An overview of the early Italian novel might well begin with the observation that Italian writers never felt too comfortable with the novel as a literary form before the nineteenth century. Therefore, many literary historians came to the inevitable conclusion that the birth of the Italian novel takes place in 1827 with Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi. Such an assessment makes sense only if it implies that detecting a unified pattern of development in the Italian premodern novel leading to the “rise”of the “modern” novel would be very difficult. To put it another way, the Renaissance Boccaccian novella does not “evolve” into the bourgeois novel of the eighteenth century. In the Italian canon, there is no Astrée after Sannazaro's Arcadia, and the historical novel of the seventeenth century does not constitute an antecedent of the early nineteenth-century historical novel. Yet so vast a literary output cannot fail to stimulate the curiosity of the reader interested in the history of the genre and in the relationship between literature and the society that produced it.

The fourteenth century

Giovanni Boccaccio is generally considered to be the founder of modern narrative as it emerged in postmedieval Europe. He stands out in the history of modern European culture as a reviver of the literary tradition, of the pastoral allegory and biography as well as the various forms of fiction: the novella, the longer narrative poem, and long prose fiction. Just as his friend Francesco Petrarca created the language of the new lyric, so Boccaccio, gathering up the entangled but vigorous threads of the medieval tale and novel, established the types and prose style of European narrative.

Theology is the determination, delineation, and articulation of the beliefs and values, as well as the meaning of the symbols, of a particular faith community. The task of Christian theology is to set forth what might be called the “mosaic of beliefs” that lies (or should lie) at the heart of the Christian community. This mosaic consists of the interlocking doctrines that together comprise the specifically Christian way of viewing the world.

Although Christian theology has always been “church dogmatics” in this sense, the “churchly” aspect of “church dogmatics” has become even more crucial in the postmodern context. In a world characterized by the presence of a plurality of communities, each of which gives shape to the identities of its participants, the Christian community takes on a new and potentially profound theological importance as the people who embody a theological vision that sees the divine goal for humankind as that of being the bearers of the image of the God who is triune.

In 1982 a group of American theologians, schooled in philosophy of religion (particularly the death-of-God thinking from Hegel and Nietzsche and the linguistic turn taken by Wittgenstein and Heidegger) encountered the work of Jacques Derrida and saw the potential of deconstruction for furthering their project of announcing the end of theology. A book emerged, Deconstruction and Theology, edited by Thomas Altizer, featuring essays by the most prominent of them: Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Robert Scharlemann, Charles Winquist, Max Meyer, and Carl Raschke. In the same year Mark C. Taylor published his full length study Deconstructing Theology, to be followed in a collection under his editorship Deconstruction in Context in 1986. Of course, Derrida's work (along with Paul de Man's) was taking the American literary world by storm from the mid seventies when English translations of his work began to appear. And the influence of Derrida's thinking on those schooled in hermeneutics, and primed for the next move that might be made following Gadamer's Truth and Method, was beginning to be felt earlier than 1982.

The term “postmodern” raises a number of vexing critical questions, not the least of which concerns the meaning of the “modernism ” to which postmodernism must logically be related. Italian literary history departs, in some respects, from the standard treatment of twentieth-century literature in other European literatures and in American criticism because of an important current of Italian critical thought that employed the term il decadentismo (decadentism) to define what other literary cultures would have called modernist. The major authors of Western modernism, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, or Jorge Luis Borges (to mention only a few) were less influential forces in Italian culture before World War II than elsewhere, although in the postwar period their works were widely read, imitated, and analyzed. While, in the past, Italian critics sometimes overlooked connections between native writers today regarded as modernists (Luigi Pirandello, Eugenio Montale, Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda) and their counterparts in the rest of Europe or America, contemporary critics, both within Italy and abroad, have been unanimous in regarding Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco as postmodernist masters. Their works enjoy enormous audiences throughout Europe, the United States, and the English-speaking world, and they have achieved this widespread popularity in large measure because they have been perceived as exemplary expressions of the postmodern bent in contemporary culture, a cosmopolitan literary style that seems to transcend national boundaries.

Life

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a wealthy native of Stagira, a Greek coastal city on the Chalcidice peninsula of Macedonia, not far from modern Thessaloniki. His father, who died in Aristotle's childhood, was physician to the Macedonian king. In 367 Aristotle was sent to Athens, at the age of seventeen, to complete his education at Plato's school, the Academy. Instead, he remained there until Plato's death in 347, studying, writing and lecturing over a wide range of philosophical subjects having roots in Plato's own work - the theory of rhetorical argument and persuasion, logical theory, ethics, and questions of metaphysics, among others. At Plato's death he, together with Xenocrates, another of the leading members of the school, left Athens for the north-western coast of Asia Minor, where the local ruler Hermias (whose daughter Aristotle married - later the mother of his two children) established them at the town of Assos. Aristotle continued his work there, and afterwards for a time at Mytilene on the nearby island of Lesbos, where he apparently first collaborated with the younger philosopher Theophrastus: it appears that his most important researches on sea animals date from this period. In 343 King Philip II of Macedon called him (accompanied by Theophrastus and others) to the royal court to become tutor to his son Alexander (‘the Great’).

The first question to be posed in an essay addressing Lacan's Marxism must be: can such a thing be said to exist? In the absence of any profession of socialist allegiance on Lacan's part, and given his notorious allergy to institutionalized political commitment, the relevance of Marxist doctrine or methodology to Lacan's theory cannot be presumed but must rather be interrogated and qualified. Do those elements of Marxist theory - individual concepts and broader paradigms alike – that are scattered in Lacan's discourse find their way back out again with all their force and defining political impetus?

Slavoj Žižek , the figure most often identified with a combined Marxist-Lacanian approach to cultural politics, has acknowledged the need to dispel some uncertainty on this point. It is worth exploring in some detail the roots of what may be called Žižek ’s “Lacano-Marxism,” since one may safely assert that it is because of the strong impact and infectious charm of Žižek ’s many books that Lacan’s name has remained so popular in English-speaking countries and has moreover weathered the anti-theoretical storm of the nineties. After having explored Žižek ’s unique visibility as a self-appointedMarxist Lacanian, I want to then go back in time and engage with Louis Althusser, whose unorthodox, not to say heterodox tendencies in the sixties were all but confirmed, in the eyes of the French Communist Party, by his dalliance with the “decadent” enterprise of psychoanalysis.

The two most popular works of Italian fiction written between Italian Unification (1860-70) and World War I were Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, 1883) by Carlo Collodi, the pen name of Carlo Lorenzini (1826-90); and Cuore (Heart, A Schoolboy's Journal, 1886) by Edmondo De Amicis (1846-1908). The poles between which both books shuttle are the home (family) and school, although in the case of Collodi's ambivalently constructed protagonist (the boy/marionette) there is much straying. It cannot be surprising that these should be the institutions invested with the greatest authority and responsibility in creating a “new” citizenry for the new nation which until then had been a land made up of various regions, each of which had its own dialect and customs. The slogan of the time was “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” The church of Rome was not prepared to participate in a state it felt had usurped much of its authority and land, but religious values were essential to character-building, the goal of the age. It is well to remember also that, except in some of Italy’s northern regions and Tuscany, literacy was a rarity. And the values and virtues being proclaimed were in the cause of a productive, middle-class ethic. The “popular” fiction and culture in general referred to here were created, primarily at least, for and by Italy’s bourgeoisie, not for and by peasants and the proletariat, although under the impulse of verismo of varying degrees it did not shy away from depicting the latter classes, sometimes in a way meant to point to supposed virtues that the petite bourgeoisie might embrace.

Since we are talking about Lacan, therefore about psychoanalysis, I will begin with a personal reminiscence, almost a confession. It could borrow its title from Milan Kundera's novel The Joke, for it all started with a silly practical joke. In the fall of 1968, when I was a new student at the Ecole normale supérieure, I overheard friends preparing one of the idiosyncratic pranks that used to be one of the privileges of that French cathedral of learning. They had espied with some nervous envy how the famous psychoanalyst would be driven to the school's entrance to emerge with a beautiful woman on his arm and make his way to the office of Louis Althusser, who was then the Ecole's administrative secretary. By contrast with the nondescript student style of the school, Lacan was known to draw crowds from the city's select quarters, a medley of colorful intellectuals, writers, artists, feminists, radicals, and psychoanalysts. It was easy to rig the speakers connected with his microphone. A tape consisting of animal squeals and pornographic grunts had been rapidly put together. Now was the moment to see how the master and his audience would react to this insolence; not having had time to finish lunch, still clutching an unfinished yogurt pot, I followed the conspirators. We arrived late (our X-rated tape was to be aired close to the end of the seminar) into a crowded room, in which dozens of tape recorders had been set on the first row of tables in front of a little stage. There Lacan was striding and talking to the forest of microphones; behind him was a blackboard on which was written: “The essence of psychoanalytic theory is a discourse without words.” Clearly, he was begging for our rude interruption! Precisely as I entered the room, Lacan launched into a disquisition about mustard pots, or to be precise, the mustard pot, l'pot d'moutard'. His delivery was irregular, forceful, oracular.

The experience of reading a book written in Italian but conceived in a foreign cultural world is unusual in modern Italian literature. Such an experience, normal in the anglophone, francophone, and the Spanish-speaking world, has become less rare in the past decade thanks to a number of books written, often in cooperation with authors of Italian birth, by foreigners who have immigrated to Italy. Most of these books are in diary form and document the autobiographical struggles of Africans or East Europeans who travel throughout Italy or make Italy their new home. This phenomenon is in the process of evolution, but the literature it has already generated offers the promise of producing a body of work of great interest. Because of the current growth of the multicultural population in Italy, this kind of literature is destined to become a fixture of twenty-first-century Italian culture.

Even though the literary output of these new immigrants might not yet have created an enormous body of work or vast outpourings of scholarly analysis, the cultural impact of this new wave of non-Italian migratory tales written in Italian has provoked rethinking about the concepts of migration, exile, and frontier literature in Italian culture. Up to the 1990s, Italian scholarship had rarely perceived the themes of migration and frontier as two faces of the same literary phenomenon.

Compare the following two questions, both of which greatly exercised ancient Greek and Roman thinkers:

1. 1 What is a good human life?

2. 2 Why isn't the earth falling?

They appear about as different as any two questions could be. The first is one that most of us continue to consider important today. The second is not a question we are likely even to think worth asking: however little physics we know, we know enough to realize that the question itself rests on false suppositions.

Despite this and other contrasts, those who manage to get inside the subject – Greek and Roman philosophy – to which this book aims to provide an entry route should find that the two questions come to exercise an equal fascination. They may even find that the two of them have more in common than at first appears, as I shall suggest below.

The book of nature is written in a mathematical script. Human nature finds itself called upon to decipher this text, and it is perhaps more deeply implicated in this activity than a mere external reader would be. The idea that there is a text outside that demands attentive and renewed reading fails to do justice to the complexities postulated by Freud, for whom the unconscious is equipped with its own inner text. Any reading that is to be done then presupposes the existence of a relation between these interiorities and an exterior that they are engaged with. There is a question here of giving an interpretation of a text, but there is also a question of whether a mathematician may be needed in order to address these questions of exterior, interior, and the frontier between them.

The psychoanalyst is called on to be a poet – or, as Jacques Lacan occasionally phrased it, to be a poem. Analytical work, at the same time, “scientifically” purifies the subject. Lacan held to both these opinions, and he was not alone in the analytical movement in wanting to bridge the gap between them. Such themes were present from the beginnings of psychoanalysis. Freud put forward claims on both sides of this divide; on the one hand, he described how words have a magical power, and on the other, he suggested that psychoanalysis can be formalized as a science.

INTRODUCTION

The last years have seen a shift in the winds of culture. The approaching storm - or the dissipation of the existing storm clouds, depending on your perspective - has been widely heralded as the “postmodern shift.” Postmodernity has as many interpretations as it has advocates and critics put together, which renders it impossible to begin a chapter of this sort with a pithy definition. But all (or at least most) of its descriptions exhibit two important features: a thoroughgoing critique of the “modern project” (when and what that was being a matter of deep contention), and an insistence that the solution to the problems of modernity lies not in a return to premodern questions and answers, but rather in moving beyond the modern project to something radically new and different.

Certain stereotypes notwithstanding, theologians are highly sensitive to shifts in the wind. As Walter Lowe points out in chapter 14 of this volume, Karl Barth recognized the exhaustion of the “modern” German intellectual projects (Hegel, neo-Kantianism, von Harnack) already in the opening of the twentieth century and proclaimed an anti-modernist (and in that sense, at least, postmodern) program. With no less insight, Paul Tillich put his finger on the pulse of the postwar intellectual–existential climate when he published his highly successful The Courage to Be (1953) and began formulating his mature systematic theology. One detects a similar cultural acuity in the death-of-God movement, in Langdon Gilkey’s naming and reaping of whirlwinds, and the diverse forms of liberation theology that have left an indelible impression on theology at the turn of the millennium.

One way of telling the story of modernity and postmodernity is by charting the relationship, often volatile and sometimes violent, between Scripture and tradition. At stake is the nature and locus of divine authority: does it reside in the canon or in the community?

In one sense, the postmodern condition would seem to be a swing back to the authority of tradition, in particular, to the authority of interpretative traditions. On the other hand, the postmodern situation brings to light certain reductionistic tendencies in thinking about language and literature. Some look to the later Wittgenstein as indicating a new way of thinking about language. Interestingly, Wittgenstein's emphasis on language use correlated to forms of life brings back the very Scripture/tradition dynamic in a postmodern key. For what is tradition if not a form of life to know and glorify God? And what is Scripture if not a certain use of language to name God?

SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION IN MODERNITY: FROM REFORMATION TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Protestantism: the eclipse of tradition?

From one perspective, the Reformation was a victory of the Scripture principle over ecclesial tradition. The reality, however, is more complex, for the Reformers did not object to the use of the church fathers or deny that the Bible ought to be interpreted in the context of the life of the ongoing church. What they rejected was rather the elevation of noncanonical, and hence human, traditions that were thought to supplement the revelation given in Scripture. The Reformers’ so-called “Scripture principle” identified the Bible as God’s word in human speech, while the notion of the priesthood of all believers handed Scripture to the laity and encouraged them to interpret it for themselves.

Jacques Lacan is a thinker and clinician whose apprehension of recording and broadcast media allows him to live on posthumously with the pop star status he gained in post-war Parisian intellectual life. He is not only a serious rival to the official heirs of Freud, but has emerged as a rival of that other superstar, Jean-Paul Sartre. The history of his exclusion (or excommunication) from the International Psychoanalytic Association, and his subsequent notoriety is crucial for the theorization of his reception in Anglophone academia: there is an aura of transgression, or the smell of sulfur surrounding the sovereignty of his actions and thinking. His insistence on the signifier is key to an undoing of a humanist hermeneutics that swaddled more orthodox receptions of Freud. In addition, Lacan's interest in cybernetics seems to anticipate the plague of questions raised by technological progress. The reactions to his deviation from psychoanalytic orthodoxies revealed the religious fervor with which the guardians of Freudianism tried to protect their territory. Today, Lacan's work continues to teach us lessons, not only about psychoanalysis, but about media and history as well.

Playing the master on the airwaves allowed for Lacan to perform as both charlatan and master – consider his performance in Télévision: his analytic attitude seemed like a posture of pure provocation of his more conservative colleagues. In his pedagogical performances, Lacan demonstrated that all forms of inter-subjectivity, whether mediated by transference or other forms of telecommunication, are based upon a bewitching mirage of reciprocity or mutual understanding.

Why speak of the “mirror stage” as an archive that has been obliterated? The reason is both simple and complex. First, there is no existing original of the lecture on this subject delivered by Jacques Lacan at the 16th congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), which took place in Marienbad between the second and eighth of August 1936. After he had been speaking for minutes, Lacan was interrupted by Ernest Jones, the chairman, who considered that this French participant, of whom he had never heard, was exceeding the time allotted to each speaker. At this time, the rule regulating the duration of each spoken contribution was already being applied at international conferences. Lacan, who regarded the interruption as a humiliation, quit the conference and went on to the Olympic Games in Berlin to see at close quarters what a sporting event manipulated by the Nazis was like. One might well see some connection between the forceful manner in which Jones interrupted Lacan's talk and Lacan's notorious invention of “variable sessions” marked by radical brevity and a sense of deliberate suspension. All his life, Lacan would struggle with an impossible control over time, as evinced by the masterful analysis presented in his 1945 essay on “logical time.”

Introduction: neoclassicism

In his homage to Stravinsky, Milan Kundera explains that Stravinsky's experience of forced emigration triggered a change in his musical style no less reactionary than irrevocable. Also an émigré, Kundera sees emigration as a wound – the ‘pain of estrangement: the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign’. Stravinsky, like any émigré artist, suffered estrangement from the ‘subconscious, memory, language – all the understructure of creativity’ formed in youth. Leaving the place to which his imagination was bound caused a kind of ripping apart. Kundera believes that emigration erased Russia for Stravinsky. After that, his homeland became the historical landscape of music, and his compatriots were the composers that populate that history. Kundera describes the advent of Stravinsky's neoclassical style as a metaphorical recognition – and achievement – of a new home with the ‘classics’ of European music:

‘A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country – he can have only one country – and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life.’ These words were uttered by Stravinsky at a banquet held in his honour in Moscow on 1 October 1962. The eighty-year-old composer had returned to his homeland after an absence of fifty years. In the intervening period he had acquired first French and then American citizenship, and developed an increasingly hostile attitude towards his native country and its culture. This hostility had been fully reciprocated by the Soviet musical establishment. Now, as the guest of the Union of Composers, Stravinsky was seemingly performing a complete volte-face by wholeheartedly embracing his Russian identity. For Robert Craft, his assistant and amanuensis, this was nothing short of a ‘transformation’, and he was astonished, not only to witness Stravinsky and his wife suddenly taking ‘pride in everything Russian’, but to observe at close hand how ‘half a century of expatriation’ could be ‘forgotten in a night’. Craft's diary of the famous visit contains many revealing comments about a composer who was a master of mystification.

Like his younger contemporary Vladimir Nabokov, with whom there are some intriguing biographical parallels, Stravinsky did not care to be pigeon-holed or linked with any particular artistic trend after he left Russia. Above all, because of a sense of cultural inferiority which stemmed from the fact that Russia's musical tradition was so much younger than that of other European nations, he came to disavow his own musical heritage, which necessitated embroidering a complex tapestry of lies and denials.