Retorica e mito in Giambattista Vico

The purpose of this thesis is to show that Vico had the constant aim, remained unaltered in time, to support the usefulness of Rhetoric. The awareness of the strength acquired by the “anti-rhetorical” movements, particularly by the Cartesians and the Logicians from Port-Royal, obliged Vico to elaborate some strategies and counter-moves that, little by little, became more and more complex and refined, till they inspired his main work, The New Science. By taking into consideration the most significant aspects of Vico’s speculation (topic, tropes, the formation of language, the development of human thought, the new conception of philology ), this work shows that they are part of a strategy worked out by the Neapolitan philosopher, in order to demonstrate the validity, the usefulness and the modernity of Rhetoric. Every aspect of Vico’s thought reaches its peak when Vico formulates his theory about myths, which he interprets as an expression of the primitive man’s necessities and demands. The point of view expressed by this doctorate thesis emphasizes that, despite the inevitable modifications that have taken place through the centuries, Vico’s thought keeps its substantial unity. So those subjects that critical literature tends to separate are, in reality, linked and unified.

Il piacere dell'annientamento. Pavese, Leucò e il mito classico

Oggetto della tesi sono i Dialoghi con Leucò, ventisette dialoghi tra dèi ed eroi del mito antico, pubblicati da Cesare Pavese nel 1947. Muovendo dai molteplici studi che negli ultimi anni si sono interessati alla raccolta e al suo rapporto col mondo classico, riconducibili nell’alveo più ampio dell’ interesse verso la dimensione intertestuale dell’opera pavesiana e in quello ancor più generale delle riscritture del mito classico all’interno della letteratura italiana, il presente lavoro intende colmare una lacuna: nonostante gli indubbi passi avanti compiuti nell’interpretazione dei Dialoghi, il panorama critico è tuttora mancante di un’analisi complessiva di tutte le tessere della raccolta, cioè uno studio che si mostri capace di integrare i risultati raggiunti sino a oggi in una cornice sistemica che includa e consideri tutti i componimenti – obiettivo specifico del lavoro qui sviluppato. L’analisi, dal taglio spiccatamente comparativo, si snoda sul duplice binario della sincronia e della diacronia: da un lato vengono chiarite le strategie di adattamento e riscrittura dell’antico, mentre, dall’altro, l’indagine è arricchita dal raffronto con altre riscritture mitiche, letterarie e non solo, nella convinzione che solo da un’analisi globale dell’opera se ne possa produrre una nuova interpretazione e che questa non possa prescindere dal confronto e dalla contaminazione con tendenze, motivi ed emersioni mitiche successive, anche non immediatamente riconducibili a Pavese.

Mitochondrial Inheritance, Mito-nuclear Coevolution, and Sex-associated Genes in Bivalve Molluscs: Transcriptomics and Molecular Evolution

Bivalvia represents an ancient taxon including around 25,000 living species that have adapted to a wide range of environmental conditions, and show a great diversity in body size, shell shapes, and anatomic structure. Bivalves are characterized by highly variable genome sizes and extremely high levels of heterozygosity, which obstacle complete and accurate genome assemblies and hinder further genomic studies. Moreover, some bivalve species presented a stable evolutionary exception to the strictly maternal inheritance of mitochondria, namely doubly uniparental inheritance (DUI), making these species a precious model to study mitochondrial biology. During my PhD, I focused on a DUI species, the Manila clam Ruditapes philippinarum, and my work was two-folded. First, taking advantage of a newly assembled draft genome and a large RNA-seq dataset from different tissues of both sexes, I investigated 1) the role of gene expression and alternative splicing in tissue differentiation; 2) the relationship across tissue specificity, regulatory network connectivity, and sequence evolution; 3) sexual contrasting genetic markers potentially associated with sexual differentiation. The detailed information for this part is in Chapter 2. Second, using the same RNA-seq data, I investigated how nuclear oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) genes coordinate with two divergent mitochondrial genomes in DUI species (mito-nuclear coordination and coevolution). To address this question, I compared transcription, polymorphism, and synonymous codon usage in the mitochondrial and nuclear OXPHOS genes of R. philippinarum in Chapter 3. To my knowledge, this thesis represents the first study exploring the role of alternative splicing in tissue differentiation, and the first study analyzing both transcriptional regulation and sequence evolution to investigate the coordination of OXPHOS genes in bivalves.