IGS members are strongly encouraged to write to the editors about those aspect of their current work and projects which would be of interest to the readers of the Newsletter. The editor has requested and received the following information from two current IGS members.
Maurice Finocchiaro, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, has made many contributions to Gramscian studies. His latest two books deal directly and extensively with Gramsci:
Gramsci ciritico e la critica (Rome: Armando, 1988). This is a critical examination of some key
critiques by Gramsci found in the Prison Notebooks, and some of the critiques of Gramsci by some major modern authors. The former involve Croce's philosophy, Bukharin's sociology, Machiavelli's politics, and Mosca's political theory; the latter critiques involve the works of Luciano Pellicani, Joseph Femia, Walter Adamson, and Leonardo Paggi. What ties the two parts together is the concern to use Gramsci and Gramscian studies for the development of some ideas in the general methodology of criticism.
Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
This is a critical examination of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and a historical illustration of the nature of dialectical thought. A key element of the deep structure of the Notebooks is the concept of dialectic, understood methodologically as a way of thinking which is essentially identical to the approach discernible in Croce, Bukharin, and Hegel. These three thinkers provide the substantive content for Gramsci's use of a dialectical approach to the problem of evaluating Marxism. The examination of all four thinkers is itself an exercise in the dialectical methodology of textual interpretation. [END PAGE 40]
Renate Holub has recently completed a book which will be published in June 1992 by Routledge in England and the United States. In this book, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, Holub seeks to reclaim Gramsci from classical Marxism, and instead places him in the broad European critical context[!]alongside the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and sociolinguistics. This book points to Gramsci's affinities with the cultural theories inscribed in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Bloch, Brecht, Benjamin). It also establishes affinities between Gramsci's linguistic and phenomoenological forms of knowledge. Placing Gramsci in this broader context evokes the immense conceptual and methodological complexity of his work, a complexity Holub discusses in terms of "differential pragmatics." It is this very complexity which is, the author claims, relevant today when constructing our own critical theories. [END PAGE 41]