Filosofia e dibattito. Le Meditazioni Cartesiane come esempio di deliberazione filosofica

This essay relates the content of an educational experience that applies the methodology of debate to the closer examination of an argumentative philosophical text, in the form of a deliberation with oneself. The text in question is Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, specifically the first, the second, the sixth meditation and respective Objections. The class involved in the activity is the IV B of the Liceo classico Alessandro Manzoni in Lecco.

Alessandro Manzoni: il «reale» e il «possibile» nel dialogo Dell’invenzione

Il dialogo Dell’invenzione, pubblicato nel 1850, sembra a prima vista del tutto estraneo all’arco della quasi quarantennale riflessione teorica manzoniana, che sul tema del rapporto fra storia e invenzione, dai cosiddetti Materiali estetici al Discorso del romanzo storico, sfugge sia all’ambito del formularismo pragmatico classicista sia all’opposta opzione romantica. Tale visione critica può intervenire a relegare il dialogo manzoniano al puro settore dei suoi scritti filosofici, e dunque a considerarlo di interesse minore, proprio per il suo oggetto, che è l’ontologia e la gnoseologia rosminiana, discussa dai tre personaggi fittizi di Primo, Secondo e Terzo.

Struttura e narratore ne I Promessi Sposi di Alessandro Manzoni

In the early 19th century, the Italian literature did not have a mature novel, as is known today. The Italian novelist, Manzoni, and his masterpiece The Betrothed, set a solid basis for the contemporary Italian novel; thanks to its’ narrative characteristics that helped the novelist in achieving different reformative goals, woven stupendously with fictional, historical and realistic threads. The main purpose of this study is to apply an analytical and thematic approach on the structure and narrator of the novel. Furthermore, the research aims to distinguish the main artistic characteristics adopted from the European historical novel. The study then focuses on analyzing the function of the anonymous author’s fictional frame and how it created a diversity in the narrative levels. The research also highlights the importance of the omniscient narrator, the strong relations between the narrator and the narratee, the different narrative perspectives, and finally the polyphony: techniques that enhanced the realistic dimension of the novel.

Cardiac patient care during a pandemic: how to reorganise a heart failure unit at the time of COVID-19

To date, the pandemic spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has involved over 100 countries in a matter of weeks, and Italy suffers from almost 1/3 of the dead cases worldwide. In this report, we show the strategies adopted to face the emergency at Centro Cardiologico Monzino, a mono-specialist cardiology hospital sited in the region of Italy most affected by the pandemic, and specifically we describe how we have progressively modified in a few weeks the organization of our Heart Failure Unit in order to cope with the new COVID-19 outbreak. In fact, on the background of the pandemic, cardiovascular diseases still occur frequently in the general population, but we observed consistent reduction in hospital admissions for acute cardiovascular events and a dramatic increase of late presentation acute myocardial infarction. Despite a reduction of healthcare workers number, our ward has been rearranged in order to take care of both COVID-19 and cardiovascular patients. In particular according to a triple step procedure we divided admitted patients in confirmed, suspected and excluded cases (respectively allocated in “red”, “pink” and “green” separated areas). Due to the absence of definite guidelines, our aim was to describe our strategy in facing the current emergency, in order to reorganize our hospital in a dynamic and proactive manner. To quote the famous Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni ‘It is less bad to be agitated in doubt than to rest in error.’

The New Faces of the Historical Novel

This article analyzes the problem of referentiality in the historical novel, based on a comparison between its classic and contemporary forms. The first section addresses the “mixture of history and invention” that, following Alessandro Manzoni, was the foremost characteristic of the realist historical novel. The next section discusses how the meta-historical novel of the second half of the 20th century - for example, Disgrace (J. M. Coetzee) and El entenado (Juan José Saer)-eclipsed the problem of referentiality by assuming that the historical novel should operate by its own procedures, and not those of history. The following sections discuss the referential turn in 21st century literary narratives, focusing on three novels: El material humano, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; K. Relato de uma busca, by Bernardo Kucinski, and Jan Karski, by Yannick Haenel. The article concludes that the inversion of these two poles—from non-referentiality to the predominance of referentiality—is an unexpected facet of the elasticity of the concept (and practice) of fiction, which by denying itself ultimately enriches itself.

MATE ZORIĆ ON ALESSANDRO MANZONI

The article focuses on Mate Zorić’s scientific production dedicated to Manzoni and to the reception of The Betrothed among Croatian writers and readership. His critical interest is due to Manzoni’s close ties to Marko Kažotić and Niccolò Tommaseo, writers amply studied by Zorić since the 1950s. A third reason of his critical interest, discussed in this article, is Manzoni’s popularity among the Croatian readership through the translations of his works. The merit of Zorić is not only that of having identified the first attempt at translating Manzoni’s masterpiece in the archives of the National and University Library in Zagreb, but also of having applied the results of the studies of Croatian and Comparative Literature to the studied material. Attributing (along with the literary critic Emil Štampar) the translation published in 1875-1876 to the Croatian writer and translator Josip Eugen Tomić, Zorić also illustrates “the echoes of Manzoni” in the formation and flourishing of the Croatian historical novel. Mate Zorić’s work continues to stimulate further research on the subject from the perspectives of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies.

The evolution of the Italian novel (based on the works of Clorinda Di Fini), part 1

The article deals with the evolution of the Italian novel in different literary and historical periods, starting with the epic poem of Antiquity up to the historical novel (“The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni) and the social novel (“The House by the Medlar-Tree” and “Mastro-don Gesualdo” by Giovanni Verga). Based on the works of Italian philologist Clorinda Di Fini, the article shows how the focus of narrative shifts from the fate of the upper classes to the lives of ordinary people in a larger historical context, as well as the author's position in the novel moves towards impersonality and objective reflection on social problems