This essay focuses on the encounter between sadness as a feeling of resistance and writing as a way to overcome it. Sadness is not such a welcome feeling in today’s society, though writing on unhappiness is an ancient gesture (as recalled by Ovidio’s famous Tristia). Indeed, as a philosophical or literary figure it represented the muse of almost every form of writing assumed by its authors as something more than the topic and the aim of narration. The author conceives the autobiographical writing of sadness both as a gestation period of the new and a way to overcome it. It also stands out as a carrier of a more thoughtful and discreet life-style and an existential alternative.

Can we know whether an ex cathedra uneasiness – that is, a teaching uneasiness which is diffucult to be expressed really exists? This is what the author wonders assuming that everything related to teachers’ uneasiness inexplicably deals with a residual space in the broad literature on school uneasiness which usually draws its attention to the student. This essay shows the outcomes of a survey carried out together with a group of teachers for disabled students and sheds light on submerging uneasiness which didactic science should necessarily give voice to.

The occasion of a research reveals an unsuspected uneasiness experienced by a considerable group of students towards the school, the classmates and the teachers themselves. The analysis of their writings opens a window onto both a world of suffered feelings, misunderstandings, disappointments towards the teachers, and the ever-lasting hopes and expectations shared by all the adolescents. It leads to discover that school experience can be a chance to grow rather than, as usually happens, a missed encounter with oneself and the others

The author seizes the chance encounter with a manuscript to pave the way for a deeply pedagogically reading of the pain of living. The recovered manuscript – written by a “tragic hero” of Southerness, that is an ordinary man who retraces his very precarious existential matters in the early twentieth-century appealing to his memory – becomes a portrayal of a Southern Italy where the uneasiness and fatigue of living were one’s daily bread. Yet, the latter can also work as a life experience of an inestimable educational value.

Every age is a conceptually multifaceted phenomenon, but the old age is the most particular one since, while appraoching, the adult perceives it as an unknown and menacing land. If it is true that our world is populated, to an ever greater extent, by the elderly it may be also true that a generalized situation of misknowledge, under-evaluation and under-utilization of the elderly person’s affective, cognitive and relational resources really exists. Instead, the author presents the workshops on memory writing (which took place within a project on the elderly’s training in some parts of Southern Italy) as a virtuous example of a renewed assumption of the old age standing out as a person’s irreducible value and a precious social resource

A non-believer dealing with a grounding issue from a perspective of a rationalist and lay culture. A pathway, which is also existential, unravelled among several readings that move around a current culturally “uncomfortable” topic: the Christian roots of Western civilization. Recognizing one of the roots of Western civilization in Christianity is not an ideological act but one of historical awareness and correctness.

The Berlin of the Weimar Republic is set on the distant background. The present is the uneasiness of the exile experienced by such Jews – but not only – women authors as Anna Seghers, Nelly Sachs, Irmgard Keun, Else Laser- Schüler, Hilde Domin, Dinah Nelken, Vicki Baum, Gina Kaus. They gave voice to the whole ambivalence of the female exile experience moving between the pain of loss, uneasiness, material needs and resistance ability. The essay focuses on the idea of exile as a fruitful condition of new cultural models in which writing turns into an essential dimension to re-discuss one’s own cultural and linguistic identity.

Both shame and guilt are negatively valenced self-conscious emotions. They are “moral” since they represent a key element of the human moral system, modelling the relationships between moral standards and moral behaviour. This paper focuses on narratives of guilt, shame and their blend, distinguishing two opposite styles of contamination and redemption. The multiple links between social scenarios, emotional regulation and prosocial behaviour are analyzed.

In the first part, the essay focuses on Tasso’s epistolary writing which reflects and expresses the poet’s uneasiness and melanchony mood. However, in his view the untouchable sphere of the literary dignitas exists – humanistically beyond the lived experience. The last part of this essay is devoted to Southern poet Isabella Morra, who entrustes the hope of a spiritual redemption of her female condition, emotionally affected by Fortune, to her beloved muses throughout the painful notes of her poetry.

The author retraces the stages of the existential uneasiness in the great philosopher’s autobiography. It unravels between a discovery of an intellectual precocity and a melancholic temperament which doesn’t provide joy, but an increasing awareness of a thoughtful genious also emerging thanks to falls and errors in the growing. It stands out as an emblematic pathway that makes the genious come closer to human fragility through uneasiness too.

In this essay the author wants to provide an overview of the most recent Italian narrative production on the issue of job precariousness. Thus, the focus is on those novels and shortstories which in the last years have made the thirty-year-old generation the main characters of the publishing scenario. This choice is due to the affirmation of narrative talents, to the primary role within the narrated plots and to the readers’ target. By making reference to some specific examples (Bajani, Desiati, Dezio, Incorvaia and Rimassa, Murgia, Candida, Parrella, Nove etc.) the attempt is to detect and define the main features of this production also taking into account the contemporary “youthful” narrative tout court.

The author explores themes, reasons and sense of uneasiness writing by an author who can be considered the emblem of a generation experiencing uneasiness in life and writing: Pier Vittorio Tondelli. Moving between biographical forays and an unconventional analysis, the essay reshapes an existential pathway marked by the pain and illusion of the salvific power in literature.

Starting from Arthur Rimbaud’s famous statement “Je est un autre”/“I is one other”, this essay provides an example of “verse schizophreny”. It is based on the Hugo Ball’s Sieben schizophrene Sonette which have been translated into Italian for the first time. The Zurich environment is evoked both as a centre of psychological and psychiatric studies and as an imaginary place of the Cabaret Voltaire where the Dada movement came from. Hugo Ball was one of its greatest leaders. His whole personal story and his linguistic inventions are marked by the awareness of the self’s lability

The coexistence of two different languages (Latin and vernacular) on the same ancient parchment and within the same ortographic system, and the co-presence of linguistic features wavering between Latin, Tuscan and Tarantino dialects (or a generally Southern), are the overt sign of a linguistic uneasiness. It was suffered from those who used to write a text in the fifteenth-century and those who have to read and interpret it nowadays. The linguistic analysis of that primitive and composite vernacular shows that the inner, or mental, condition of dialectic and often conflictual comparison among competitive models has never changed. The latter always coexist in the selective process which stands for the basis of any linguistic formulation and of any writing act.

The author distinguishes between writing 1 and writing 2: the former is business-writing which is necessarily supported by market turning a product into a selling item and (perhaps) making the writer a happy and satisfied person. Instead, writing 2 is practised by those who do not seek great success (i.e. money, fame) but, rather, communication with other fellows and a form of dialogue that may soften the uneasiness of human existence. Giancane’s proposed examples relate to this second typology whereas writings turn into a community’s hope and a proof of living in a society that seems to go towards loneliness.