italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
Dear all,
it gives me great pleasure to announce the publication of a new book, which I'm sure will be of interest to many list members.
Screening Religions in Italy by Clodagh Brook investigates the place of religion in the cinema and television of 21st-century Italy. It addresses two main questions: how Italian filmmaking reflects and constructs the continuing position of religion in the public sphere and why religion persists on Italian screens. It assesses how religions, including Islamic minorities, access the public sphere in Italy (or not), looking at the structures of the cinema and television industries, as well as the how the values and iconography which dominate filmmaking forge paths for certain religions, especially, of course, Catholicism, to the public sphere.
Details can be found here:
https://utorontopress.com/us/screening-religions-in-italy-2
Please see below further information about the book and its author.
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Screening Religions in Italy: Contemporary Italian Cinema and Television in the Post-Secular Public Sphere by Clodagh Brook, University of Toronto Press, 2019.
Religion has had been foundational in shaping Italy. Home to the Vatican State, the Italian peninsula is the religious centre for one billion Catholics globally. It is also increasingly home to those of other faiths, especially Islam. Italy’s development as a contemporary post-secular and multi-religious society is fraught and fascinating.
The recent resurgence of religious discourse is a sign of what German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, has defined as the post-secular condition. Habermas and others have questioned what most people in the West had, up to a few years ago, taken for granted: the unstoppable forward march of secularization and the subsequent marginalization of religion. Instead, one of the greatest global fault-lines in the contemporary world – the divide between absolutist, extremist Islamic faith and liberal, but Christian-inflected, secular values – has religious identity at its core. The first book-length study to examine religion in contemporary Italian cinema and television, Screening Religions in Italy spans genres such as horror, comedy, hagiopics, and TV fiction, and explores both commercial and art-house filmmaking. In a discussion of films and television series that range from Moretti’s Habemus Papam to Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, the author identifies two key issues: how Italian filmmaking constructs the continuing position of religion in the public sphere and why religion persists on Italian screens.
The author
Clodagh Brook is an Associate Professor of Italian. She was educated at Oxford University (D Phil) and at University College, Dublin (BA and MA). She is currently Head of the Italian Department and Associate Vice Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Trinity College, Dublin. She has published widely on Italian cinematic and cultural production, including monographs on Bellocchio (Marco Bellocchio: The Cinematic I in the Political Sphere, UTP, 2010), and on Eugenio Montale (Oxford University Press, 2002), co-edited books on politics and media (Cultures of Opposition under Berlusconi (Continuum 2009), Transmedia(Mimesis, 2014), and numerous articles. She was Principal Investigator (and continues to provide the intellectual leadership) for the AHRC-funded project, Interdisciplinary Italy: Interart/Intermedia (www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org) which explores relations, and boundaries, between the arts and media.
Prof. Ruth Glynn,
University of Bristol
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