Search results for "George P"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Positional goods and social welfare: a note on George Pendleton Watkins’ neglected contribution
2018
Watkins's analysis of adventitious utility contains many aspects that are connected to the contemporary debate on positional goods. First, Watkins adventitious utility emerges from a process of social exclusion and can create negative externalities, in the sense that positive consumption of one individual implies negative consumption by another individual. Not only it creates negative externalities on other individuals, but it can initiate a race-to-the-bottom, where individuals waste an increasing amount of money on goods which do not possess any real utility.
Rappresentazioni vertiginose. Tre esempi: Perec, Lequeu, Douat
2022
Nel novembre del 2009 il Museo del Louvre decise di affidare a Umberto Eco la direzione di una serie di conferenze da tenere su un argomento di sua scelta. Eco scelse il tema della ‘lista’ conferendo a quella manifestazione il nome di Vertige de la liste a cui seguì un saggio dallo stesso titolo pubblicato da Bompiani. Questa breve nota prende in prestito la stessa tematica che, per via del suo carattere altamente ete-rogeneo, è in grado di coinvolgere diversi ambiti del sapere senza minimamente accennare ad esaurirsi. L’elenco, strettamente legato alla figura retorica dell’accumulazione, può infatti costituirsi di segni, parole, suoni e di qualsiasi altra forma di rappresentazione utile a …
Il Cabinet d'amateur di Georges Perec
2011
In 1979 one year after the publication of La vie mode d’emploi, George Perec wrote Cabinet d’amateur. Histoire d’un tableau, in which he tells the story of a painting belonging to the genre of the cabinet d’amateur, also known as kunst- und wunderkammer. It is a collection of different paintings, usually belonging to a rich man or a notable, portrayed (once again) in a single picture celebrating the magnificence of this more or less real collection. As for the pictorial genre, so the short novel is the celebration of the images collected by George Perec in his previous masterpiece, La vie mode d’emploi. This is why I assume this work to be referable to the genre of structural homology more …
Present Uncertainty and Looking to the Past: The Ambiguous Literary Nationalism of Putnam’s Monthly
2023
Putnam’s Monthly (1853-1857) was one of the best literary and general interest magazines in antebellum America. Besides its high quality, what made the New York-based magazine stand out was its commitment to publishing American writers and focusing on American themes at a time when, with no reliable international copyright protection in place, many periodicals in the United States were in the habit of reprinting the works of foreign (primarily British) authors, sometimes without payment. However, despite its optimistic literary nationalism, Putnam’s Monthly expressed uncertainty about the quality of contemporary American literature and, indeed, about the capacity of American society to enco…