Distributed for UCL Press
Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati
Adventures into the Errant Familiar
Selected Essays and Dialogues is a collection of translations of Italian essayist Gianni Celati’s theoretical and musing work from the late 1960s to the present. Its topics range from environmental perception and archaeological conceptions of historical knowledge to street theater, writing, photography, cinema, and translation. The book provides a framework of key literary, theoretical, and artistic movements of the past fifty years, as well as a guide for English-language readers to place Celati’s work in historical, cultural, and biographical contexts.
Celati’s fondness for the unexpected ordinary tempts readers to wander and become lost in the webs of his daring thoughts. Indeed, a genial adventurousness can be found within all of his writings collected here, driven by an affectionate and light-hearted engagement with the surrounding world. This collection offers a taste of his adventures of the mind and body, led by a lithe sensitivity not restricted to the so-called high arts or letters, but also very much engaged with the everyday lives, places, and tales we all constantly share.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 ‘One-Page Autobiography’
2 ‘Speech as Spectacle’
3 ‘Gianni Celati and Italo Calvino, Correspondence (Comiche)’
‘Surface Stories’
4 ‘The Virtues of the Gorilla’
5 ‘The Archaeological Bazaar’
6 ‘The Comic Body in Space’
7 ‘Counter-information on Power. On Foucault’s Discipline and Punish’
8 ‘On the Era of this Book’ and ‘Alice and the Occurrence…’ from Displaced Alice: Collective Materials (on Alice) for a Survival Manual
9 ‘Soft Objects’
10 ‘Adventure at the End of the Twentieth Century’
11 ‘Fictions to Believe in, An Example’
12 ‘A System of Stories about the External World’
13 ‘Desert Crossings’
14 ‘Translating Jack London’
15 ‘The Frontal View: Antonioni, L’Avventura and Waiting’
16 ‘Comments on a Natural Theatre of Images’
17 ‘Swift, Prophetic Treatise on the Modern Age’
18 ‘The Sentiment of Space’ 19 ‘Introductory Note’, Narrators of the reserves
20 ‘Threshold for Luigi Ghirri: How to Think in Images’
21 ‘In Praise of the Tale’
22 ‘Last Contemplators’
23 ‘Italo’s Death’
24 ‘Two Years of Study at the British Museum’
25 ‘Rewriting, Retelling, Translating’
26 ‘Heading to the River’s Mouth’
27 From ‘In Zurich with Joyce’
28 ‘On Jonathan Swift and the Development of Aliens’
29 ‘The Disorder of Words: On a Translation of Joyce’s Ulysses’
Bibliography of Original Source Texts
Selected Bibliography
Index