Pisa University Press eBooks

‘A Green Thought in a Green Shade’: Immaginario letterario e ambiente. E-book. Formato PDF Aa.Vv.   -  Pisa University Press, 2020  - 

I diciannove saggi raccolti in questo volume, in forma ampliata e rivisitata, offrono una testimonianza dello spessore culturale e dell’intensità del dibattito che hanno caratterizzato le giornate del convegno internazionale ‘A Green Thought in a Green Shade’: Immaginario letterario e ambiente (Bagni di Lucca, 8-10 settembre 2017). Ospitato dalla Fondazione culturale ‘Michel de Montaigne’ e coordinato da un gruppo di accademici italiani e stranieri, l’evento ha fornito le basi teoriche e gli elementi ispiratori di uno studio aggiornato che intende far luce sia su fenomenologie storico-letterarie di varie epoche, sia su realtà territoriali, linguaggi architettonici e cifre del patrimonio botanico e paesaggistico.  Le molteplici suggestioni legate al topos del ‘pensiero verde in una verde ombra’, eco di un celebre verso di Andrew Marvell, sono state recepite all’interno di una cornice epistemica che, nel dialogare con il passato, non manca di focalizzare l’attenzione sulle istanze della contemporaneità, dalla crisi ambientale alla sensibilità ecologica che permea il nostro quotidiano e innerva l’ambito ormai istituzionalizzato dei Green Studies.  

Worlds of words: complexity, creativity, and conventionality in english language, literature and culturevolume II - Literature and culture. E-book. Formato PDF Aa.Vv.   -  Pisa University Press, 2019  - 

Inspired by the papers presented at the 28th biennial Conference of the Italian Association of English Studies, held in Pisa in September 2017, the essays collected in the Literature Section of this volume intend to contribute to a reflection on complexity and creativity in literary works, focusing both on the diachronic development of these two concepts through different ages and literary periods, and on their synchronic occurrence within texts and across genres. The wide time span covered by the essays, ranging from the early modern period to the contemporary, enables an extensive charting, as well as an inclusive and in-depth understanding, of an extremely rich phenomenology. The papers included in the Culture Section draw together multiple strands which expatiate on a variety of issues and fields, such as the far-reaching project and latest developments of Cultural Studies, trauma and ethnicity, globalisation and cyberspace, the politics of intermediality and communication patterns in social networks. An up-to-date and stimulating cartography is thus offered in which the paradigms of complexity, creativity and conventionality are crucially addressed and investigated in connection with their material contexts.

Worlds of words: complexity, creativity, and conventionality in english language, literature and cultureVol. I - Language. E-book. Formato PDF Aa.Vv.   -  Pisa University Press, 2019  - 

The volume collects articles which discuss complexity, conventionality and creativity in the English language from perspectives as diverse as specialised discourse, language teaching and learning, language varieties, lexical creativity, stylistics, knowledge dissemination through the media and audio-visual translation. It offers a multifaceted picture of the ways in which opposing forces exerted by conventionality and creativity contribute to shaping all levels of the linguistic system. The interpretive paradigm is offered by the theory of complex systems, a rich research framework attempting to describe and explain the dynamics which emerge in the many forms of situational adaptation of natural systems. Norms and conventions are, in fact, constantly exploited and manipulated through the creative behaviour of language users. This may lead to unpredictable synchronic effects and variation and, ultimately, to diachronic innovation.