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• Luigi Russo: the union of science and life

  10-19

  Andrea Manganaro

  Views:

  255

  In his work as a historian and literary critic, Luigi Russo considered literature not in the perspective of the limited disciplinary knowledge, but always tended to correlate it with wider aspects of reality, history, to “make history” rather than to “know how to read”, to always connect “science” and “life”, theory and practice, study and ethi-cal-political values, according to the teaching of Francesco De Sanctis, set out in the extraordinary Neapolitan prolusion of the same name of 1872, interpreted by Russo in the monograph 1928 Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana. The work of Luigi Russo, anti-authoritarian, anti-demagogic, anti-dictatorial, can still be a point of reference for those who care about the values of culture and the polis together.

• Spiritualism and positivism in Luigi Capuana's short narrative

  Debora Bellinzani

  Views:

  267

  Luigi Capuana believed in the immortality of the soul as conceived by theosophical theories, as well as in the perceptibility of the manifestations of the spirits. At the same time, his short stories and essays reflect his faith in the positivistic approach and in experimental sciences. During a period that sees the proliferation of seances evoking spirits, Capuana writes his only four short stories that depict the perceptible manifestation of a ghost. In Creazione (1901), La evocatrice and Forze occulte (1902), and Un vampiro (1904), the spirits appear and show a noticeable originality when compared to the ones that haunt contemporary ghost stories. By examining the structure of the mystery through Freud’s “uncanny”, and by exploring the content of the stories through Capuana’s key science concepts, the analysis will demonstrate how the subtraction of mystery as well as the reflection on science create a common literary ground where Spiritism and Positivism can surprisingly coexist. On that ground, the scientific openness to the discoveries of the Twentieth Century emerges with the strength of reassuring ghosts.