, What we know of polar expeditions coincides with a number of fictional and non fictional representations using different registers: the iconic-technical-scientific, the auto/biographical, the literary/fictional. This paper draws a comparison between texts featuring contrasting views on the character and…

In the modern age, Occidentalism as a process of signifying practices based upon the notion of “the West” has played a hegemonic role in the configuration of collective identity and alterity. The imaginary geography of “the West” has been one…

With his article Surrationalism, 1936, (now in The Rationalist Engagement), Gaston Bachelard codifies the neologism ‘surrationalism’ by which he describes his engagement in favor of a kind of rationality that rejects any closing within the dogmas of indisputable knowledge. The…

NASA astrobiologist David Morrison coined the term cosmophobia – fear of the cosmos – in response to the plethora of 2012 disaster scenarios that depict Urania, the muse of astronomy, as a wicked destroyer rather than a beautiful inspiration. The…

On several occasions, Gaston Bachelard has suggested that his poetic of elements could be extended beyond the four chemical elements, notably by increasing the specificity of the material imagination related to darkness, to the nocturne element, to the material called…

The Musée du Quai Branly features ethnological findings from four continents: Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Today scholars and experts are still debating whether in this particular museum/institution the aesthetic concern should prevail - allowing visitors to relate to…

Se questo è un uomo di Primo Levi e Una giornata di Ivan Denisovič di Aleksandr Solženicyn sono due “atti letterari” che hanno contribuito in modo significativo alla conoscenza storica del XX secolo: il primo nell’Occidente dei campi di concentramento…

The scope of the study is an analysis of Schachnovelle (The Royal Game) by Stefan Zweig, focusing on the opposition between two topics: (1) cultural x\borders and conflicts and (2) intellectual cosmopolitism. The analysis is based on a semiotic approach,…

The aim of the essay is to look back at 9/11 from the temporal perspective of 2011 and interpret it as a singularity, that is a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in…

This essay will examine anthropology museums as cultural museums from the methodological approach of Cultural Studies. Within this frame, the museum acts as a mode of conservation of material culture thus revealing its immaterial consequences. In the museum, historical memories…