Gramsci And Languages

In Gramsci and Languages Alessandro Carlucci explores the origins and significance of Antonio Gramsci’s interest in language, showing in particular how his experience of linguistic and cultural diversity contributed to the shaping of his intellectual and political profile.

Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony have permeated social and political theory, cultural studies, education studies, literary criticism, international relations, and post-colonial theory. The centrality of language and linguistics to Gramsci's thought, however, has been wholly neglected. In Gramsci's Politics of Language, Peter Ives argues that a university education in linguistics and a preoccupation with Italian language politics were integral to the theorist's thought. Ives explores how the combination of Marxism and linguistics produced a unique and intellectually powerful approach to social and political analysis. To explicate Gramsci's writings on language, Ives compares them with other Marxist approaches to language, including those of the Bakhtin Circle, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School, including Jürgen Habermas. From these comparisons, Ives elucidates the implications of Gramsci's writings, which, he argues, retained the explanatory power of the semiotic and dialogic insights of Bakhtin and the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School, while at the same time foreshadowing the key problems with both approaches that post-structuralist critiques would later reveal. Gramsci's Politics of Language fills a crucial gap in scholarship, linking Gramsci's writings to current debates in social theory and providing a framework for a thoroughly historical-materialist approach to language.

This anthology brings together key articles translated into English for the first time from Italian debates concerning Antonio Gramsci's writings on language and translation as central to his entire social and political thought. It includes recent scholarship by Italian, German and English-speaking scholars providing important contributions to debates concerning culture, language, Marxism, post-Marxism, and identity as well as the many fields in which Gramsci's notion of hegemony has been influential. Given the growing literature on the role of language and so-called 'global English' within process of globalisation or cultural and economic imperialism, this is a timely collection. Franco Lo Piparo is often cited as the key source for how Gramsci's university studies in linguistics is at the core of his entire political theory, and yet none of this work has been translated into English nor have the debates that it spawned. Lo Piparo's specific thesis concerning the 'non-Marxist roots' of Gramsci's originality and the critical responses to it have been almost unknown to non-Italian readers. These debates paved the way for important recent Italian work on the role of the concept of 'translation' in Gramsci's thought. While translation has become a staple metaphor in discussions of multiculturalism, globalization, and the politics of recognition, until now, Gramsci's focus on it has been undeveloped. What is at stake in this literature is more than Gramsci's understanding of language as one of the many themes in his writings, but the core of his central ideas including hegemony, culture, the philosophy of praxis, and Marxism in general. This volume presents the most important arguments of these debates in English in conjunction with the latest research on these central aspects of Gramsci's thought. The essays this volume rectify lacunae concerning language and translation in Gramsci's writings. They open dialogue and connections between Gramscian approaches to the relationships among language, culture, political economy, and historical materialism with other Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Valentin Volosinov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. It provides novel arguments concerning Gramsci's theories and the relationships among power, politics, language, consciousness, and capitalism.

This book demonstrates the continued political and theoretical relevance of Gramsci’s writing on language.

Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks offers a rich collection of studies addressing the thought of Antonio Gramsci, one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century, from a global network of scholars confronting the actuality of our ‘great and terrible’ world.

This book demonstrates the continued political and theoretical relevance of Gramsci’s writing on language.

In Gramsci's Political Thought, Carlos Nelson Coutinho offers an analysis of the evolution of the political thought of Antonio Gramsci. Focusing on central concepts of the Prison Notebooks and relating them to the history of modern political ideas, the book also demonstrates that Gramsci’s ideas continue to be relevant resources for understanding the controversies of our present time. Written by a leading Brazilian Marxist theorist, Gramsci's Political Thought provides one of the most succinct and theoretically focused introductions to the thought of Antonio Gramsci available internationally.