Transcodification: Arts, Languages and Media

This volume offers a critical exploration of the many ways in which transcodification acts at the intersection of literature, art, history, and social and cultural artifacts to foster instances of recognition in the US.

Recognition covers a wealth of meanings: from the mere acknowledgement of existence, validity or legality, or appreciation of something as valuable, to the identification of something as known or familiar. Accordingly, this volume deals with different struggles for recognition. One focus of the volume is the assessment of artistic achievement in relation to a so-called original, with essays concerned with cultural codes and with the role that translation, adaptation, and cross-cultural encounters have played in US artistic and literary productions. A second, parallel, strand focuses on the fight for political and social inclusion, or on the dynamics beneath the recognition of group and gender identities, to explore how activism and artistic/literary productions challenge received identity boundaries and accepted social and cultural hierarchies.

Bringing together recognition and transcodification/transculturality, the book deconstructs crystalized and codified categories and celebrates the crossing of boundaries.

Citare in Italian means both to cite and to quote. Citazione means both citation and quotation. This volume, with many discussions of annotations or marginal notes (postils), aims to tease out one of the principal threads of the over-arching theme of what might be termed ‘Lost and Found in Translation’ with regard to Early Modern Architecture. Citation of texts in relation to Early Modern architectural design, treatise writing and theory, has long been studied, but mostly in ways which have never clearly distinguished between three important but different terms: mindset, citation and quotation. This volume charts citation from Filarete and ancient descriptions of Near Eastern Architecture, to difficulties in understanding Vitruvius, and Lost and found in Fra Giocondo’s Vitruvius. The investigation then broadens to Tracing Renaissance Italian Architectural Books in colonial Mexico and an examination of reverse ekphrasis and Early Modern Architecture. It then turns to twisted words and borrowed wisdom: misleading citation in Scamozzi’s Idea dell’architettura universale (1615), before heading East to discuss formats and functions of large-scale calligraphy in late-Ming and Qing-period China and the reconstruction of architectural spaces. Turning to Quotation, the investigation begins with Pirro Ligorio, the ‘Megala’ ship and the Cortile del Belvedere, and invention, imitation and reiteration: the case of Bramante’s Palazzo Caprini and its progeny. Then follows Quoting from memory: centralized models and basilica systems in early counter-reformation Venice, followed by ‘Borrominismo’ in eighteenth century Lisbon, and old form with new function: Villa Emo–Amtshaus Wörlitz, and concludes with found and reshaped in translation: architectural models between centre and periphery. An important reading for anybody interested in Early Modern Architecture.

What is the connection between philosophical enquiries and storytelling in contemporary narrative? Is it possible to outline some features of a so-called philosophical fiction in Western literature throughout the last two centuries? This book aims to provide a plural answer, hosting extensive essays by seven young researchers coming from different fields (Theory of literature, German, American, Russian and Italian contemporary literature, history and evolution of the essayistic form). A short The volume is addressed to all those with a strong interest in both evolution of philosophical speech and history of the novel and has a strong vocation to promote interdisciplinarity in literary studies.

This book brings together papers from a conference that took place in the city of L'Aquila, 4–6 April 2019, to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the earthquake that struck on 6 April 2009. Philosophers and scientists from diverse fields of research debated the problem that, on 6 April 1922, divided Einstein and Bergson: the nature of time.

For Einstein, scientific time is the only time that matters and the only time we can rely on. Bergson, however, believes that scientific time is derived by abstraction, even in the sense of extraction, from a more fundamental time. The plurality of times envisaged by the theory of Relativity does not, for him, contradict the philosophical intuition of the existence of a single time. But how do things stand today? What can we say about the relationship between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of time in the light of contemporary science? What do quantum mechanics, biology and neuroscience teach us about the nature of time?

The essays collected here take up the question that pitted Einstein against Bergson, science against philosophy, in an attempt to reverse the outcome of their monologue in two voices, with a multilogue in several voices.

This is the second volume on the mechanisms of oral communication in ancient Greece, focused on epic poetry, a genre with deep roots in orality. Considering the critical debate about orality and its influence on the composition, diffusion and transmission of the archaic epic poems, the survey provides a reconsideration and a reassessment of the traces of orality in the archaic epic poetry, following their adaptation in the synchronic and diachronic changes of the communicative system. Combining the methods of cognitive science, and the historical and literary analysis of the texts, the research explores the complexity of the literary message of the Greek epic poetry, highlighting its position in a system of oral communication. The consideration of structural and formal aspects, i.e. the traces of orality in the narrative architecture, in the epic diction, in the meter and the formulaic system, as well as the vestiges of the mixture of orality and writing, allows to reconstruct a dynamic frame of communicative modalities which influenced and enriched the archaic epic poetry, providing it with expressive potentialities destined to a longlasting permanence in the history of the genre.

The volume deals with the mechanisms of the oral communication in the ancient Greek culture. Considering the critical debate about orality, the analysis of the communicative system in a predominantly oral-aural ancient society implies a reassessment and a deep reconsideration of the traces which orality embedded in the texts transmitted to us. In particular, the focus is on the 'cultural message', a set of information which is processed and transmitted vertically as well as horizontally by a living being, so to be differently from a genetically encoded information, a culturally defined process. The survey intertwines different approaches: the methodologies of cognitivism, biology, ethology, to analyze the embrional processes of the cultural messages, and the tools of historical and literary analysis, to highlight the development of the cultural messages in the traditional knowledge, their codification, transmission, and evolutions in the dialectics between orality and writing. The reconstructed pattern of the mechanisms of cultural messages in a prevailing oral-aural system cast a light on a shadowy aspect of a sophisticated communication system that has long influenced European culture.

This collection aims to renew our perspective on adaptation and intermedial processes by thinking of them in terms of codes rather than media. As a result, the notion of transcodification emerges as a crucial tool in order to study the circulation of semiotic and aesthetic resources across disciplines, knowledge systems, and cultures. Defined as the transfer of meaning-making potential from one semiotic domain to another, transcodification both includes and transcends intermediality, thus dramatically expanding the scope and research potential of adaptation and intermedial studies.
The essays collected here apply this framework to an incredibly wide variety of objects and issues, from the relationship between art and historiography to the visual culture of finance, from contemporary approaches to ekphrasis to the hidden labor of screenwriters, from modern surveillance to digital comics, from fansubbing to the reception of the classical world in the digital age, from medieval theater to the role of videogames in the “war on terror”.
By fostering dialogue between radically different disciplines, the book offers a unique approach to the study of semiotic interrelations across the most diverse aspects of human culture.