Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati

Adventures into the errant familiar

Edited and translated by Patrick Barron

ISBN: 9781800086395

Publication: March 21, 2024

Series: Literature and Translation

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What is this?

Selected Essays and Dialogues is a collection of translations of Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s theoretical and musing work from the late 1960s to the present. Topics range from environmental perception and archaeological conceptions of historical knowledge, to street theatre, writing, photography, cinema and translation. The book provides a framework of key literary, theoretical and artistic movements of the last 50 years, as well as a guide for English-language readers to place Celati’s work in historical, cultural and biographical context, serving to illuminate his books available in English, namely Towards the River’s Mouth, Adventures in Africa, Voices from the Plains and Appearances.

There are various paths to take, tempting readers to wander and become lost in webs of daring thought, drawn ever on by Celati’s fondness for the unexpected ordinary and his bonhomie with others. Indeed, a genial adventurousness can be found within all of Celati’s writings collected here, driven by an affectionate and light-hearted engagement with the surrounding world. Herein is a taste of a seemingly endless series of adventures of the mind and body, always tapped into a lithe sensitivity for an encompassing collective imagination not restricted to the so-called high arts or letters, but very much also engaged with the everyday lives, places and tales we all constantly share.

Praise for Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati

‘Barron’s volume is a very welcome addition to the field. As the first collection of Gianni Celati’s essays in English translation, the book makes accessible a wide selection of his critical work to an Anglophone audience.’ Marina Spunta, University of Leicester

Patrick Barron is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

List of figures
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction
2 ‘One-Page autobiography’
3 ‘Speech as spectacle’
4 ‘Gianni Celati and Italo Calvino: correspondence (Comiche)’
5 ‘Surface stories’
6 ‘The virtues of the gorilla’
7 ‘The archaeological bazaar’
8 ‘The comic body in space’
9 ‘Counter-information on power: on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish’
10 ‘On the era of this book’ and ‘Alice and the cccurrence…’ from Displaced Alice: Collective Materials (on Alice) for a Survival Manual
11 ‘Soft objects’
12 ‘Adventure at the end of the twentieth century’
13 ‘Fictions to believe in: an example’
14 ‘A system of stories about the external world’
15 ‘Desert crossings’
16 ‘Translating Jack London’
17 ‘The frontal view: Antonioni, L’Avventura and Waiting’
18 ‘Comments on a natural theatre of images’
19 ‘Swift, prophetic treatise on the modern age’
20 ‘The sentiment of space’
19 ‘Introductory Note’, Narrators of the reserves
21 ‘Threshold for Luigi Ghirri: how to Think in Images’
22 ‘In praise of the tale’
23 ‘Last contemplators’
24 ‘Italo’s death’
25 ‘Two years of study at the British Museum’
26 ‘Rewriting, retelling, translating’
27 ‘Heading to the river’s mouth’
28 From ‘In Zurich with Joyce’
29 ‘On Jonathan Swift and the development of aliens’
30 ‘The disorder of words: on a translation of Joyce’s Ulysses’

Bibliography of original source texts
Selected bibliography
Index

'Barron’s volume is a very welcome addition to the field. As the first collection of Gianni Celati’s essays in English translation, the book makes accessible a wide selection of his critical work to an Anglophone audience.’
Marina Spunta, University of Leicester

Format: Open Access PDF

284 Pages

10 B&W photo/halftones

ISBN: 9781800086395

Publication: March 21, 2024

Series: Literature and Translation