Silvia Valisa, Ph.D
Paper abstract for the conference on “TECHNOLOGY AND THE PRINTED MEDIA IN ITALY BETWEEN 1870 AND 1914”
Progetto Sonzogno: A Publishing House’s History
and its Role as Cultural Mediator.
In this paper I discuss my current research on the publishing house Sonzogno.
Founded in 1861, Sonzogno embodies the new entrepreneurial spirit of late nineteenth century media industry, as well as an explicit commitment to undermine the distinction between high and low culture in the post-Unification years in Italy. I discuss the extent to which Sonzogno became an essential cultural operator between nineteenth and twentieth century in Italy. I propose a reflection on the variety and intensity of the cultural production of this publisher in years that are also fundamental for the formation of an Italian “consciousness”. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Sonzogno published books as varied as cooking manuals, Laurence Sterne’s work in Foscolo’s translation, Italian classics such as Tasso and Ariosto, and translations of contemporary French novels (Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo among others). I argue that Sonzogno, through both its periodicals and newspapers (such as “Il secolo”) and its several book series, contributed to reflect and define not only the tastes and the interests of the intellectuals of its times, but, also became a means of cultural distribution at large. I will also discuss the specificities of my research, as it is tied to a restitution of Sonzogno’s catalogue (its archives were destroyed by fire in 1970) through a collaborative, interactive work that will be developed in the form of a literary “Wiki.” The analysis of editorial data will investigate notions of canonicity and of textual transmission while exploring the impact of technologies of communication, then and now, on the life of texts.
Silvia Valisa holds a Ph.D in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
She is currently adjunct faculty at Florida State University.
Her dissertation, Dissonant Vehicles of Gender. The Ideology of Character from Alessandro Manzoni to Elsa Morante, analyzes the intersection between narrative, epistemology and gender in a selection of nineteenth and twentieth century Italian novels. Her main interests are women novelists, gender studies, theory of the novel and trauma theory. She has worked on, Neera, Colette, Sibilla Aleramo, Primo Levi, and Pier Paolo Pasolini among others.