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…

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…

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…

, 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…

This paper means to show how British Colonialism in India was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest. In fact colonialism…

A specialist text is rich in technical terms and is complex from the morphological and syntactical point of view. A foreign student, and perhaps an Italian-speaking one too, does not have a fund of knowledge or sufficient independence and control…

Object of interest and philosophical speculation, sometimes examined as in contrast to the perception and knowledge, Imaginary has generated, in the history of thought, conflicting theories that have defined it, alternately, positive enhancer of knowledge or element disturbing element of…

The paper first focuses on the construct of popularisation and its various interpretations in the past few decades and briefly reviews the main studies that have been devoted to the analysis of the discourse of popularisation tracing the main conceptual…

Analysis of resistance groups active in the War on Terror provides case-studies for an examination of Occidentalism. Al-Qaida constructs a West both homogeneously and pejoratively in order to represent the self as a single Islamic nation under attack from a…