Italian Narrative Research Articles

Mythopoetic Bodies. Representations of Disability in Contemporary Italian Narratives

Il presente articolo investiga la tendenza a rappresentare la disabilità come una condizione totalizzante che non lascia spazio ad altre caratteristiche dell’individuo. Nel fare ciò, il saggio analizza alcuni topoi della costruzione narrativa della disabilità: l’accostamento ad una seconda vita, la visione della disabilità come accusa o colpa, e la sua percezione come una forma di mancanza. Tale approccio fa risaltare la capacità mitopoietica alla base di un notevole corpus di produzioni narrative nel romanzo italiano contemporaneo. Al centro del discorso si trovano, fra gli altri, autori come Alessandro Perissinotto e Piero d’Ettorre, Michela Murgia, Carmen Verde, e Simona Vinci, scrittori che l’articolo propone come riferimenti contemporanei al tema della disabilità e che ricevono il testimone da autori più canonicamente studiati come Dacia Maraini e Giuseppe Pontiggia.

Uncanny strangeness in Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s novel Little Mother

This article explores Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s novel Madre Piccola/Little Mother through a unique lens diverging from conventional postcolonial approaches. Departing from the predominant focus on Italian postcolonialism, the analysis employs Freudian and Kristevan concepts to examine the interplay of uncanny strangeness within Somali identity and diaspora experiences in Italy. The protagonist, Domenica Axad, embodies this interplay as she navigates between Somalia and Italy, encountering feelings of familiarity and estrangement. The article also examines the deterritorialization of the Somali language, tracing its displacement alongside the characters, and emphasizes its connection with Freudian and Kristevan concepts rather than its subversive potential. Through the embedding of Somali words within the Italian narrative, the novel achieves an uncanny strangeness, enriching our understanding of cultural hybridization and dynamics of migration in diasporic literature.

Enemy Aliens: internment and deportation policy in Great Britain, September 1939–June 1940

AbstractDuring the Second World War, Germans, Austrians and Italians living in Great Britain were designated as ‘enemy aliens’ and consequently interned. The worsening situation on the continent in May and June 1940 stirred up hysteria that spies and saboteurs could be amongst the Germans and Austrians. Mass arrests started in May 1940, and Italians were soon caught up in the detentions when Mussolini declared war on 10 June, thus filling internment camps to capacity. Canada and Australia agreed to take some of the ‘most dangerous characters’, facilitating the most controversial aspect of internment – deportation – which led to the ultimate tragedy when the SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk on 2 July 1940. Building on previous scholarship that focuses on either German or Italian internment, this article examines both government policy towards and the internee experience of these two groups on an equal footing, thus furthering integration of the Italian narrative within internment historiography.

‘Queering the Textual Politics of Alba de Céspedes’s Prima e dopo’

Abstract Alba de Céspedes’s Prima e dopo (1955) has generally been interpreted within the framework of the Italian Resistance and the subsequent disillusionment of Resistance ideals. While taking this interpretation into account, I argue that the central narrative of desire in Prima e dopo is not Irene’s relationship with her lover, Pietro, but Irene’s subversive desire for her maid, Erminia. I analyse and challenge some of the mechanisms and methodologies of Italian literary historiography that create and reproduce the disregard and devaluation of queer desire, specifically lesbian desire, in Italian narratives, and I identify scholarly, cultural and textual mechanisms that have rendered queer desire in Prima e dopo invisible. In sum, this article contributes to an Italian lesbian archive and lesbian literary historiography and argues that a queer reading of Erminia’s role in Prima e dopo enhances our understanding of the post-Resistance framework of the novel and its radical politics.

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives

Deicide and the Drama of the Holocaust: Gian Paolo Callegari’s Cristo ha ucciso (1948)

ABSTRACT Gian Paolo Callegari’s prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone in Italy’s response to the Holocaust. Among the earliest Italian creative works to confront the genocide of the European Jews, Callegari’s play challenged the legacies of anti-Semitism in European culture. Yet it also concealed the troubling history of its author’s own Fascist anti-Semitism. Exploring this apparent paradox, the present essay situates both play and playwright in the post-war Italian context. I argue that Cristo ha ucciso makes possible a substantial reconsideration of the public reckoning that attended news of the liberation of the death camps. This is because, with its provocative claim that Christian forgiveness had to be abandoned as an impediment to justice, Callegari’s play offered a radical alternative to the Christian humanist framework predominant in Italian narratives of the Second World War.

Dichotomous conceptualisations of female friendship in 20th and 21st century Italian literature – a comparison of Alba de Céspedes, Anna Banti, Elena Ferrante, and Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Female friendship played a minor role in 20th century Italian narrative and this theme seems to have emerged only recently in Italian and European literature. Nevertheless, it offers an interesting lens through which to reflect on female narrative across time. This paper will first analyse the conceptualisation of female friendship by two authors who were the cornerstones of 20th century Italian (female) narrative – Anna Banti and Alba de Céspedes. It will then compare it to the representation of female friendship in contemporary authors, like Elena Ferrante and Donatella Di Pietrantonio. I will argue that Banti and de Céspedes’ representations of female friendships are dichotomous. The young protagonist of Banti’s Itinerario di Paolina (1937) avoids female bonds as a consequence of her attempts to escape from patriarchal restrictions, while Alessandra in de Céspedes’ Dalla parte di lei (1949) conceptualises female bonds as constitutive of her own and free identity from a very tender age. Building on this analysis, this paper shall then assess the extent to which 21st century authors like Ferrante and Di Pietrantonio have echoed or changed the representation of female bonds and in turn reproduce the dichotomous conceptualisation of female friendship in their narratives. It will argue that while reproducing a dichotomous representation of female friendships similar to that of de Céspedes and Banti, this is actually underpinned by the same ideological standpoint in both authors, because they both see female friendship as the ground to forge women’s identities and fight the patriarchal struggles of their times.

Contributors

Contributors

Pasolini’s View on the Free-Indirect Speech in the Italian Narrative

Pasolini’s View on the Free-Indirect Speech in the Italian Narrative

Daughters of Zeus and Leda: Four Twins in Contemporary Italian Narrative

Abstract It would seem impossible, Carl Gustav Jung, Károly Kerényi and Mircea Eliade harbour no doubts about it, to do without myth: archetypical images seem necessary to give human thought shape. In this essay, having acknowledged a seemingly incredible proliferation of twins in the Italian literary and cinema production of the last few decades, we dwell on two recent novels: Giorgio Falco's La gemella H and Laura Pugno's La ragazza selvaggia. Two utterly different works, yet united by the same central image, that of the Dioscuri, albeit in their female version. Between a supreme and hyper-narcissistic attraction for an Identical-Other and attempts to retrieve one's own subjectivation, breaking the twin egg, Falco and Pugno narrate, in their peculiar and different ways, stories which are capable of throwing light on darkened areas in our minds. The world of wakefulness and of dreams, both vividly real, mingle in a couple of novels which will long endure.

Book Review: Shakespeare and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Italian Narratives by Silvia Bigliazzi

Book Review: <i>Shakespeare and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Italian Narratives</i> by Silvia Bigliazzi

From Constitutional Transitions to the Great National Transition: A Constant and Obstinate Italian Narrative

Abstract The essay aims to illustrate the ways in which Italian literature deals with transitions (constitutional or political). After having clarified the methodological approach, the author identifies and describes in the national literature some historical phases, analysing the trends emerging from the reading of famous novels. In conclusion, some observations are drawn, in which it is highlighted that in the national literature there is a profound awareness of the importance of informal institutional transformations and of the central role of social, moral and economic factors.

Bob Dylan e gli strimpellatori. La popular music nella narrativa del Settantasette e dintorni

In questo articolo analizzero un corpus di testi narrativi italiani ambientati in Italia nella seconda meta degli anni Settanta. Il mio obiettivo e mostrare che la rappresentazione dell’atto di ascoltare ‘popular music’, talvolta anche di suonare o scrivere canzoni, fa parte del piu generale dissenso dei giovani protagonisti nei confronti del sistema sociopolitico di quegli anni. Nel primo paragrafo riassumero le premesse metodologiche e culturali di questo studio, prestando particolare attenzione al dibattito musicale degli anni Settanta, che tende a schierarsi dalla parte del cantautorato politico contro la musica pop. Nei paragrafi successivi affrontero le varie articolazioni del rapporto tra le rappresentazioni del dissenso e i riferimenti musicali, specialmente ai cantautori italiani e a Bob Dylan, in Porci con le ali di Rocco e Antonia (1976), Boccalone di Enrico Palandri (1979), Altri libertini di Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1980) e altre opere che hanno segnato l’ascesa della nuova narrativa italiana fra la fine degli anni Settanta e l’inizio degli anni Ottanta. Nell’Appendice esaminero brevemente due romanzi degli anni Zero – Occidente per principianti by Nicola Lagioia (2004) and Piove all’insu by Luca Rastello (2006) – suggerendo che i riferimenti letterari a Bob Dylan e alla ‘popular music’ hanno perso la loro lineare connessione con il dissenso.

Fantastic, Spirits, Pseudo-Science and Risorgimento in Nineteenth-Century Italian Narrative: The Case of Tarchetti's A Dead Man's Bone

This paper aims to study the Italian ghost story entitled A Dead Man's Bone, included in Tarchetti's Fantastic Tales (1869) to illustrate, by means of this specific case, both the way and the purpose of the reception of the Gothic and Fantastic in Italian narrative. For this reason, it is necessary to frame the textual analysis within the historical and cultural coordinates of the post-Unification years, in order to, first of all, clarify the fact that the operation ought to be evaluated in a specific ideological and compositional context rather than from a thematic point of view. In this regard, the study of A Dead Man's Bone intends to highlight that the most relevant outcomes of Tarchetti's rewriting of a ghost story by Théophile Gautier have to be appreciated as the opening for new experiments in narrative forms which root in a rapidly changing situation and, nurtured by the disillusionment of the post-unification years. Moreover, the author's use of codes and conventions of a specific subgenre of modern Fantastic, such as the ghost story, is also related with his direct involvement in pseudoscientific movements as Mesmerism and Spiritism. It goes without saying that the author's effort to innovate narrative forms is meant to convey a personal interpretation of the present by means of a new kind of realism in art.

Free to choose: Female characters in the stories of Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda’s strategies of female characters’ construction and agency are at the core of this essay. The goal is to investigate how the Nobel prize winner shapes the identity as the actions of her female characters in a decidedly eccentric manner if compared to contemporary Italian narrative. The path of the essay is chiefly chronological as it starts from her first short stories 1888, published in the context of widely circulated periodicals, to ends with Cosima, the autobiographical novel published in 1936, the year of Deledda’s death. A typology of her characters emerges in relation both to the cultural assumptions that strongly influence the first production of Deledda as well as to the heterogeneous literary models with which the writer weaves a dense and uninterrupted dialogue.

Al di qua dell’Avanguardia: i 'Nuovi racconti' italiani di Ettore Mazzali

The essay analyses Nuovi racconti italiani, the anthology edited by Antonio Baldini and published by Nuova accademia editrice in 1962. There is no archive of the publishing house, but it was a meritorious enterprise in Milan in the sixties, proposing an idea of universal literature and trying to promote Italian literature abroad. Baldini's anthology is a completely popular example of this attempt, which nevertheless suffers from a certain delay in developments – just to give an example the Neoavanguardia – of italian narrative in the early sixties.

Italian Narratives of Oppositional Identity

Drawing together scholarship on the late antique and medieval holy man, and modern theoretical work on affect and identity, this article seeks to analyze one method by which group identities in the Mediterranean region broadly, and in Italy specifically, have been defined trans-historically through rhetorical emphasis on the “invasion” of foreignized bodies. The discussion first focuses on late antique Near Eastern Passio texts commemorating Christians who faced persecution under Muslim Saracens, before then shifting to tenth- and eleventh-century southern Italy and Sicily, and to the corpus of Italo-Greek Vitae in which holy individuals regularly encountered the Saracen as a dangerous invader. Such discourses of opposition obscured the inter-reliance between populations, and reduced relations to inherited, primordial struggles, simultaneously shifting attention away from the heterogeneity of non-Muslim resident populations. A similar approach is pursued in modern Italian discourse on migrants, where a selective rhetoric of “invasion” forefront the risks posed by migrants in ways that create a sense of unity in an otherwise-fragmented nation. Urging academic dialogue that incorporates the pre-modern and modern, this article examines the construction of oppositional identity and explores how such narratives reveal collective fears amongst populations threatened by the destabilization of pre-established hierarchies.

МОТИВ ЧЕЛОВЕЧЕСКОГО ХИТРОУМИЯ В СРЕДНЕВЕКОВОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ

The present article discusses the formation and development of the motif of human cunning in medieval literature. The motive of cunning is not chosen by chance. For the frst time, it appeared in Italian narrative in the Renaissance. But the beginning of the motive of cunning goes to the oral folk story. In the urban environment, stories about resourceful townspeople laughing at a stupid knight or a voluptuous monk were very fond. Such stories vividly and expressively depicted typical events of city daily life and aroused keen interest among the townspeople. And the life of Italian cities was stormy and diverse, abundant in various events. At the end of the Middle Ages, new social groups were formed, involved in a political struggle and challenging the power of the aristocrats. At the interpersonal level, the gradual erosion of the conceptual boundaries of nobility began. A new system of ideas about the purpose and role of a man was formed. But the nobility of origin was to be opposed by any quality of a common man, which would distinguish and characterize him. That was the quality comparable to titles and ranks. Cunning turned out to be such a quality. But the conceptual content of cunning did not happen immediately. At frst, there was a coarse laughter and bullying in literature. The cunning motive reached its full development in the novel of the Renaissance, when the image of a man of a new era was fnally formed. Then cunning, quick-wittedness and resourcefulness came to value more than titles. So tracing the development of the motif of human cunning in medieval literature, one can understand how the man of the Renaissance was formed.

La linea stilistica della «chiarezza poetica» Comisso vs d’Annunzio

Giovanni Comisso, after d’Annunzio passed away, proposed to place his artistic figure in the framework of the contemporary critical horizon, selecting a very peculiar formal line, distinguished by ‘clarity’, in order to measure himself and, together, to take the necessary distances from the teaching of the ‘Vate’. In the second part of this paper, a Comissian critical essay is published, which appeared in the early ’60s in Il Mondo of Pannunzio and has remained in the shadows so far; in it we summarise an exemplary historiographical and stylistic balance of the Italian narrative between the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, re-reading in perspective and under another way d’Annunzio’s function.

‘Remember Without Hate’: The Holocaust as European Memory in 1960s’ Italian Television

This article discusses a small cluster of documentary programmes that aired in the first half of the 1960s and representing Italian TV’s earliest forms of engagement with Holocaust-related topics. Within this small corpus, particular attention will be given to two documentary programmes broadcast by Italian State-owned network RAI in 1965. The documentaries Europa per la libertà (Europe for Liberty) and Il giorno della pace (The Day of Peace) represent some of Italian television’s earliest forms of engagement with the issue of how to remember the Holocaust. Moreover, these discussions of Holocaust memory were framed in terms in which national and transnational dimensions coexisted. However, this emphasis on supranational memory was not at odds with domestic needs, as it was ultimately consistent with established Italian national narratives about the war and the country’s role in it.