have tried to argue elsewhere (and in the same collection of essays which have gradually appeared in the journal), the disciplinary configuration, already put into definitive crisis of all (without exception) the pillars that constituted it, by the critical, aesthetic, and political relativization of the Western-masculine-“white” cultural monopoly (in a word: bourgeois) and by the end of the evaluative aesthetics of idealistic matrix, based on “disinterestedness” and on judgments “of taste”. Finally, the literary criticism we have known finally explodes in the impact with mass media and new technologies and, in particular, by the emergence of forms of production and textual fruition, no longer Gutembergian and no longer (or increasingly less) mediated by the publishing market and therefore by the consequent crisis of the author-written text-publisher-market-reader link (which claimed to be natural and exclusive, indeed constitutive of literature!)

Of course, like all endings, even this one is not without residue, and indeed we can now, in this long-awaited and long-lasting sunset, finally raise many of Minerva’s night owls in flight.
And just as the end of “literature” leaves nothing less than the concrete inexhaustible vitality of texts, in whatever form and from whatever source, so from the end of “literary criticism” emerges a radical analytical and cognitive tension regarding such forms of textuality, literally un-limited. A new world of all the texts of the world, so far excluded from the narrow and short-sighted gaze of “literary criticism” is thus emerging, and with them the plurality (so far removed, and therefore reduced to secrecy) of textual traditions, which are so much a part of the Benjaminian (and Gramscian) “tradition of the oppressed” (from the writing of women to that of migrants, from orality to multimedia production, from memory of the subordinate to experimentation, and so on).

If these texts will be, and already are, the object of study of Other Criticism, its method rediscovers and actualizes the very root of respect and study of texts and their tradition, also known as philology.

Digital Humanities

The section deals with the field of humanistic informatics, taking in the historical and epistemological evolution of the field: from the purely humanistic-literary issues of the early years of the discipline, with particular attention to computational tool experimentation on humanistic objects and contents, to the social, political and cultural aspects of digital and network technologies which have and are still transforming these very objects and contents.

The topics of the contributions considered for publication may be:

• encoding of the literary text,
• digital edition
• sociology and anthropology of digital communication,
• theoretical, historical, and geopolitical aspects of internet and social media,
• ethical and social aspects of digital technologies,
• evolution of strategies for the production and dissemination of digital texts,
• digital narratology.

Art Comparison and Intermediality

Art Comparison and Intermediality is the section referring to Leonardo da Vinci’s distinction and differences of the arts (Libro di Pittura, Codice Urbinate lat. 1270 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, edited by Carlo Pedretti, Critical transcription by Carlo Vecce, Biblioteca della scienza italiana, I, Giunti, Florence 1995; Parte Prima, et prima di poesia e Pittura, pp. 131-168), but also on the current forms of their interaction and integration, the most spectacular but also problematic, such as installations – works that, starting from the years around 1960 and from the most varied research, combine linguistic and expressive means of painting, sculpture, photography, video, music, in the given environments in which they are housed – and then art videos, research on the interaction of word and sound, from Wagnerian Wort-Ton-Musik onwards, but also of figurative scenography and theatrical text, or forms of literary self-reflection and the many differences in the relationship between form and content or, more generally, the great debate on the forms of art.

Gender Studies

Since its inception, feminist criticism had been strongly influenced by structuralism, whose merit had been to focus analysis on the functional components of the text and thus to renew its reading, restoring, as it were, the balance in favor of women’s writings generally ignored or undervalued by critics. Gender criticism – which is based on the socio-historical construction of differences – has moved towards an approach that closely links the reading of texts with autobiographical and biographical data, with physical, cultural, ideological, political conditions, and with the intellectual and scientific systems in place. The term “gender” does not refer to women solely, but implies putting into perspective differences of class, origin, language, religion, sexual inclination, with the intent to deconstruct the superstructures of preconceptions and prejudices, the still predominant power games, with the conviction that writings, in all their forms and modes of production, belong to a continuous and multiple process of re-creation of the sense, of re-elaboration of life, of which they marry the duration, pauses, rhythms, pulsations, to return its corporeity, the vicissitudes, the unfathomability…

Notes and Reviews

The section dedicated to notes and reviews includes reviews of books and digital works, reports of conferences and exhibitions in progress, as well as reports of cultural events of particular relevance.

The reviews – signed by editors and external contributors – are usually 3-5 thousand characters long.

Cognitive Neuroscience and Humanities

This section deals with cognitive and behavioral sciences with a historical and epistemological approach: from the analysis of the development – in the last two centuries – of the main scientific theories on mind and mind-body relationship, to the discussion of the most recent models of our cognitive system and its main dysfunctions.

With particular reference to the so-called ‘embodied cognition’ paradigm, articles, reviews and chronicles of particularly significant events related to the following topics shall be submitted:

• history and epistemology of psychology and cognitive neuroscience,
• emotions and cognitive functions: theories of ‘embodied knowledge,’
• psychology of communication and philosophy of language,
• mind and behavior patterns,
• neuropsychology and cognitive system disorders.