Gramsci, Antonio

Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings

Edited [with an Introduction] by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Translated by William Boelhower

London ; Cambridge, Mass.: Lawrence & Wishart ; Harvard University Press, 1985, xvi, 448 p.

Gramsci's writings on culture have been hugely influential for western critical thinking during the last fifty years. This volume brings together a wealth of these writings, ranging from appreciations of theatre, literature and other forms of artistic production to notes that break new ground in cultural theory. Gramsci was interested in both popular and high-art culture, and the writings in this selection include his reflections on Futurism as well as the detective novel as a genre, on linguistics and journalism, on national-popular' culture and folklore. The volume's extensive introductory material and explanatory notes offer useful background information on the wider context of Gramsci's work.

Chapter 1: Proletarian Culture (pp. 16-86) This section contains early writings by Gramsci from the years 1913 to 1922, a period when 'culture' in the dominant senses attaching to the word in Italian at that time (including 'education' as well as what the jargon of idealism called 'activities of the spirit' such as philosophy, art and literature) was a large part of his routine existence.
Chapter 2: Problems of Criticism (pp. 87-135) Gramsci's prison writings (dating from 1929 to 1935 and represented in this and the remaining sections of this volume) reflect the break with immediately tactical issues imposed by his imprisonment after 1926. Their scope however remains political, since all Gramsci's theoretical and historical work in prison is linked to the problem of how to win power now that the prospect of an imminent socialist revolution is in abeyance in the West, fascism is installed in power and international capitalism is developing structurallt new characteristics and extensive ideological defences.
Chapter 3: Pirandello (pp. 136-146) In an early plan of the Prison Notebooks contained in a letter of 19 March 1927, Gramsci reports to Tania Schucht that as well as intending to work on the intellectuals, linguistics and serial literature he is going to write 'a study of Pirandello and the transformation of theatrical taste he represented and helped determine
Chapter 4: Canto X of Dante's Inferno (pp. 147-163) Gramsci planned a series of notes on the tenth canto of Dante's Inferno in his schema of 8 February 1929. Several letters to Tania record his progress with the project, the most detailed being that of20 September 1931 (L, pp. 489-93; partly in LP, pp. 208-10). The notes, contained on the first pages of Notebook 4, were written in 1931-32.
Chapter 5: Language, Linguistics and Folklore (pp. 164-195) Language and linguistics have recently come to be seen not as a marginal subject in the Prison Notebooks but as occupying a central place in their overall theoretical construction. This revaluation stems largely from the argument ofFranco Lo Piparo in Lingua intellettuali egemonia in Gramsci (Bari 1979) that Gramsci's concept of hegemony was influenced by models for describing linguistic change in terms of 'radiations of innovations' from high-prestige to lower-prestige speech communities.
Chapter 6: People, Nation and Culture (pp. 196-286) 'National-popular', with its variants ('people-nation', etc.), is a recurrent term in the Prison Notebooks and one whose meaning has been a subject of dispute. In Italy, particularly in the 1950s, it tended to become diluted into a cultural slogan and was more or less collapsed into 'neo-realism' or 'social realism' in the arts, while in the 1960s it was used by new left intellectuals as a sort ofcourtroom exhibit with which to accuse Gramsci of'populism', 'idealism' and 'intellectualism' and of having renounced an international perspective of struggle. In reality, not much of this stands up against Gramsci's texts themselves and the accusations ofpopulism and intellectualism actually identify the conceptwith two ofthe things he employs it to attack.
Chapter 7: Manzoni (pp. 287-297) Gramsci's student research into Manzoni's proposals for reforming the Italian language had focused on their limitations in terms of real national linguistic change. His view here of Manzoni's novel, The Betrothed, which had been consciously popularizing both in its language and its subject matter, as nonnational -popular is in effect the literary counterpart of that judgement, and it makes a significant contrast with Lukacs's positive view of the novel as 'the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole' (The Historical Novel, written 193617: p. 70 of the English edition, London 1962). Gramsci's approach to the novel is linked to his analysis of the caste tradition of the Italian intellectuals, the reformist nature of the Risorgimento, Catholicism and 'Brescianism' (see Section VIII). Manzoni provides him with a symptomatic illustration ofall these things.
Chapter 8: Father Bresciani's Progeny (pp. 298-341) Gramsci's coinage 'Brescianism' comes from the name of a nineteenth-century reactionary historical novelist, the Jesuit father Antonio Bresciani (1798-1862). A novel by Bresciani about Italy in 1848, L 'Ebreo di Verona ('The Jew ofVerona'), had been the subject of a scathing critical essay by Francesco De Sanctis in 1855. Exposing the author's mastery of the 'art of simulation and dissimulation', De Sanctis showed how Bresciani had presented the 1848 revolution as if it were entirely the work of fanatical conspirators and secret societies, while at the same time expropriating revolutionary language to the cause of reaction, presenting Catholicism as the 'true liberty' and calling the liberals 'libertines'. He also drew attention to the laboriously wordy elegance and fixation on form in Bresciani's style. On 10 November 1917, Gramsci printed an extract from De Sanctis's essay in II Gn·do del Popolo (reprinted in SC pp. 327-28), giving it the title 'Reaction and Revolution'. His point was to draw a parallel between Bresciani's reaction to 1848 and that of the bourgeois press to the Bolshevik revolution.
Chapter 9: Popular Literature (pp. 342-385) Gramsci had borrowed many commercially successful novels from the prison library during his thirteen-month period of incarceration in Milan in 1927-28, and in a letter to Tania of22 April 1929 he explained that they became interesting 'if one looked at them from the following angle: why are these books always the most read and the most frequently published? What needs do they satisfy and what aspirations do they fulfill? What emotions and attitudes emerge in this squalid literature, to have such wide appeal? (LP, p. 145). In the prison at Turi he wrote nearly fifty notes with the generic heading 'Popular literature', some ofwhich he then rewrote and grouped in a special notebook of 1934-35 (number 21) which he called 'Problems of Italian national culture 1: Popular literature'. Although these notes deal more or less consistently with popular literary taste, they also clearly overlap with and presuppose a number of other subjects in the Notebooks.
X JOURNALISM (pp. 386-426) Gramsci's purpose in the notes on journalism is twofold: to understand how the bourgeois press is organized and to plan the organization of a Communist press. The opening note in this section announces the double project. On the one hand Gramsci wants to see 'how the ideological structure of a dominant class is actually organized' and he concentrates on the press as its 'most prominent and dynamic part'. On the other he asks what resources an 'innovative class' - in other words the proletariat can oppose to this 'formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the dominant class' and how it can spread these resources to 'the classes that are its potential allies' (X 1).
CONCORDANCE TABLE (pp. 427-439) The following table is designed to let the reader trace each of the texts translated in this volume to an Italian source and vice versa.
INDEX (pp. 440-448)

Lingua	eng
Nomi	[author] Gramsci, Antonio [curatore] Forgacs, David [curatore] Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey [traduttore] Boelhower, William Q.
Soggetti	Cultura Proletaria Futurismo Letteratura Proletarian Culture Futurism Literature