Charles Burdett

Marco Santello

Loredana Polezzi

Transnational Italian Studies is specifically targeted at a student audience and is designed to be used as a key text when approaching the disciplinary field of Italian studies. It allows the study of Italian culture to be construed and practised not simply as the inquiry into a national tradition but as the study of the interaction of cultural practices both within Italy itself and in those parts of the world that have witnessed the extent of Italian mobility. The text argues that Italian culture needs to be considered in a transnational/transcultural perspective and that an understanding of linguistic and cultural translation underlies all approaches to the study of Italian culture in a global context. Contributions deploy a range of methodological approaches to understand and illustrate how language operates, how culture inhabits and constitutes public and private space, how notions of time operate within people's lives, and the multiple ways in which people experience a sense of personhood. Chapters stretch from the early modern period to the present and demonstrate how transnational Italian culture can be critically addressed through the examination of carefully chosen examples.

Transnational Italian Studies

Daniela Corbetta

Reaching for objects in our surroundings is an everyday activity that most humans perform seamlessly a hundred times a day. It is nonetheless a complex behavior that requires the perception of objects’ features, action selection, movement planning, multi-joint coordination, force regulation, and the integration of all of these properties during the actions themselves to meet the successful demands of extremely varied task goals. Even though reach-to-grasp behavior has been studied for decades, it has, in recent years, become a particularly growing area of multidisciplinary research because of its crucial role in activities of daily living and broad range of applications to other fields, including physical rehabilitation, prosthetics, and robotics. This volume brings together novel and exciting research that sheds light into the complex sensory-motor processes involved in the selection and production of reach-to-grasp behaviors. It also offers a unique life-span and multidisciplinary perspective on the development and multiple processes involved in the formation of reach-to-grasp. It covers recent and exciting discoveries from the fields of developmental psychology and learning sciences, neurophysiology and brain sciences, movement sciences, and the dynamic field of developmental robotics, which has become a very active applied field relying on biologically inspired models. This volume is a rich and valuable resource for students and professionals in all of these research fields, as well as cognitive sciences, rehabilitation, and other applied sciences.

Brain, Behavior, and Modelling Across the Life Span

Reach-to-Grasp Behavior

This book is for anyone concerned with the meaning of our journey through Life. It is the story of a young man’s encounters with a Teacher of Truth – the ever present, ever hidden Way that supports Humanity. It is a testimony of the hopes, doubts, fears, thirst for knowledge and growth of a contemporary “Seeker”, played out against the backdrop of a provincial Italian town: A young boy’s sadness at his father’s early death prompts the first, unformed questions and yearnings to understand the mystery of life A young man’s faltering steps to encounter “spirituality” through Eastern disciplines A series of “coincidences” giving rise to extra-ordinary encounters with a Teacher of Truth, hidden, yet visible, “in” but not “of” the world It is a journey towards self-discovery and the Light that is in all of us, buried by our personalities and forgotten through our distractions and indifference. It is a journey towards the true Heart that, although almost forgotten, has never stopped calling. This book is testimony to the Teaching and to the Seeker’s experiences as a disciple and friend of an extraordinary Teacher, Alfredo, who represents and upholds the profound Work of the Way.

Marco Santello

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