Italian Writer Research Articles

In memoriam: Paolo Sassone-Corsi.

In memoriam: Paolo Sassone-Corsi.

Because the Poet

The transdisciplinary dialogue, the rebellious attitude, and the sublimation of dissidence by experimenting new forms as an act of hope are the key features of the relationship between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Patti Smith, who saluted the Italian writer as one of her greatest teachers throughout her entire career, along with Blake, Rimbaud and the Beats. From the poetry of Babel to the lyrics of Easter, passing through the photographic series Pasolini es vie, the eclectic American artist has never ceased to appraise the literary works and movies of this author as a constant source of inspiration, creating a bond that became very important to the audience but was never properly explored by the critics. In terms of reception, one should not forget that this original relationship also led many (especially outside Italy) to discover the figure of Pasolini. This article seeks to investigate Patti Smith’s Pasolini and the works that influenced her most, revealing through an intertextual and interdiscursive approach how the poet contributed to shape the imaginary and spiritual vision of one among the most important lyrical voices in the world today.

Resenha de A árvore de luz, de Rina Sara Virgillito

Esta resenha aborda o livro A árvore de luz da escritora italiana Rina Sara Virgillito. Trata-se de uma importante obra para os estudos de literatura italiana no país. Virgillito concebeu os poemas desse livro utilizando-se, de modo exemplar, dos estratos verbais, visuais e vocais à disposição. A tradução para a língua portuguesa, na maioria das vezes, recupera esse esmero linguístico-poético. O trabalho editorial, além de muito estético, respeita o aproveitamento da página em branco nos poemas traduzidos. Por fim, essa tradução apresenta um breve estudo introdutório, o que também auxilia leitores iniciantes no universo da poetisa milanesa.

Il Vate e il suo doppio ironico Altre note su Thomas Mann lettore di d’Annunzio

In Germany, beginning from the last decade of XIX century, the fame of Gabriele d’Annunzio grew increasingly thanks to a continue flow of translations, which made him one of the most celebrated writers of theJahrhundertwendein the country of Goethe. Among the German admirers of the ‘Vate’ there were poets and novelists such as Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann. On the contrary, Thomas Mann’s appreciation of d’Annunzio was problematic: he disliked his aestheticism, his superficial NietzscheanÜbermenschcult and moreover his far too refined, turgidly baroque prose. Nevertheless, he read attentively his colleague’s narratives – albeit using German translations, unlikely George and his senior brother Heinrich –, and undoubtedly made allusions – often in a deeply ironical sense – to d’Annunzio’sTriumph of Deathin his novelTristan. This essay reconstructs the cultural context of the relation between Mann and d’Annunzio, and offers a detailed comparison of selected passages and/or fragments from both works aimed at analysing the nature of Mann’s borrowings from the Italian writer, in order to show the ‘dialectical’ character of such a procedure.

METAFICTION AND DROSTE EFFECT IN THE NOVEL “IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER” BY ITALO CALVINO

f on a winter's night a traveler is considered one of the greatest novels by Italian writer Italo Calvino. Published in 1979, this literary work, which belongs to the postmodernist narrative style in the form of a frame story, tells about a reader trying to read a book with the same title from beginning to end. Much of the story’s content was written in the second-person’s narration, implying that “you” (the Reader) are the protagonist of the novel. Embedded inside are ten short stories (the loose ends of different novels) read by the main character, which causes the book to constantly switch between settings, narrators, and styles. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is truly a perfect illustration for the literary style characterized by metafiction and postmodernism. The novel is a conscious textual play with various techniques employed such as authorial role limitation, reader involvement in the plot line, open structure, non-linearity, fragmentation, multiplicity, and intertextuality. By effectively using these devices, Calvino deconstructs the traditional novel form and creates a new structure which shows a parallel between the processes of writing and reading a text. Calvino acts as the supreme game-master taking control of both the characters and the real players, who have been pushed into this game-like novel. This article focuses on analyzing the charactericstics of metafiction, the Droste effect and deconstruction in Calvino’s novel If on a winter's night a traveler, thereby helping to grasp his playful language and his narrative techniques as well as to discover his metafictional discourse.

The Adventures of the Thing: Mario Perniola’s Sex Appeal of the Inorganic

This paper explores the concept of “inorganic sexuality” in the work of Italian writer and philosopher Mario Perniola. The main objective is to develop the controversial and original aspects of Perniola’s thought within his aesthetic theory of feeling. Perniola elaborates the so-called “thing that feels”, namely a feeling in which the neutral and impersonal dimensions of the things flow into organic life and vice versa. This perspective, as will be clarified, by dissolving the vitalist and spiritualist drives of the subject, enlarges the horizon of aesthetic feeling by welcoming what is commonly left outside of it: the inorganic and material world, in its surprising aspects, but also in its uncanny and disturbing ones. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to show the significance and the value of neutral sexuality, which opens up a space of experiences beyond the traditional metaphysical oppositions such as masculine/feminine, organic/inorganic, alive/dead, real/virtual, gender/sex. Article received: April 28, 2020; Article accepted: June 23, 2020; Published online: September 15, 2020. Original scholarly paper

Atlantic ripples in the Mediterranean: Early nineteenth-century patriotic readings of Haiti in the Italian peninsula

ABSTRACT By examining how news from Haiti was picked up by Italian periodicals, reference and educational works in the early nineteenth century, I suggest that the Italian peninsula provides a new perspective for gauging the impact of Haitian self-presentation based on the appropriation and subversion of Eurocentric notions of civilization. An intellectual triangulation involving Simondi, Vastey, and Mazères highlights a hitherto uncharted Italian reception of Haitian post-revolutionary discourses. Without a colonial empire, Italian writers addressed the slave trade, colonialism, and Haitian independence as instrumental to their patriotic ambitions. Haitian contestations of the imperialistic order set at the Congress of Vienna suited the Italian vision of a global struggle for national independence. Haitian claims that civilization originated in Africa provided an argument against the narrative of progress spearheaded by Northern Europe; a notion that Italian patriots disputed owing to their pursuit of a leading role for their prospective nation in the Mediterranean.

I vestiti nella narrativa di Natalia Ginzburg

In questo articolo mi sono occupato del rapporto tra gli abiti e la narrazio-ne nei romanzi della scrittrice italiana Natalia Ginzburg, seguendo l’approccio teorico di due studiose italiane, Paola Colaiacomo e Eugenia Paulicelli, che si occupano del nesso moda-letteratura. L’idea che ha fatto da perno alla ricerca è che l’abito, anche essendo “appiattito” dalla formula letteraria, trattenga a sé una dimensione materiale data da una certa figuratività. Nel caso di Natalia Ginzburg il piano figurativo a cui fa riferimento è il teatro da una parte, e l’album fotografico dall’altra. All’interno di questi due poli figurativi si muovono le diverse tipologie di abiti raccontati che ho analizzato. Stabilendo infine che, nelle mani della scrittrice, le categorie sono duttili e spesso si contaminano a vicenda.

Roberto Saviano, czyli rzecz o kalaniu własnego gniazda i jego konsekwencjach

Roberto Saviano is an Italian writer and investigative journalist who has been living under strict police protection for thirteen years. He wrote Gomorrah, a bestselling book, that drew the mafia’s attention and resulted in a death sentence. Life in hiding is a price he pays for revealing the harsh truth about the activity of Neapolitan Camorra. The aim of this paper is to investigate what drives his uncompromising pursuit for truth, the strategies he uses to achieve this aim, and the response to his approach, coming from Italian politicians, intellectuals, ordinary people, and international general public.

Brickwork and the wall as metaphors in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s fiction

The article analyses the topical motifs of the brickwork, the wall, and the house in the works of Carlo Emilio Gadda, one of the greatest Italian writers of the 20th century. These motifs were part of the writer’s broader writing project, the aim of which was to depict and catalogue the entire material reality. These elements appear as parts of a bigger whole: a safe house and a private impenetrable space, but also as a symbol of limitations, petite bourgeois conventions, and a place of suffering and sacrifice. In utilising architectural elements, Gadda indicated the minutest of details and functions that constitute the whole. By utilising architectural references such as a brickwork or a wall, Gadda made them part of a complex system of metaphorical relations through which he attempted to bridle the chaotic reality. The brickwork and walls of villas, condos, labourers’ flats, rural manors, and towering stone fencings often possessed dual meanings and roles: they separate one from the world and protect them against the chaos of the world, or are the products of the burgher culture – despised by the writer – as well as the marks of its undoubted richness and bad taste. This was why they became the focus of his criticism. In some of his works, they become a symbol of a character’s desire to isolate themselves from the world. At the level of the narrative structure, the motifs of the brickwork and the wall become a pretext for a digressive expanding or a developed pause, which, in turn, produces an effect of a breaking-up of a diegesis, which remains unfinished and fragmented.

The Future of Man is to be an Animal.

This paper examines the role of the dog in the work of two modern Italian writers Curzio Malaparte and Carlo Levi and the writings of a notable Italian philosopher of our times, The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in several works he assures the importance of animals in tne human life, and the dog, in particular, in the redefinition of the future of the human being. Taking their assertions as analysis tools for the mentioned authors, we analize in the texts, where they formulate a peculiar way of central role represented by the animal. In Levi he is capable to be the key able to open the door to a fantastic world. For Malaparte the dog becomes the essential counterpart to the humanity being capable to harbor huge feelings that he is able to teach man . Finally, for Agamben, men and animals are part of the same natural creation and, eschatologically, walk together until, at the end of time, when humans will reconcile with their half animal nature.

PRINCE STANISŁAW PONIATOWSKI: EXPERT ON AND COLLECTOR OF ANCIENT AND ITALIAN ART

The current state of research into the patronage and collecting activities of Prince Stanisław Poniatowski (1754–1833) in Italy with which he was connected for almost 40 years of his life is outlined. Over the period, the Prince made 3 long trips there which preceded 30 years of living in Italy on a permanent basis, first in Rome, and then in Florence where he was buried. Despite his many accomplishments and extraordinary personal history, the Prince has not taken as prominent a position either in academic research or in the collective memory of Poles as his junior cousin Prince Józef who drowned in the Elster River giving his life for the homeland. Although no monograph has as yet been published on Stanisław Poniatowski, he is not entirely forgotten. However, the major studies dedicated to him were published a relatively long time ago. The most extensive, i.e. the book I Poniatowski a Roma (Firenze 1972), speaking of the history of Prince Stanisław and the Poniatowski family, was written by the Italian writer and columnist Andrea Busiri Vici and has never been translated into Polish. As the current state of research shows, very few Polish art historians have taken any in depth interest in the Prince’s activity. Apart from the mentions scattered in different studies, there are merely four articles dealing with some selected aspects of the Prince’s patronage and collecting activity (by Janina Michałkowa, Elżbieta Budzińska, Tadeusz Jaroszewski, Dominika Wronikowska). Historically the most complete study dedicated to Prince Stanisław is to be found in Jerzy Michalski’s paper from 50 years ago published in the Polish Biographical Dictionary. The to-date Polish and foreign publications in history, history of art and archaeology do not exhaust many issues related to the person, activity, and the collecting passion of Prince Stanisław.

Some Interpretations of Foreign Literature during the Epoch of Socialism

This paper will focus on some Bulgarian translations of works by foreign writers that were published during the epoch of Socialism. Throughout this period several works by authors from territories such as Latin America, Western Europe and the USA were translated into the languages of the Eastern European countries; some of them do not seem to fit the criteria of the Socialism realism: this is the case of genres such as science fiction or fantasy. Authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, the Italian writers Italo Calvino, Dino Buzzati and many others have been translated into languages such as Bulgarian and Russian. Many of them do not deal mainly with social and political themes, and some of them (for instance Dino Buzzati) are even highly critical towards doctrines such as Marxism. However, in the forewords of some of the Bulgarian translations of their works we can find political and social interpretations. Similar interpretations can also be found in science fiction works and in non-literary works, such as books devoted to practices such as Yoga, which in some books is analyzed from a Marxist point of view.

Extracomunitario?

AbstractThis essay uses Bruno Latour’s model of diplomacy from An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (AIME), alongside the networks/worknets of actor-network theory, to discuss how the medieval Italian writers Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri explore experiences of political exile in their vernacular writings. It examines how the two authors reflect on the pluralities of language and community that connect them to readerships both at home and in exile, focusing especially on Brunetto’s Rettorica and Dante’s Convivio. The essay investigates Brunetto’s rhetorical doctrine and Dante’s models of vernacular knowledge sharing by drawing on AIME’s notion of the diplomat, whose measured speech helps “renegotiate the new frontiers of self and other.” It is especially concerned with the modes of engagement Latour labels as the beings of politics [POL], law [LAW], and fiction [FIC].

The Blackness in The Bluest Eye

Novels, of any time, carry certain stories related to reality. The earlier forms of the Novel, Allegory and Romance, contained religious, philosophical facts. These literary genres took the shape of Novels, which continue to carry moral, philosophical and historical truths. George Meredith, a Victorian novelist, defined Novel as the ‘summary of actual life’. According to William Henry Hudson, an English writer, Novel is an effective medium of the portrayal of human thoughts and actions.
 The English word, Novel derived from the Italian term, Novelle, which means ‘a fresh story’. It was in 1350 that the Italian writer, Giovanny Boccassio, wrote his world famous collection of love stories in prose, named Decameron. Such stories in prose were called ‘novelle’ and a story in verse was known as ‘romance’. It meant a story of the legendary past. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is an example. Some experts gave various definitions for a ‘Novel’. According to an American novelist, F. Marion Crawford, a Novel is a pocket theatre; a novel contained all accessories of a drama without requiring to be staged before an audience. George Meredith, an English novelist, called it a ‘summary of actual life’ including both ‘the within and the without’. According to W.H Hudson, Novel is an effective medium of the portrayal of human thought and action, ‘combining in itself the creations of poetry, the details of history and generalised experience of philosophy’.

Da cidade imaginada à cidade escrita:

O livro Constantinopla, do escritor italiano Edmondo De Amicis (1846-1908), aborda a viagem do escritor à capital do Império Otomano em 1874 e se insere em um tema singular no campo literário a partir do século XVIII: os livros de viagem sobre o Oriente. Este artigo tem como proposta analisar o modo como o escritor tentou apreender na sua narrativa de viagem à capital do Império Otomano e as dificuldades que a narrativa apresenta para retratar a cidade. Um desses problemas está no fato de que cidade se organiza, no seu urbanismo e na vida urbana, de modo diferente dos parâmetros europeus modernos; outra dificuldade está no fato de que o narrador não consegue separar a sua descrição das inúmeras leituras fantasiosas sobre o Oriente que autor tinha realizado, antes de chegar à cidade.

Foreign settings in the Fascist-eragiallo: Italian writers’ creative explorations of criminality and cultural difference

The 1930s saw an explosion in the publication of crime writing in Italy, but initially readers’ appetite for crime fiction was fed almost entirely by translated imports from the US, Britain and France. Even as publishers began promoting crime writing by Italians, foreign models and settings remained important, and several early Italian writers set their work in foreign countries. This article, which draws on both textual analysis and archival research, examines some foreign-set novels produced by Italian authors during the Fascist years, and seeks to identify the function and appeal of foreign settings in the depiction of criminality in that period. These books, peopled by exotic ‘Others’, comment on corruption, freedom of the press, cultural diversity, racial difference, policing, criminality, as much at home as abroad. The distant settings offered safety and freedom, as well as escapism or distraction, and the opportunity to experiment with genre.

A ciência e o arquivo como metáforas para a dominação: Histórias naturais de Primo Levi

Questões como a influência da tecnologia no cotidiano e as soluções e problemas que poderiam advir da relação cada vez mais próxima entre homens e máquinas e a observação mais científica do mundo e mais humana das ciências, são as chaves pelas quais pretende-se desvendar os contos que perfazem um percurso repleto de imagens corpóreas, sensações, devires no livro Histórias naturais, publicado em 1966 pelo escritor italiano Primo Levi (1919-1987). As metáforas levam significado de um domínio ontológico para outro, criando uma relação que não se encontra na natureza, assim o texto busca na linguagem da ciência e na obsessão pelos arquivos todo um arcabouço semiológico, de forma a dar relevo aos processos de submissão do humano à máquina e à tecnologia. A partir da obsessão contemporânea pelo arquivo, como descrita por Jacques Derrida e das noções de biopoder de Michel Foucault, do poder de promover a vida ou desautorizá-la ao ponto da morte, pretende-se observar as metáforas literárias em Histórias naturais, do qual emergem a ciência e o arquivo, com suas linguagens e técnicas como alegoria bem construídas a favor do poder, da dominação e da destruição do outro.

“You will be richer, but I very much doubt that you will be happier”. Antonio Panizzi professor in London, 1828-1831

The paper offers an overview of the complex, not easy period in which Antonio Panizzi was teaching at London University (1828-1831), innovatively suggesting that “a uniform program be adopted for the study of all modern languages and literatures” and nevertheless dedicating himself to research with care and passion. In the article, the teaching materials and custom tools he quickly provided to his students for learning italian language and culture are analyzed regarding concept, structure and target: The Elementary Italian Grammar 1828, and two anthologies of prose writings: Extracts from the Italian Prose Writers, 1828, and Stories from Italian Writers with a Literal Interlinear Traduction, 1830.

Réflexions sur le rapport homme-nature dans la vie et l'oeuvre de Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008)

This article looks at the relationships that Mario Rigoni Stern, an italian writer, maintained with his lived space and with nature, in reading keys specific to cultural and humanist geography.