Showing papers in "The Italianist in 2017"
TL;DR: Verga's verismo should be seen against the writings of the meridionalisti, the public intellectuals and political reformers in post-Unification Italy as mentioned in this paper, who argued that Verga should be viewed against the backdrop of the verismo.
Abstract: In this article, I argue that Verga's verismo should be seen against the backdrop of the writings of the meridionalisti, the public intellectuals and political reformers in post-Unification Italy c...
13 citations
TL;DR: Rohrwacher as discussed by the authors presents the coming-of-age story of a female adolescent as she unsuccessfully attempts to integrate herself into a post-modern, placeless, and post-structured world.
Abstract: Alice Rohrwacher’s debut feature film, Corpo celeste (2011), presents the coming-of-age story of a female adolescent as she unsuccessfully attempts to integrate herself into a postmodern, placeless...
8 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1947) is both the first Italian postcolonial novel and a highly complex literary work that should be acknowledged as such.
Abstract: In this article, I argue that Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1947) is both the first Italian postcolonial novel and a highly complex literary work that should be acknowledged as...
7 citations
TL;DR: The post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce has been examined in this article, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism.
Abstract: This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty, Italians increasingly dissented from Croce, but they remained more wedded to Crocean thought—and in particular to Crocean historicism—than has often been argued. Like their predecessors in previous generations, post-war Italian intellectuals positioned themselves dialogically, in constant conversation with Croce’s hegemonic philosophy. The antecedents of their reaction against Crocean historicism can therefore be identified in earlier responses to Croce’s thought, and in this essay I examine two such responses: those of Antonio Gramsci and Renato Serra. I also examine the contemporary resonances of the (partial) anti-Crocean turn, exemplified by a consequential 1992 debate over Holocaust historiography pitting Carlo Ginzburg against Hayden White. Comparing these various assaults on the ‘Crocean citadel of historicist idealism’, I argue that the challenge to Croce has been posed most cogently by those whose dissent from his dominant intellectual paradigm was inspired not by outright opposition but rather by doubt and scepticism. In the essay’s conclusion, I explore the significance of such scepticism, exemplified by the post-war critique of Crocean historicism, for the ongoing debates over ‘probing the limits of representation’.
6 citations
TL;DR: Italy is perhaps unique among the European nations in defining its origins culturally and artistically rather than politically as discussed by the authors, and it is thus historically significant that, since such foundational beliefs, it is possible to trace the origins of the country's culture and art.
Abstract: Italy is perhaps unique among the European nations in defining its origins culturally and artistically rather than politically. It is thus historically significant that, since such foundational wor...
6 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors of the novels written under the pen name Elena Ferrante and of the paratextual elements that surround them examine the portrayal of Naples and its outskirts in these narratives, and how the specific geographical and cultural context is rendered and variously translated for different audiences.
Abstract: Through an analysis of the novels written under the pen name Elena Ferrante and of the paratextual elements that surround them, this article examines the portrayal of Naples and its outskirts in these narratives, and how the specific geographical and cultural context is rendered and variously translated for different audiences. It argues that the concealment of the author's identity has enhanced the perceived authenticity of the texts, and that the emphasis on marginal backgrounds and subaltern characters entails a contradiction not dissimilar to the phenomenon that Huggan (2001) describes as ‘staged marginality’ in the context of postcolonial narratives. Ferrante's cultural specificity can therefore be read as a highly ambivalent discourse that entails both resistance and adherence to the mechanisms of a global market. Lastly, the article examines how the emphasis on dialect influences the process of translation for diverse readerships, showing the relevance of the ‘Ferrante project’ within world...
5 citations
TL;DR: Sorrentino as mentioned in this paper criticises two recent films by director Paolo Sorrentino (La grande bellezza, 2013; Youth, 2015) with a formalistic retreat from the afflicted state of the Italian nat...
Abstract: Criticism on two recent films by director Paolo Sorrentino (La grande bellezza, 2013; Youth, 2015) has tended to identify them with a formalistic retreat from the afflicted state of the Italian nat...
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the vocal and bodily performances of Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren across a series of scenes from four films (Campo de Fiori, Campo de’ fiori (Mario Bonnard), Casanova, Casanova and Monte Carlo) were analyzed.
Abstract: This essay (and the accompanying video-essay) analyses the vocal and bodily performances of Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren across a series of scenes from four films – Campo de’ fiori (Mario Bonnard,...
4 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the axioms of Book I of the Scienza nuova (1730) in the context of a realist and idealist thought of Vico.
Abstract: In order to think the simultaneously idealist and realist qualities of the thought of Giambattista Vico, this article considers the axioms of Book I of the Scienza nuova (1730) in the context of li...
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the relationship between film melodrama and opera from an intermedial perspective is examined from an artistic point of view, drawing on relevant literature in the fields of intermedionality and melodramas.
Abstract: This article focuses on the relationship between film melodrama and opera from an intermedial perspective. In addition to drawing on relevant literature in the fields of intermediality and melodram...
3 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the construction of Leopardi's authorial persona, focussing on the key concepts of contradiction and retraction through an examination of the works which were later brought together in his Canti (definitive edition 1845).
Abstract: The essay explores the construction of Leopardi's authorial persona, focussing on the key concepts of contradiction and retraction through an examination of the works which were later brought together in his Canti (definitive edition 1845). Self-contradiction, apostasy, and the continuous redefinition of the figure of the author – also through irony and desacralization – are shown to characterize Leopardi, both as a poet and as a philosopher. The essay argues that these elements play an important in Leopardi's work, which acknowledges the need for openness, dilemma, and doubt as features of modern literature.
TL;DR: For example, this paper argued that Machiavelli was a realist political theorist and that his writings exhibit a blend of polemics and realism, and that the truth is that they exhibit a mix of po...
Abstract: That Niccolo Machiavelli was a realist political theorist is perhaps one of the few claims on which scholars agree almost unanimously. The truth, however, is that his writings exhibit a blend of po...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the diverse ways in which these narrative shifts extend beyond a largely white, heterosexual, and affluent, consumerist West to the Italian culture, and the question of this vexed and complex relationship lies in a choice of preposition: is Italian cinema "before" or "after" or simply "against" the reach of girlpower, or possibly all of those things?
Abstract: ‘Girlpower’ was an influential narrative trope of the 1990s, often associated with the UK band The Spice Girls, in which young women visibly reclaimed the term ‘girl’ as an empowering one, asserted their agency and celebrated their sexual freedom, within a largely white, heterosexual, and affluent, consumerist West. Critics of contemporary US and Western European culture have recently identified a movement away from these celebratory narratives of ‘girlpower’ in a post-recession world, but as Fiona Handyside and Kate Taylor-Jones suggest, it is important to examine the diverse ways in which these narrative shifts extend beyond an Anglophone context. Although the upbeat potential of girlpower never fully entered the Italian mainstream, the notion has filtered into Italian culture regardless. The question of this vexed and complex relationship lies in a choice of preposition: is Italian cinema ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘beyond’ or simply ‘against’ the reach of girlpower, or possibly all of those things? The recognition of a girl’s agency and an interrogation of her needs and feelings as a girl have certainly become more visible on the auteur circuit and in teen films, but when it comes to casting girls at the centre of mainstream middlebrow or popular narrative, girlpower has often been a problem. We might indeed remember Ricordati di me (Muccino, 2003) in which Valentina can access power, but only as a television showgirl, whose rise to fame is saturated with moral disapprobation. Recently, critics have been preoccupied with the status of youth in Italian cinema – so prolonged that it pushes actual children and young people to the margins, making its midlife males perpetual adults, as so well illustrated by Muccino’s earlier L’ultimo bacio (2001). Despite Catherine O’Rawe’s observations of this prolonged youth as precisely a male preserve, Massimo Galimberti’s recent work betrays a widespread reluctance to acknowledge the gendered nature of this state of affairs. In fact, we know that midlife males depend upon the figure of the girl in order to navigate, if not resolve, their crises, which does not leave all representations of youth equal. More often than not the girl represents something other than herself, as Catherine Driscoll has demonstrated in relation to Western culture more broadly. Themost recent illustration of this need for a certain performance of girlhood came in the surprise success of the Italian action film Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (Mainetti, 2015). What is most striking about this film is not the characterization of its girl protagonist, whose qualities of innocent and perpetual victim inscribe her girlishness. Alessia (Ilenia Pastorelli) is presented as a daughter soon turned orphan, with mental health issues resulting from
TL;DR: This paper analyzed Italian author Laura Pariani's novel Dio non ama i bambini (2007), which draws attention to the ethnic diversity present in Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century.
Abstract: This article analyses Italian author Laura Pariani's novel Dio non ama i bambini (2007), which draws attention to the ethnic diversity present in Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century. By re-ethnicizing Italians and other immigrants, Pariani complicates the dominant narrative of easy and rapid Italian assimilation into Argentine culture, while also highlighting the instability of national identity and the influence of Italians in defining the borders of Argentine identity. This book is one example of a growing interest (in both countries) in examining past migrations from perspectives that emphasize heterogeneity and difference.
TL;DR: Isabella Cervoni's Orazione as discussed by the authors, a polemical call to war addressed to Pope Clement VIII and other rulers of Europe on the Ottoman threat in the final tumultuous years of the sixteenth century.
Abstract: This article analyzes Isabella Cervoni's Orazione [ … ] al santissimo, e beatissimo padre, e signor nostro, Papa Clemente ottavo, sopra l’impresa di Ferrara, con una canzone [ … ] a’ prencipi cristiani (Bologna: Giovanni Battista Bellagamba, 1598), a bold call to war through which the young female poet strategically inserts her voice into the complex political debate of the 1590s. Cervoni redeploys the words of well-known historians and poets, including Scipione Ammirato and Ludovico Ariosto, to bolster her historically, politically and religiously charged work. She portrays herself as, in turn, a divinely-inspired innocent, an erudite historian, and finally, a prophetic woman poet worthy of both patronage and consideration. This essay also considers Cervoni's unique work within the larger context of other writers who published similar polemics addressed to Pope Clement VIII and other rulers of Europe on the Ottoman threat in the final tumultuous years of the sixteenth century.
TL;DR: SOMMARIOL'articolo prende in esame le Lettere amorose (1642) di Girolamo Brusoni, uno dei piu notevoli esempi secenteschi di libro di lettere amoralose as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: SOMMARIOL'articolo prende in esame le Lettere amorose (1642) di Girolamo Brusoni, uno dei piu notevoli esempi secenteschi di libro di lettere amorose. L'opera e analizzata in rapporto all'ambiente dell'Accademia degli Incogniti, di cui l'autore fu una delle personalita trainanti. Quella degli Incogniti fu la piu importante accademia libertina secentesca, nota anche per le sue tendenze misogine. L'articolo mostra come le Lettere amorose costituiscano una testimonianza interessante nel passaggio da una concezione dell'amore di ascendenza petrarchista (a cui Brusoni allude per prenderne le distanze) ad una di tipo squisitamente barocco, che rifiuta l'idealizzazione dell'amata e valorizza l’edonismo senza sensi di colpa. Risultano di particolare interesse il modo in cui l'autore concepisce i ‘rapporti di forza’ fra se e le donne amate, nonche la poetica della sincerita da lui ostentata e la sua peculiare estetizzazione dell'esperienza amorosa.
TL;DR: The authors examines the foregrounding of Catholic iconography in three 1943 Fascist war films: Quelli della montagna (Aldo Vergano), Il treno crociato (Carlo Campogalliani), and I trecento della settima (Mario Baffico).
Abstract: This article examines the foregrounding of Catholic iconography in three 1943 Fascist war films: Quelli della montagna (Aldo Vergano), Il treno crociato (Carlo Campogalliani), and I trecento della settima (Mario Baffico). By portraying armed conflict not in terms of victory and defeat, but as momentary struggle on the path to salvation, this particular kind of cinema moved away from national bombast, or at least tempered it, and rewrote deprivation as abnegation, defeat as providence, and death as martyrdom. In this context, the fallen soldier becomes a Eucharistic Body: a ritualistic offering of the transubstantiated body of a sacrificial lamb to the congregation (the audience and the nation), who by taking part in this cinematic communion acknowledges his immolation and accepts military defeat as the will of a higher power.
TL;DR: In this paper, a microstoria della famiglia Stramigioli-Pucci di questa citta nello Stato Pontificio, considerando in particolare gli anni dal 1848 al 1855, is presented.
Abstract: SOMMARIOAttraverso l’analisi dei documenti processuali custoditi presso l'Archivio di Stato di Pesaro, il presente articolo esamina la microstoria della famiglia Stramigioli-Pucci di questa citta nello Stato Pontificio, considerando in particolare gli anni dal 1848 al 1855. La loro condizione sociale ed economica di piccolo-borghesi cambia velocemente nel giro di pochi anni: i debiti del paterfamilias e la morte di suo figlio li spingono verso la poverta e, allo stesso tempo, inaspriscono i loro rapporti interpersonali. I loro frequenti ricorsi ai tribunali ci mostrano come il sistema giuridico pontificio fosse frammentario e lacunoso, soprattutto per le questioni concernenti il diritto di famiglia come ad esempio la dote. In particolare, i casi descritti ci raccontano la storia di due donne, una sposata e una ‘zitella’, conscie dei propri diritti, che non esitano a rivolgersi al tribunale per farli valere e che non temono di sfidare il paterfamilias, ben diverse dunque dall'ideale di donna sottomessa tip...
TL;DR: The authors considers the characterization of blessed souls in Dante's Commedia and Petrarch's Canzoniere and Triumphi and argues that eschatological realism is not sufficient for such characterization.
Abstract: This article considers the characterization of blessed souls in Dante’s Commedia (1307–21) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (c. 1356–74) and Triumphi (c. 1352–74). It argues that eschatological realism – ...
TL;DR: In Mine vaganti (Ozpetek, 2011), a young man living in Rome (Tommaso) goes to visit his family in southern Italy to tell them that he is gay.
Abstract: In Mine vaganti (Ozpetek, 2011), a young man living in Rome (Tommaso) goes to visit his family in southern Italy to tell them that he is gay. Tommaso plans to come out during a big family dinner; however, during the dinner, something unexpected happens. Rather than Tommaso, it is his brother (Antonio) who comes out as gay. In order to come out, Antonio tells a story: an account of his falling in love with another man who used to work at the family-owned factory. Misunderstanding their son’s story for a joke, the parents burst into laughter. The tale told by Antonio foregrounds what coming out is, after all: a narrative that both constructs and makes visible for us a recognizable gay subject. As one of the defining tropes of contemporary gay identity, coming out is the quintessential gesture of acknowledging publicly who one is. As Nicholas de Villiers has pointed out, coming out locates gay identity ‘not just in a speech act but in a speech act by which one presumably discloses a previously closeted “secret”’. Its remarkable significance in contemporary culture stems from the way it challenges the injunction to silence and invisibility to which queers have been historically confined. To ‘come out’ was one of the imperatives of gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. Aptly, the title of the most important magazine of the Italian gay liberation movement was Fuori!, while the first US-based gay magazine, published after the Stonewall riots, was called ComeOut!. In line with the content of the many affirmative documentaries being made during and after gay liberation, these magazines encouraged their readers to disclose publicly their gay identity as both an act of political responsibility and one of individual self-affirmation. The prominence of coming out within contemporary gay identity may be thought of as one of the effects of the institutional incitement to speak about sex, which, from the eighteenth century onwards – as Michel Foucault pointed out in his History of Sexuality Vol. 1 – has made sex into a defining marker of one’s identity. Following the gay liberationist thrust to render public through the verbalization of one’s sexual identity, ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ has now become something that needs to be spoken, a truth that is waiting to be uncovered. As a narrative trope in fiction film, coming out has become especially prominent in the last 40 years, reaching its zenith in the 1990s with films such as Get Real (Shore, 1998), Beautiful Thing (MacDonald, 1996) and Edge of Seventeen (Moreton, 1998). In these films, the coming out narrative tends to take the viewers on a journey through the formation
TL;DR: The authors investigates the relationship between the Italian questione della lingua and Gian Mario Villalta's neodialect poetry, and emphasizes how the dialect engages the conflict between question and answer.
Abstract: This article investigates the relationship between the Italian questione della lingua and Gian Mario Villalta’s neodialect poetry. It emphasizes how Villalta’s poetic dialect engages the conflictin...
TL;DR: Tosca (1941) as discussed by the authors was originally begun by French director Jean Renoir, but finished by his German screenwriter-turned-director Carl Koch, and it was originally written by Reiniger and the young Luchino Visconti.
Abstract: Tosca (1941) is a curious and intriguing case in film history. It was originally begun by French director Jean Renoir, but finished by his German screenwriter-turned-director Carl Koch. Koch’s wife Lotte Reiniger and the young Luchino Visconti contributed to the film, while its producer was the grand old man of Italian silent film, Arturo Ambrosio. While Visconti was always open about his French experience with Renoir as his aesthetic, moral and political revelation, he always denigrated Tosca afterwards. However, visual analysis of the film reveals striking similarities with his films, particularly Ossessione (1943). Moreover, reception research shows Tosca had a critical but not entirely unfavourable reception in Italy and in Germany, too easily overlooked in Italian and German post-1945 historiography. Additional sources from the Lotte Reiniger archive and the Federico Patellani photo archive deepen the research.
TL;DR: In this paper, two collaborations that influenced Italo Calvino's short story "L'incendio della casa abominevole" are explored, the first an anticombinatoric project and collaboration undertaken with Paul Braffort of the French group Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle) in 1973, and the second with the former IBM programmer, William Skyvington, in early 1977.
Abstract: This article explores two collaborations that influenced Italo Calvino's short story, ‘L’incendio della casa abominevole', the first an anticombinatoric project and collaboration undertaken with Paul Braffort of the French group Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle) in 1973, and the second with the former IBM programmer, William Skyvington, in early 1977. In the case of the latter interaction, a hitherto unknown epistolary exchange between Calvino and Skyvington is examined in order to understand the terms in which Calvino's ambitions and the programmer's doubts were expressed, and the reasons for which a subsequent collaboration was not undertaken. The response Calvino received from Skyvington is finally brought to bear on Calvino's later work and correspondence, in which the limitations articulated by Skyvington are interpreted as influencing the nature of the Italian author's later projects.
TL;DR: This paper argued that the psychoanalytic approach to gaze theory cannot accommodate the types of gazes activated by Risi's blind characters, whose queer modes of being suggest a "blind gaze" that operates outside of the realm of both the heterosexual and the scopic, troubling in the process normative conceptions of masculinity and gender roles.
Abstract: This paper theorizes a new understanding of the cinematic ‘gaze’ based on an analysis of the intersections between blindness and sexuality in the films of Dino Risi, focusing in particular on Profumo di donna (1974) and Noi donne siamo fatte cosi (1971). Arguing both with and against Teresa de Lauretis’s theorization of the ‘blind spot’, I contend that the psychoanalytic approach to gaze theory cannot accommodate the types of gazes activated by Risi’s blind characters, whose queer modes of being suggest a ‘blind gaze’ that operates outside of the realm of both the heterosexual and the scopic, troubling in the process normative conceptions of masculinity and gender roles.
TL;DR: Amelia Pincherle Rosselli's dramatic works evidence a commitment to early feminist principles as discussed by the authors, a contribution that has been largely neglected by the Italian theatrical canon, despite their popularity.
Abstract: Amelia Pincherle Rosselli's dramatic works evidence a commitment to early feminist principles – a contribution that has been largely neglected by the Italian theatrical canon. Rosselli's plays trea...
TL;DR: The authors argues that the political and moral rejection of Fascism was prepared before 1943 by developments in the cultural sphere, arguing that realist aesthetics were a main site of explorations that anticip...
Abstract: This essay argues that the political and moral rejection of Fascism was prepared before 1943 by developments in the cultural sphere. Realist aesthetics were a main site of explorations that anticip...
TL;DR: Early writings on nascent cinematography often compared theatre and cinema, treating them as rival media striving to define their own boundaries and fields of expertise as mentioned in this paper, which was a common theme in early film scholarship.
Abstract: Early writings on nascent cinematography often compared theatre and cinema, treating them as rival media striving to define their own boundaries and fields of expertise.1 If early film scholarship2...