Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A key figure in the political and cultural debate of the Italian left, Rossana Rossanda was born in Pula in Istria (now Croatia) in 1924. A few years later she moved to Venice where she spent most of her childhood. Her family gave her a lay education. In the early 1940s she attended the University in Milan, where she met Antonio Banfi, an anti-fascist activist and professor of history of philosophy and aesthetics. Attending his courses, she engaged in studies and researches on Karl Marx's works, read through the lens of Italian “historicism.” In the same period, the impending World War II led her to embrace the cause of militant anti-fascism and the Italian Resistance, together with her university professor. After the Italian liberation from fascism in 1945, she joined the Italian Communist Part (PCI) and was later put in charge of its cultural department. In 1963 she was elected deputy to the Italian parliament. In 1968 she wrote her first successful book, L'anno degli studenti (The Students' Year), but in the summer of that year, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia , she developed a critical position toward the imperialist policies of the USSR and tried to shift her attention to the forms of class struggle in the West. In June 1969 she founded and, with Lucio Magri, became co-editor of the political review H Manifesto , which was then in opposition to the ideas ... log in or subscribe to read full text