What particularly strikes foreigners, and today again is the talk of the entire city—but only talk—is the homicides that take place so routinely. Just in the last three weeks four persons have been murdered in our district. Immediately after introducing the murderous qualities of the Romans, Goethe remarks: Schiller, who believed that Goethe was the contemporary German embodiment of this naive artist, urged modern writers to return self-consciously to the raw genius and force of their remote predecessors: Like most of his contemporaries, including his friend and mentor Johann Gottfried Herder, Goethe subscribed to a fairly traditional, Rousseauistic primitivism that celebrated the early ages of man for their nobility and liberty.
He claims that one reason why Winckelmann never reached his full greatness was because he was forced to submit to the will of his ignorant Catholic patron, Cardinal Albani. The mention of Albani recalls an earlier entry from this same date January 13, , in which Goethe openly slights the cardinal in one of his many attacks on the Catholic faith. The murderer manages to reach a church, and that ends the matter [Italian Journey ]. On a typical Romantic outing early in the novel, Corinne and Oswald decide to spend the day at the tombs outside of Rome.
In the midst of these meditations on mortality, the site of a certain tomb piques their interest. Protestants who die here are all buried round this pyramid and it is a gentle haven, tolerant and liberal [Corinne, Italy 80]. It is there that several of my compatriots found their last resting place.
Let us go there [Corinne, Italy 80—81]. She writes that there is something remarkable about the campagna di Roma. But the ground is covered with natural plants, which are continually renewed by their vigorous growth [Corinne, Italy 78]. The natural growth outside of Rome seems to shun any contact with living Italians, instead expending its energies on the remote ancient Rome that casts an overwhelming shadow over the present.
But for the foreign traveler who comes to Italy to dream, paint, and write, these alternately barren and fecund patches of the Italian landscape embody the soul of creative vision: But imaginative souls, concerned as much with death as with life, enjoy contemplating this Roman countryside where the present day has left no mark [Corinne, Italy 78]. Nowhere is the eclipse of contemporary Italy more dramatic than in the crucial episode in which Oswald, after embarking upon a simultaneously tempestuous emotionally and innocent physically relationship with Corinne, decides to abandon his lover and return home.
As his boat approaches England, Oswald equates his native land with public order and political freedom. The year he had just spent in Italy had no connection with any other period of his life. It was like a brilliant apparition which had completely struck his imagination but had not been able to alter completely the opinions or tastes which had constituted his life till then. He found his former self again, and although the feeling of being separated from Corinne prevented him from having any feeling of happiness, he nevertheless returned to a certain rigidity in his ideas that the intoxicating wave of the arts and Italy had washed away.
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Oswald marvels, moreover, at the dignity and modesty of the English women and their capacity to translate domestic tranquility into a public virtue. He was exchanging the vague desire of romantic happiness for pride in the true goods of life, independence and security; he was returning to the life suited to men, action with a goal. Reverie is more for women, beings who are weak and resigned from birth.
They [the Romans] are people who do not bother about others [Corinne, Italy ]. Since society does not set itself up as judge of anything, it allows everything [Corinne, Italy 93]. She brings all three of these elements to bear in one masterful series of episodes that culminates in the death of Corinne. Whereas Corinne is intellectual and creative, Lucile is simple and unimaginative; while Corinne is independent and iconoclastic, Lucile is submissive and traditional; and where Corinne speaks her mind, Lucile holds her tongue.
Corinne responds that art is the last refuge of a nation despoiled by foreigners of its arms and government. In celebrating the artistic heritage of Italy, Corinne also endorses the distinctly European nature of this legacy, which the modern world repaid by subjugating the Italians: Europe has received the arts and the sciences from Italy, and now that it has turned their own gifts against them it still often disputes the last glory that is allowed to nations without military power or political liberty, the glory of the sciences and the arts [Corinne, Italy 99].
From my earliest youth, I promised to bring honour to the name of Roman which still thrills my heart. You have allowed me glory, oh, liberal nation, you who do not banish women from your temple [Corinne, Italy ]. In the end, in the name of country, duty, and family, Oswald rejects Corinne and the Italy she embodies. The actual reason, however, is that he wishes to assuage his guilt in having abandoned Corinne for her half sister. The wrong you may do a woman may not hurt you in the eyes of the world. The fragile idols adored today may be smashed tomorrow without being defended by anyone, and it is for that very reason that, as far as they are concerned, I respect them more.
Morality is upheld only in our hearts. We suffer no inconvenience when we cause them pain, and yet the pain is terrible. A dagger blow is punished by the law but the rending of a sensitive heart is only the subject of a joke. So it would be better to allow yourself to strike with a dagger. Oswald, who endlessly praises the laws and customs of Britain and derides the supposed lack of social mores in Italy, is rebuked by Castel-Forte for having failed to develop an individual code of honor.
The prince himself, as a representative member of the Italian aristocracy, emerges as the emblem of a particularly Italian way of considering law and morality. He respects the fragile and the weak, beings who, like Italy, have suffered at the hand of others. Oswald, the prince claims, has rent asunder the sensitive heart of Corinne.
Although society will never punish him for this act, he may have just as well struck her with a dagger and, in so doing, at least be held accountable for his transgression. After Corinne dies, Oswald sinks into a depression that nearly causes him to lose his wits and his life. Italy and Corinne—and the accompanying fantasies of art, female imagination, and private morality that they embody—are absorbed into the smothering folds of a simple English country life.
I want neither to blame nor to absolve him Italy without Italians 71 [Corinne, Italy ]. Foscolo, in fact, was one of the very few Italian authors to enter the international arena and address foreign stereotypes about his homeland, for he spent the last decade or so of his life —27 living in England and writing for the British about Italian culture, history, and politics. For you, O reader, it would be a more pleasing spectacle to see humankind in the natural state in your own family and community.
More important, he proposes to buck the fashionable trend of emphasizing the differences between English and Italian cultures, and suggests instead that, for all their surface discrepancies, each shares a common author in nature itself: The Italian and English, created and given their speech by a common nature, repeat their lines and wear their modern costumes in completely different ways.
In order to grasp the essential kinship between England and Italy, a certain amount of cultural distance from each is needed. Exile affords Foscolo this detached perspective: And if you [reader] also lack a country and a home—then look at [humankind] in your wanderings.
The [Italian] language I write, reader, besides the powers perfected or fostered by age,. For Foscolo, the sullying of la lingua italiana by foreigners was comparable to the manner in which these same foreigners compromised Italian political Italy without Italians 73 freedom. Yet, he continues, the inherent genius and qualities of the Italian language guarantee that a certain ferociousness and freedom will always reign in Italian hearts: The majority of foreigners 74 Genus Italicum could never understand Italy, he suggests, because they seek to do so abstractly, without studying its language and carefully observing its customs.
For example, she confuses the tombs of Leonardo Bruni and Pietro Aretino based on the incidental fact that both hailed from Arezzo. Metaphysics seduced this same woman into bringing it along with her in her carriage while she penetrated, in the blink of an eye, the customs, opinions, literature, and lifeblood of national life. Today, each writer goes wandering through the history and literature of all the past centuries and all the contemporary languages.
Vanity, mixed with the impossibility of the endeavor, inspires him to show us what we do not know. And writers study with us. Foscolo notes with chagrin that such fashionable theoretical readings of history criticize Italians for their excessive reliance on Greek and Latin literature and refusal to read more modern literature. In illuminating these overlooked characteristics, he initiates his principal concern while in exile in England: Lawrence, Henry James, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, to name a few—traveled to the Peninsula in search of that same Italy that provided late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors the freedom to develop as artists and the detached perspective to contemplate their societies back home.
Some of the views that helped artists break with long-standing French neoclassical principles were admittedly extravagant. In fact, a number of empirically false observations on Italy served Romantics in reconceptualizing a construct as vast as literary history, which Romantics infused with original considerations on the nexus between geography and culture.
The other consists of the Italians of the present day, their works and ways. Building on advances in Enlightenment literary historiography, writers in the nineteenth century began to ask with increasing frequency such questions as: What is the relationship between literature and the nation? Does the history of literature contain a geographic and demographic dimension? Perhaps their Enlightenment predecessors did not ask these questions as often because they were less bothered by the crises that fueled the dialectic between historical self-consciousness and literary theory in pre-Romantic Europe.
Subjectivity, for Schiller, exists as a form of compensation. We became selves, he suggests, when we became conscious of the loss of that organic connection between humankind and the world that rendered subjectivity a moot point in the supposedly reciprocal relations between internal and external life of antiquity. Thus, in Schiller, a theory of literary history becomes no less than a theory of human nature. For many Germans, and for Schiller in particular, Goethe represented a literary history-inminiature; he was the author who took it upon himself to give his inchoate nation a cultural tradition worthy of the ancients.
The ensuing aesthetic dialogue represented the painful, glorious birth pangs of German literary history: But here and now, born a German, your Greek mind transplanted into this northern world, you are faced with the choice of becoming a Nordic artist or of recreating in your imagination the art which reality withholds from it. With the help of rational thinking you substituted, in your imagination, the ancient ideal of art for the poor reality around you.
Hartman, Goethe lacked a strong native literary tradition: The site of this transformation and the pedagogic forum for his cultural apprenticeship was Italy. Let us admit, nevertheless, that it is hard, sad work to sort out the old Rome from the new, but one has to do it and hope for inestimable satisfaction at the end. What the barbarians left standing, the builders of new Rome have ravaged [Italian Journey ].
For Goethe, as for many fellow Romantic travelers, the time within the Italian classroom is limited, and the cultural lessons learned only attain their true value at home, far removed from the originals—copies of which, thanks to his friend Tischbein, Goethe can bring back to Germany December 29, ; Italienische Reise ; Italian Journey He sought, therefore, not merely to trace the roots of German culture back to antiquity via a virtuoso display of erudition.
However, the associations that their aesthetic bliss occasioned markedly differed. For the neoclassical Addison, the perfect proportions of the statue set off a sequence of cultural meditations: The basis of his aesthetic encounters was the reciprocity between the self and the object that the work inspired, either in the form of personal epiphany, existential insight, or material for his own poetry: Cecilia favors speculation over formal analysis: The experience of art becomes more freighted with autobiographical meaning if also perhaps less enjoyable, therapeutic, or didactic.
The shift is from a tourism of appreciation to one of appropriation. For Goethe, personal contact with ancient Roman cultural forms attained full value when these same forms were transformed into a native, national idiom. The civic-minded Goethe translated his devotion to ancient Italy into the source for modern Germanic culture; for the more delicate Keats, the translatio was of an emotional, existential register. The long-standing debate, which received its most dramatic academic installment in the comparatist Wellek contra the nominalist A. Lovejoy , remains open.
In the tradition of Wellek and his contemporaries Abrams, Bloom, de Man, and Hartman, many literary comparatists and theoreticians situate the Romantic text within an international network of aesthetic, creative, and intellectual currents that reveal the conceptual and formal similarities of the various literary movements of nineteenth-century Europe. Times have changed, for the current trend is to regard with historically or politically oriented suspicion those conceptual comparative paradigms that led to the promotion, in postwar Anglo-American criticism, of the idea of a European Romanticism.
No less an authority than Manzoni argued that the actual, polemically charged word Romanticism, because it meant so many different things in so many different contexts, should never be mentioned. Only by examining aspects of the Romantic controversy on an individual and ad hoc basis can one accurately judge whether an international European Romanticism or an isolated, local Romantic effect is at work. This is the great advantage they hold over men of letters of preceding centuries.
The profound and clear reasoning which many have infused into their books and their conversation has done much to instruct and polish the nation. This philosophy has relegated to the schools thousands of childish disputations that had formerly been dangerous and have now become objects of scorn. In this way men of letters have in fact served the state. We are sometimes amazed that matters which formerly disturbed the world no longer trouble it today.
We owe this to true men of letters. His writer, one might say, is not born; he or she is made. Style, thus conceived, absorbs the need for any introspective inquiry into the self, for the agreed-upon conventions of literary excellence translate into viable models of social conduct and moral behavior. Recent work has exposed the ideological assumptions underlying the presumed stylistic universality that sanctioned these high-Enlightenment protocols.
Many philosophes, however, have considered this method quite useful. By continually looking at himself in a truthful mirror, sooner or later a man of sense ought to correct what truly displeases him, for no one knows us better than we know ourselves. Because he equates self-examination with diary writing, literary pursuits will presumably sustain his desire for self-improvement.
All of these factors suggest that his early notions of literature and authorship derived primarily from his exposure to the vogue of French literary thought. His autobiographical Vita scritta da esso Memoirs; rests upon this Archimedean point in his life in which he decides to become a writer. He writes of the Swedish landscape, one of the many stops in the incessant wandering of his life: Had I known how to write verses I should have turned it all into poetry [Memoirs ].
From that July [], in order to avoid conversing in the French language, I religiously shunned every society in which it was spoken, yet I did not succeed in Italianizing myself [Memoirs ]. This process of Italianization via mastery of the prestigious Tuscan dialect of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio entailed the rejection of those rhetorical principles that allowed the Enlightenment writer to move effortlessly between genres.
Io mi arrabbiava, e piangeva: Era forza pigliar pazienza, e rifare: I raged, I wept, but it was necessary to assume patience and begin my task anew. I was obliged to ransack classical Italian texts, however insipid and anti-tragical, in order to become master of the native Tuscan. The Italian models he initially consults, however, repel him because of their ostentation and empty formalism.
But the exorcism of French rhetoric is not yet complete. Only an Italian author such as he would opt for a local Tuscan dialect—which was, after all, a foreign language even to him, a native of Piedmont—rather than the accepted international prestige of French. But through his mythmaking—a Romanticizing of Italy similar to that which took place abroad—he paved the way both for a literary rebirth in his native land and for foreigners to view Italian cultural history as a viable alternative to increasingly obsolete high-Enlightenment especially French literary ideals.
He was born to act, but he could only write. His style and his tragedies are affected by this constraint. He wanted to achieve a political objective by means of literature [Corinne, Italy ]. She claims, however, that his quixotic desire to be a literary history-of-one was doomed to fail; he was no Goethe.
Lucile has come to visit Corinne to apologize to her about her marriage, gain her forgiveness, and establish a relationship with the EnglishItalian half sister from whom she was separated in childhood. Because Lucile married Oswald unaware of the fact that he had been involved with Corinne, Corinne assures Lucile that she does not begrudge her actions. Instead, she offers Lucile advice: Like Dido, in death Corinne rejects an Aeneas that in life she could not live without.
Her death song, appropriately, begins with an apostrophe to Rome that is funereal both in theme and tone: Fellow citizens, listen to my solemn greeting. Darkness already draws near to my vision, but is not the sky more beautiful at night? Thousands of stars adorn it. By day, it is but a desert. The eternal shadows reveal countless 92 Genus Italicum thoughts which gleaming posterity made us forget. But the voice which could tell of them gradually grows faint [Corinne, Italy —]. The deadly muses, love and unhappiness, inspire her, and the angel of death, white wings and shroud of darkness withal, awaits her.
Corinne then turns once more to her adopted city: And you, Rome, where my ashes will be conveyed, you who have seen so many die, if, with trembling step, I join your illustrious dead, forgive me for complaining. Perhaps noble, fruitful feelings and thoughts die with me, and of all the faculties of the heart I receive from nature, that of suffering is the only one I have fully put into practice [Corinne, Italy ]. In so doing, she lends the Roman necropolis a genius loci of a distinctly European Romantic dimension that remains beholden to long-standing Enlightenment principles.
Rome accepts Corinne after native England has spurned her; and the liberal Roman nation allows Corinne her glories, while refusing to discriminate against her gender or national identity. More mysterious, however, remain the reasons that a certain idea or representation of Dante came to dominate the literary reception of the poet, both in the high literature of the age and in the public imaginary.
The nature of this paradigmatic notion of Dante becomes all the more striking, when one considers that it does not often square with the messages and motifs of the masterpiece that established his Romantic preeminence, La divina commedia. As obscure as Foscolo, Manzoni, and their contemporaries were, Dante was proportionately famous; yet it was not always so.
The Romantics were intensely interested in his biography, especially the poetic and legendary form established by Boccaccio in Trattatello in laude di Dante Little treatise in praise of Dante; c. In the Commedia, however, heroism serves only to aid the Pilgrim in his spiritual ascent. Dante later admits to Virgil that, were he to die at the time of his journey through the afterworld, he would be placed in the terraces of Purgatorio among the proud. One could even argue that the central theme of Paradiso, the canticle in which Dante encounters God, is the overcoming of the self.
That he, here in exile, could do this work [the Commedia], that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great; the greatest a man could do. An eminent statesman and educator in thirteenth-century Tuscany, Latini, like Dante, suffered exile. Unlike Dante, however, Latini failed to acknowledge his own sins and shortcomings. Dante lampoons his former teacher by exposing the ostentation and empty erudition of his Latinisms, rhetorical inversions, and false allegiance to the realm of medieval astrology.
I am prepared for Fortune as she wills. Such earnest [talk by Latini] is not strange to my ears, therefore let Fortune whirl her wheel as pleases her, and the yokel his mattock. Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling promoted Dante as a landmark in modern individuality in order to situate the birth of their artistic and intellectual concerns in a historical source whose visionary character imbued their endeavors with a transcendental basis and bias.
We are today in a better position to recognize its unique synthesis of the most heterogeneous elements; for we are both at one with the poet and at the same time divorced from him through our modern education. Dante, by contrast, is all about closure. His architectonic mind, moreover, privileged what the Romantics avoided: Few Romantic readers ventured into Purgatorio or Paradiso; as Victor Hugo writes, the human eye, at least in Romantic Europe, was not made to look upon such light, and when the Commedia becomes happy, it was thought to be boring. In literary-historical terms, the rebirth of Dante was indeed sudden and dramatic.
By the early nineteenth century, the canonical status of the Commedia was so well established as to prompt Peacock and later Wordsworth to deride the resurgence of Dante as a cult. Between and , no fewer than editions of the Commedia were published in Europe, from Scotland to present-day Slovakia, edited by writers as accomplished as Rossetti, Foscolo, and Mazzini. Between roughly and , European writers revised the way they wrote about, interpreted, and imagined their own lives. On the other hand, the Romantic age is considered the period of self-conscious inquiry into an interior drama that is then cloaked with literary form.
They shared, however, a concern with the question of individual personality, the development of artistic sensibility or creative vocation, and the desire to unravel the threads of emotional history and private thoughts. If so-called Romantic autobiography might be reduced to any single trait, it could be this sense of the sometimes daunting, often inscrutable strangeness that writers imagined they carried inside themselves. If that sense of inner strangeness now seems either well-rehearsed or self-indulgent, we need only recall how astonishing and perverse it would have appeared to the generations of authors—the Johnsons, Lessings, Montesquieus, Parinis, and so on—who never heard its voices.
Nobody reads Dante anymore in Europe. Many major writers remarked about the work, and some devoted themselves either to attacking or defending it. After , Europe saw no new publication of the text until In contrast to the paucity of writing on Dante during the s, the range of Dante criticism during the eighteenth century was indeed broad. Voltaire reserved, however, this process of self-emancipation for a select few who could immerse themselves in the study of books only by casting aside worldly concerns. The Voltairean garden was never merely a place where one donned a mask and played at letters for a while, only to shed the disguise once the demands of the city encroached upon the stillness of the literary grove.
From this Archimedean point outside of historical events, he critiqued Heirs of a Dark Wood society through satire, literary evaluation, and philosophical speculation. The garden was ultimately the only place where the iconoclast Voltaire felt at home; exile and displacement were, therefore, preconditions for the independence that he only experienced in small, episodic doses. In this era, the typical attitude toward the Commedia was disdainful: Corneille, Racine, and Blaise Pascal ignored Dante. Like the ancients, there was nothing that Dante did not express.
He encouraged the Italians to say all. Nobody reads Dante anymore in Europe, because his work is nothing but allusions to now-ignored facts. As harsh as these words may sound, Voltaire wrote them with a neutrality that disappeared in the later criticism. As we will see, however, his defense only pushed Dante further into the exile that Voltaire had decreed for him.
According to Baretti, after a golden age in the baroque France of Louis XIII, the return to cultural sobriety under the aegis of critics like Bayle and Boileau led the French to reject the Italian literary tradition. He describes the French as a docile and passive nation: Baretti fails, however, to develop the notion of taste implicit in these observations. Critics of his age struggled with the question of whether it was possible to establish a model of literary taste that transcended cultural differences. According to Voltaire, taste in literature was universal insofar as it was beholden to such abstract qualities as clarity, design, and measure.
His aesthetic theories embodied the qualities of his own social milieu, which in turn rewarded him for upholding its values by sanctioning his views on art. Voltaire considered literature—like clothing, cuisine, gardening, and even animal husbandry—an art of civilization and thus the antithesis of the natural and primitive.
These allegorical lines invoke a monumental, polished cultural enclave into which the gens de lettres enter through a door hidden from the world. Such highly aestheticized realms embodied the types of spaces from which writers in support of Voltaire attacked Dante. Ever the Enlightenment gentleman, Baretti rivals Voltaire in his wish to produce a version of Dante suitable for the drawing room. In line with many of his contemporaries, he used translation to tame the supposedly primitive elements in Dante.
Our torments would be less, if you would allay the rage of your hunger upon us. Hoping both to dissuade young Italian writers from imitating Dante and to defend an increasingly besieged cosmopolitan ideal of neoclassicism, Bettinelli issued what is likely the most debilitating of all eighteenth-century attacks on Dante: Lettere virgilianae Virgilian letters.
The letters propose to meditate on Italian literary history, but they barely masque their promotional intent. The second letter describes a make-believe land whose arcadian inhabitants masquerade as Greek and Latin poets. He juxtaposes the immaturity and uncouthness of the Dantesque intruder with the serene detachment of the arcadian poets: But we, who by nature are more patient and because of our work more accommodating, invited him to sit with us on the grass.
This pronouncement by the Roman poet rewrites one of the more powerful scenes in the Commedia, Inferno In Inferno 26, Virgil represents a cultural ally who helps the Pilgrim communicate with an ancient Greek. Virgil next takes the Commedia and joins the Greek and Roman poets who have secluded themselves from the others: I took in hand the heavy volume and sat with it in a circle of Latins and Greeks.
By situating the literary pastoral of Limbo in the early part of hell, Dante shows that even the greatest achievements of literature must answer to a transcendental Christian order. Dante also fails, according to Bettinelli, because he attributes to Virgil anachronistic knowledge of medieval matters. When the Commedia is mentioned, Ovid laughs, Lucretius yawns, and Horace describes it as an eccentric poem that is neither utile useful nor dulce pleasing. The reactions of these arcadian litterateurs are eminently classicizing: The Pilgrim exhibits none of the impersonal heroism that Bettinelli associated with the protagonists of the epic genre, of which he imagined the Commedia to be a failed example.
He negatively contrasts Dante with the traditional epic hero who is passively linked to a larger sociopolitical and cultural network that gives meaning to his actions from without and endows him with a sense of personal identity. His ultimate value, Bettinelli claims, is that he was a pioneer who allowed his literary successors their achievements. I admire the courage with which you ventured to claim that Dante was mad and that his work was a monster.
I still prefer this monster to all those miserable worms called sonnets that come and go by the thousands in Italy, from Milan to Trent. The Italians call him divine, but it is a hidden divinity. Few people understand his oracles. He has his commentators, which is perhaps yet another reason for not being understood. His reputation will always endure, since scarcely anyone reads him.
- Waiting For Us.
- Mantenersi al fresco. Consigli utili per chi finisce in carcere (I Galeoni) (Italian Edition);
- Il viaggio (Italian Edition);
There are in his work twenty or so passages that we know by heart, and there is thus no need to bother with examining the rest of him. This is not to say that Voltaire is ahistorical in the tradi- Dante and Autobiography tional sense of the word. In fact, the paragraphs following the above citation explore the relationship between the biography of Dante and the content of the Commedia. His interests were less the peculiarities and details of a given period and more its overall spirit, and the way this spirit informed his theories of historical progress.
Whereas other historians situated Dante in a primeval forest of crude yet powerful barbarism, Voltaire disdainfully set him on a shelf in the antiquarian shop. But there are some verses so felicitous and natural that they have not aged in four hundred years and never will age. For Voltaire, the anteriority of the primitive poet, however pure and raw, represents not a stage of plenitude from which the later writer has fallen but a state of ignorance out of which he has progressed.
Even if thinkers like Voltaire understood the great extent to which individual experience shaped aesthetic judgments, most defended the belief that a general human nature supersedes the impulse to relativism and subjectivity. The faith of most philosophes in human perfectibility, the eradication of prejudice, and the study of humankind in the Enlightenment understanding of anthropology depended on the premise that human nature is the same for all.
Crucial to this argument was the idea of common sense. With these universal points of contact in the human psyche, Voltaire and his associates imagined that it was possible to extrapolate guiding principles—not rules—for evaluating art. From this perspective, it is logical that Voltaire would set his critique of Dante on the same philosophical foundation that supported the aesthetic notions of his fellow philosophes.
But his reading of the Commedia, for all its bile, does reveal an abiding interest in Dante that distinguishes him from the other Encyclopedists, none of whom left any lasting contribution to Dante studies. The manner in which Voltaire approached the historical world of the Commedia was consistent with how he interpreted his own past. Like the majority of the philosophes, he composed few works that addressed the content of his own life.
Voltaire and other philosophes did pose the sort of questions about personal identity that later compelled Romantic writers to turn to the Commedia. The forms, however, in which many philosophes chose to couch their inquiry into the self—whether the memoir, philosophical tract, or historical overview of literary production—tended not to focus on their individual feelings and thoughts about their own lives.
Dante and Autobiography Voltaire left only three texts that are autobiographical in nature. Horticultural imagery marks each stage of this bittersweet return: We have movement, life, feelings, and thoughts without knowing how. The world of nature is as unknown to us as everything else. For the psychoana- lyst, instead, Zeno's lies are facts that he believes reveal the truth of Zeno's past. Diceva 'Abbiamo avuto questo, abbiamo avuto quello' " "The doctor noted everything.
He would say 'We have had this, we have had that,' " In Svevo's version of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex is the problem that once recognized will provide the cure. He is unaware, however, that Zeno is lying and making up stories just to please him. The infant Oedipus was just like that: I invented new details of my childhood in conformity with Sophocles' diagnosis," When Zeno lacks good dreams that can satisfy Doctor S. Of course to Doctor S. To them everything counts. Zeno may think he has invented that he sucked his mother's left foot but as Doctor S. Psychoanalysis and Doctor S.
Non era altra che quella diagnosticata a suo tempo dal defunto Sofocle sul povero Edipo: The Svcvo limi lin- Ironie Conscience of the Novel 35 diagnosis was exactly the same that dead Sophocles made on poor Oedipus: I had loved my mother and wanted to kill by father. In one of the novels key allegories, the episode of the fly, Svevo points to two basic errors in man's quest for health.
The fly in question was bothering Zeno who in blowing it away damages one of its legs. Con le due zampine posteriori si lisciava assidua- mente le ali. It was industriously cleaning its wings with its two hind legs. It tried to move, but fell over on its back. Then it picked itself up again and returned obstinately to its task. Scrissi allora quei versi, stupito di aver scoperto che quel piccolo organismo pervaso da tanto dolore, fosse diretto nel suo sforzo immane da due errori: Erano errori che si possono facilmente scusare in un insetto che non vive che la vita di una sola stagione, e non ha tempo di far dell'esperienza.
First of all, in cleaning its wings so persistently the insect showed that it did not know which was the wounded limb. Secondly, its persistent efforts showed that it assumed health to be the right of every- one, and that though we have lost it we shall certainly find it again. These errors are quite excusable in an insect which only lives for one season and has no time to learn from experience. The insect's two errors are that although it feels pain he ignores the origin of that pain and, second, that it regards health as something it is his by right. These are man's two major delusions.
Man deludes himself when he thinks that he knows the origin of his illness and he can cure it and when he presumes that he has a right to health. Psychoanalysis is one way that these errors are perpetuated. In the case of the animal health is regained through the animal's innate ability to adapt to the demands of nature. Health can only belong to the animal, whose sole idea of progress is that of his own body. When the swallow realized that emigration was the only possible life for her, she enlarged the muscles which worked her wings, and which became by degrees the most important part of her body.
The mole went underground, and its whole body adapted itself to the task. The horse grew bigger and changed the shape of his foot. We know nothing about the development of certain animals, but it must have existed, and can never have injured their health. It tries to survive any way it can. The same cannot be said for man. Unlike the animal, man has not learned to adjust, on the contrary, he has tried to substitute himself to Nature forcing it to adjust to his ways.
At first the "ordigni," as with the animal, were extensions of man himself, necessary to his survival. Later, however, they become instruments for the dissemination of destruction and of illness. Nowadays, however, the tool bears no longer any relation to the arm. It is the tool that creates the disease by abandoning the law by which everything was created on earth. Survival for man is in terms of the greatest number of "ordigni" — instruments of destruction — he possesses Svi'vo ami ihf Inmtv Conscience of he Navel 37 whereby he survives by destroying others.
Altro che psico-analisi ci vorrebbe: We need something more than psychoanalysis to help us. Under the law of the greatest accumulation of tools, disease will prosper and the diseased will grow ever more numerous," , italics mine. Man's illness cannot be cured by psychoanalysis or by any other cure. The only cure, the only possible return to health, in Svevo's pessimistic and apocalyptic vision, is a world-wide catastrophe that would put an end to the human race. Only with the destruction of the planet earth as we know it, illness will finally disappear because for Svevo that illness is man.
The final explosion that will wipe man from the face of the earth is the final irony. The tool that man developed initially in order to survive, and later becomes an instrument of domination and destruction, finally turns against him and destroys him altogether. The "health" that man seeks will be achieved only with the end of man. At that moment, time too will finally come to a halt and cease to exist. In the explosive finale of the novel, Svevo's supreme, absolute irony puts an end to time and to all of man's illusions at one stroke.
Zeno's "coscienza," in Eleatic fashion, disrupts our ordinary perception of the world and reveals it in all it nakedness. His language is not the language of communication but of disfiguration. It reveals the "sickness" of the figure which hides the real sick- ness. This is not a conscious action on Zeno's part. As we have said earlier, Zeno's "coscienza" is ironic and functions despite his ordinary, commonplace mentality. This ironic knowledge is described as a knowledge without knowing: Through Zeno's ironic "coscienza" speaks a wisdom which is not his and 38 Massimo Verdicchio is not ordinary knowledge.
Those who know professors or psychoanalysts possess only a knowledge of facts which in the last instance is useless and misleading, whereas Zeno's ironic "coscienza" is a knowledge that goes to the heart of the problem and does so by questioning and "disfiguring" ex- amples of health. Zeno reminds us of that philosopher who went looking for a wise man but always found that those reputed wise were more ignorant than he. Zeno is for Svevo an ironic tool, "ordigno," with which to criti- cize a society obsessed with health which to Svevo appeared hopelessly and incurably sick.
Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy
The reading of La coscienza di Zeno and the search for its meaning s are preoccupations rather similar to an obsession with health; the reader or the critic is not different from the analyst. As I have already indicated, in some instances the reader-critic indeed has become the analyst and has placed both Zeno and Svevo's novel on the couch. Other times the reader-critic has downplayed Svevo's pessimism by attributing it to the erratic and extremist behavior of his protagonist or simply to the shortcomings of the social class that he represents. Just as the "coscienza" of not having been cured is the best proof of health, the best proof that one is reading this novel with a certain degree of accuracy is in the awareness that its meaning is not what one thought it to be at first but always other and different in spite of our efforts.
This is a reading based not on the professional knowledge of what we expect or know the novel to be but on the ironic Eleatic knowledge that things are never what they seem logically to be. Extensive modifications to de Zoete's translation have been made throughout. The translation of other texts is mine. For example, Fonda's premise and justification for his Freudian reading of Zeno and of the novel is the following, "la premessa fondamentale, l'ultima convinzione che sta alla base di tutto il nostro studio Fonda discounts the possibility that Svevo might be humoring the practice of psychoanalysis.
How can one be and know that he is being? The paradox is a form of the ancient paradox of Zeno of Eleia sic , transposed from the mysteries of space and motion to those of Augustinian duration and time" Petersen identifies ironie themes and ironie elements in the novel but does not provide an overall reading of the novel. Here everything was truth" His enthusiasm made him even attempt a translation of Freud's On dreams.
This interest in psychoanalytical theory, however, does not extend to the practice. Svevo was disenchanted with it when his brother- in-law Bruno, who had gone to Vienna to be analyzed by Freud, returned even more neurotic than before. For accounts in English see for instance Furbank halo Svevo especially 7, Svevo's interest in "psychoanalytical" problems predates even Freud, as he says himself: This quotation also implies that even more than Freud, the greatest influence on Svevo was Charlie Chaplin and his character Chariot. Svevo's literary use of Freud, Nietzsche or Darwin, did not imply that he shared their philosophy.
Svevo's similar preoccupation with the unconscious explains why, in sending a copy of La coscienza di Zeno to Freud, he expected to be commended by him. As Lebowitz suggests, perhaps Svevo wanted from Freud the same accolade that he had sent to Arthur Schnitzler praising him for the depth of his artistic intuitions But just as Weiss, who at the time was a personal friend 40 Massimo Verdicchio of Freud, reneged on his promise to review La coscienza di Zeno because "the novel had nothing whatever to do with psychoanalysis'" Furbank, , so Freud, if he read the novel, not only must have felt the same but must have felt slighted by a novel that however full of insights into human nature also made fun of his psychoanalysis.
Quel tono ricorda da vicino quello che riconoscevamo in Svevo, giudice e confessore del suo protagonista" "He has taken on that apologetic tone in reverse, typical of Jewish antisemitism, whereby the deepest love and hatred can be found together in a monstrous embrace. That tone reminds us closely of what we recognized in Svevo, judge and confessor of his protagonist," Or when Zeno is seen to be emblematic of the ambiguity and impotence fo the middle classes by Lunetta. Proposta di interpretazione della Coscienza di Zeno.
The Man and the Writer. Indagine psicanalitica sull'opera di Italo Svevo. Saggio sul testo di Svevo. La Coscienza di Zeno. The Confessions of Zeno Trans. London and New York: Starting with the earliest reviews, some critics have focused on its factual matrix and interiority, while others have highlighted its feminist message.
At the same time, Graf's contemporary, Alfredo Gargiulo, understood its seminal nature, placing it "nella bibbia del femminismo, al posto della genesi" alongside Ib- sen's plays, an opinion echoed in by Lanfranco Garetti: Aleramo was extremely concerned with the veracity of her fiction, as though any dis- tortion of the facts would negate the validity of her message for, although her heroine's tale was exemplary, it was also her story whose telling was an act of self-revelation.
The emphasis on truthfulness contained in this revisionist re-telling underlines the fusion of the real and fictional selves in Aleramo's writing: Dissi in quel tempo che soltanto ad un intcriore comando avevo ubbidito lasciando la casa dov'ero moglie e madre. Come si va ad un martirio. Non era per amore d'un altro uomo ch'io mi liberavo: Bussane se Throughout her long literary career, Sibilla would come to consistently and faithfully write herself, obliterating the demarcation between reality and imagination in a series of poetry collections, novels, and public diaries which link her production to that of other modern women "writers like Dorothy Richardson and Anais Nin, whose lives, journals, letters, and fiction become nearly coterminous" Gardiner , to such an extent that Aleramo would come to create works like Amo dunque sono , an autobiographical epistolary novel that reads like a diary for the beloved.
Aleramo's female protagonists are projections of herself and this narcissistic identification of author and character is further heightened by the employment of a first person narration. However, the tone, style, and purpose of Una donna differ from the lyric and fragmentary nature of later Sibillian prose, from which this first novel was also separated by more than a decade of artistic silence. Notwithstanding its autobiographical fidelity, Una donna was intended as a manifesto, or a "thesis" novel, in which the obvious feminist ideology both includes and transcends the personal chronicle.
In a letter dated Septem- ber 17, , two years prior to publication, Aleramo had already noted the paradigmatic value of her past, as well as her own detachment from it: Like history, Una donna records the past. While the book's first person narrative demands a participational reading reminiscent of the journals and autobiographies women often chose to compose "not only because they were more 'acceptable,' but because they often suited what was an underlying motive of women writings — the need to validate one's own experiences" Goulianos 81 , its structure is essentially realist.
Critics have frequently indicated Una donna'? Una donna; Autobiography as Exemplary Text 43 The heroine's experiences offer a maturation process in progress whereas the narrating "I" attests to the achievement of the desired maturity and self- affirmation. In feminist terms, the witness has achieved the psychological liberation for which the protagonist is striving.
In many ways, Una donna is a "libro della mia memoria" which, like the Dantesque prototype, declares incipit vita nova, a new life whose meaning is understood in both personal and universal terms after the narrator has reappraised the past. In recreating the significant moments in her own life, Aleramo seeks to associate a woman with Everywoman; the autobiographical tale becomes the story of woman-kind.
In doing so, the author explores a variety of standard female literary motifs, which have been identified and described in recent scholarship on women writers,'" and utilizes several significant archetypal patterns, which will be detailed in the course of this analysis. Among the recurrent themes, common to women's fiction, we find: In addition, many of Aleramo's struc- tural and stylistic choices serve to depersonalize and, thereby, universalize, her narration.
The division of the text and its ordering indicate Sibilla's adherence to a somewhat traditional format. The story line is presented se- quentially from earliest childhood memories to the narrating present with no use of flashbacks and a relatively consistent use of the past tenses.
The heroine has gone beyond the reality described and survived; the past is now memory, albeit painful. By implication, other women in similar circumstances can do the same. It is important to note that Aleramo's first draft was written in the present tense,'" which naturally intensified the emotional level and the im- mediacy of communication, making the book more diaristic, but this verbal choice narrowed the focus on change and rebirth.
By opting for the finality of the past tenses rather than the ongoing quality of the present, the author requires her public to assume the perspective of the narrating "I. In turn, the internal structures of each part are complementary, although they do not correspond in chronological time. Parti Prima and Seconda are of similar length nine and ten chap- ters, respectively but of unequal duration: Bassanese Stresses inner growth and its time is psychologically defined; the chapters indicate interior change rather than the passage of years and the protagonist's education is predominantly spiritual.
Not incidentally, the nine chapters of Parte Prima contrast thematically with the ten of Seconda: Parte Terza covers a short temporal span and a mere three chapters in narrative space; its truncated length is a sign of its content, for the protagonist opts for authenticity and abandons her family and, by doing so, the past. This focus on growth and process leading to closure suggest an inherent affinity between the design of Una donna and the patterns of the Bildungsroman. Generically, a Bildung story details the psychological development of the main character; as it is traditionally defined, such a novel is an optimistic ren- dering of male development and integration into the social fabric.
The genre's acknowledged prototype, Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre , fol- lows the adventures and misadventures of the protagonist, a merchant's son, as he sets forth to learn about life and decipher its meaning in a series of sex- ual encounters, work experiences, reversals, and achievements. The sequel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden , depicts the mature Meister relating to his society as a contributing member. Briefly put, the classic German Bildungsroman and its imitators are about leaving childhood, exploring the world, and learning lessons with the specific in- tent of creating rational, responsible paradigms of human behavior; the hero gradually matures by leaving the security of family and home and venturing into the unknown and often hostile world.
In the end, the Bildung hero has achieved a private identity which allows him to integrate into a social group generally, the bourgeoisie by adopting its values. Clearly, many of the topoi utilized in a male Bildung process cannot apply to female protagonists be- cause of the diverse natures of their socio-sexual development. Recent studies on novels of female maturation, notably Annis Pratt's Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction and the anthological The Voyage in Fictions of Female De- velopment, have dealt with variations on the Bildungsroman as it is adjusted to portray women's reality.
The nineteenth century proposed two models of female development novels. Early, socially conservative stories written for young girls emphasized patriarchal values to their readers, such as chastity, domesticity, submissiveness, and altruism. These novels offered models for "growing down" rather than "growing up," ' to distinguish the different existential sphere inhabited by women. Since the traditional woman's domain is private rather than pub- Una donna.
Autobiography as Exemplary Text 45 lie, her life-style is defined by confinement and passivity offering no valid openings to the outside world in which the male conducts his quest for iden- tity, autonomy, and position. Female life is directed to closure not adventure, obeisance not action, chastity not sexuality. Her apprenticeship is pre-ordained. A sub-genre of this con- ventional and conservative female BiUlung novel traces the spiritual nature of the heroine's quest beyond its seemingly inevitable conclusion in mar- riage and maternity.
In this variation on the novel of de- velopment, the protagonist comes to understand the disparity between social expectations and personal aspirations; because of a fundamental discontent with her lot and through personal meditation, the "awakened" heroine strives for self-fulfillment and authenticity only to be blocked by the obstacles cre- ated by the patriarchal order.
Seeking real growth, the heroine meets with rejection and dead-ends forcing her to retreat, abdicate, or choose non-conformity and exile. Una donna's narrative patterns borrow from both the classic female novel of development and its evolutionary offspring, the novel of awakening. The initial pattern described in the book's first chapters appears to herald a stan- dard male Bildungsroman, for the protagonist as child rejects passivity and domesticity in favor of action and energy. She reads voraciously, possesses a questioning mind, finds pleasure in her athletic prowess, emulates her father's work ethic, refuses feminine tasks, and rejects the home in favor of office work at the factory.
Drawn to power, independence, authority, intellect, and an undefined sensuality, the girl favors the assertive world and personality of her father while denying the value of her mother's femininity. It is only with advancing puberty and the forced recognition of her sexual identification that the protagonist conforms to standard behavioral norms applied to women and, even then, only after having been manipulated, spiritually seduced, and physically violated by an attractive and inferior co-worker.
At this point, the text implies that cross-sexual attitudes call for the downfall of the "mas- 46 Fiora A. Bassanese culine" heroine as a negative model which is to be avoided: Women who rebel against the female role are perceived as unnatural and pay the price of unhappiness, if not madness or death. It is also the introduction of a more conventional female development pattern directed at producing good mothers and wives rather than rebellious androgyne.
As often occurs in early female Bildungsromane , the non-conformist girl must be made to comply through suffering and punishment. Because of her vio- lent sexual initiation, the heroine's biology has become her destiny and she must follow society's fixed gender roles. Having lost ownership of her body according to established morality, this child-woman of fifteen abdicates her personhood as well and becomes the property of her rapist: Appartenevo ad un uomo, dunque? Lo credetti dopo non so quanti giorni d'uno smar- rimento senza nome. Avevo cominciato a pensare che forse amavo il giovane da tanti mesi senza saperlo.
Poi avevo soggiunto che forse, in quell'avvenire di amore e di dedizione non mai prima intraveduto, era la salvezza, era la pace, era la gioia. Egli m'aveva voluta, egli m'era destinato, tutto s'era disposto men- tre io credevo seguire una ben diversa via. Quello sposo delle leggende, che m'era sempre parso un puerile personaggio, esisteva, era lui! The metamorphosis from ravager into prince, violence into love, and indepen- dent human being into possession re-establishes the traditional prototype of the female Bildungsroman: Like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, she prepares for a life similar to those fic- tions which "portrayed acquiescent females who cultivated domestic virtues in dreamy anticipation of a prince's rescue by which the heroine might enter magically into marriage — her highest calling.
It is her first taste of closure, as she is confined to her father's house, awaiting marriage: Vera stato davvero un tempo in cui io potevo recarmi alla spiaggia a mio piacere, a tuffarmi per ore nell'acqua, e vagar nella campagna, e abbandonarmi a sogni di lavoro e di bellezza senza fine? Adesso le giornate scorrevano quasi per intero nel silenzio della mia stanzetta.
Autobiography as Exemplary Text 47 definitivamente fissata" With the achievement of the married state, Una donna's heroine has completed the voyage of discovery charted for women, crowned with the joy of motherhood. Yet, just as marriage is a closure to the dreams, hopes, aspirations and freedom of adolescence, other such ter- minations and impediments appear as the novel progresses, continuing the protagonist's maturation process.
Attempting to be the perfect wife, the heroine becomes a perfectly unhappy one, reacting with inertia and frigidity to her new husband. Her legendary prince has not rescued her but meta- morphosed, instead, into a tyrannical, sexually demanding toad. Maternity augurs a new fulfillment and an escape from personal unhappiness which is socially acceptable but it does not complete her. As she attempts to regain a measure of meaningfulness and power over the environment through her child, he becomes her stand-in as she sets out to mold him, making the boy the image of her perfect self, an impossible task.
The more she gives her son, the less the heroine has left for herself: In me la madre non s'integrava nella donna. Instead, Aleramo shifts the action so that the book clearly presents itself as a novel of awakening rather than a classic novel of female development whose intended goal is the exaltation of passive womanly virtues and the praise of married life. Now conscious of her inner needs and existential angst, the heroine seeks for wholeness; another opening to personal satisfaction materializes in the person of a "forestiero," an outsider come to invade her limited physical and psychological spaces.
She idealizes her platonic lover and romanticizes the beauty of their adulterous attachment, only to reject him too when he proves as animalistic and egotistical as her rapist husband. By the conclusion of the first section of Una donna, the heroine has attempted all avenues of self-realization open to women in a traditional society: All have failed her and the consequences of having violated her vows albeit only in thought and having stained her husband's name her own being valueless are abuse, public dishonor, and further confinement into the unreachable recesses of her house turned prison.
Beaten and unheeded, "come un oggetto immondo" 90 , the bruised woman chooses the negative self-affirmation of suicide only to be forced back to life. Bassanese Seen as an independent whole, Una donna''? Caught between society's dictums and her private self, she turns to adulterous love, despair, and death.
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All three characters seek resolutions to their emptiness first in marriage, then through their children, and finally in an alternative passion, only to find that all are wanting; thus, suicide becomes the last possibility for women suffocating in their optionless lives. The awareness of social constraints, the subordination to a spouse's whims and demands in keeping with the Pauline injunction that wives submit to their husbands, motherly affection, and the abdication to male supremacy are all signs of a cyclical fate which is passed from mother to daughter through the generations, offering only resignation, madness, or death as female openings: Questo il destino [di mia madre] e forse di tutte le donne?
The opening and closing sentences of this section of Aleramo's novel point to the negative knowledge achieved by the protagonist. Going from an attitude of vital autonomy — "La mia fanciullezza fu libera e gagliarda" 19 — to one of lifeless abandon to the power of the other, the male — "Ma la mano ferma ed inflessibile mi resse il capo, mi costrinse" 93 — the heroine has awakened to the reality of her woman's identity in a patriarchal universe.
In her depiction of this female iter which closely parallels her own experiences, Sibilla Aleramo manages to integrate a number of recognizable archetypal images that mirror the universal female condition and emphasize the paradigmatic nature of her Bildung narrative. Since archetypes are woven into the fabric of the collective unconscious, these categories are not necessarily calculated by the artist but flow naturally into a work, being common, if variable, images, narrative patterns, and types.
As employed by Ale- ramo, these archetypes are not mutually exclusive but blend harmoniously in the structure of her plot and the characterization of her protagonists. In her adolescent, pre-sexual development, Sibilla's heroine displays a predilection for physical sovereignity and a one-ness with the infinite natural world the green world archetype that sets her apart from the invasive and threaten- ing social order and offers her a place for authenticity.
At the same time, she finds herself innately unsuited because of her intellect, aspirations, and self-determination to the community she rejects but is destined to enter the growing-up-grotesque archetype. The vitality and hopefulness characterizing the adolescent hero's attitude toward her future here meet and conflict with the expectations and dictates of the surround- ing society. Every element of her desired world — freedom to come and go, alle- Una donna. Autohiof'raphy as Exemplary Text 49 giance to nature, meaningful work, exercise of the intellect, and use of her own erotic capabilities — incvitahly clashes with patriarchal norms.
Pratt 29 The adolescent "s ingress into male-dominated society is often forced and involves the loss of autonomy and self-hood the rape trauma , contrasting the freedom of the green world with the enclosure of marriage. Part of the Sibillian protagonist's grotesqueness is based on her personal identification with masculine rather than feminine qualities. Aleramo clearly divides the two spheres through the representation of the parental figures.
The Father and Mother are both individuals and stereotypes, embodying, respectively, reason and emotion. He is a scientist, risk-taker, manager, leader, freethinker, and atheist: By comparison, she is a shadow figure whose traits include submissiveness, fragility, resignation, sentimentality, and anxiety.
The dynamic Father overpowers the passive Mother, controls her, and eventually breaks her will. The daughter's affinities, before marriage, are totally paternal as she is drawn to him in a complex, exclusive, and exclusionary bond: She emulates his work ethic and beliefs, keeps her hair short, runs, swims, works at the factory, and rejects the passive life of her mother. Drawn to male power, she is androgynous and abhors her blossoming womanhood, outrightly rejecting marriage as her destiny. It is the Mother she is repudiating and the traditional female role.
Whereas father and daughter are ostracized and excluded by the community, a small provincial Southern town, the mother is honored as the ideal: The Marian model is a perfect patriarchal projection of suitable womanliness in its devotion, piety, humility, chastity, and obedi- ence to male authority.
Such virtues are shunned in men, however, "and the type of virtues decreed feminine degenerate easily: Trapped in her virtues and rendered powerless, the Mother gains public commendation but loses herself. The frail woman, unloved and unnecessary, impulsively attempts suicide, suiA'ives. The melancholia, hysteria, and masochism of the Mother are brought about by her enclosure in the spaces and limitations of marriage, which afford her no room of her own in which to define herself.
Having lost her husband's love, fidelity, and erotic interest, she develops into the mad wife so common in literature by women: Aleramo's Mother is confined from 50 Fiora A. Bassanese the beginning to the end of the novel. She inhabits her house, the only uni- verse she knows. Even her joyful memories are contained in four domestic walls: Significantly, the Father introduces his daughter to working spaces and nature whereas the Mother instructs her in prayer in the limits of her childhood room. While the Father's spaces enlarge, the Mother's narrow.
She can only escape by fleeing the house, flinging herself from a window during her suicide attempt. Savoca is the first editor to return to the Vat. Commas function both rhythmically and semantically, and sometimes signify a brief pause to negotiate tension between rhythm and significance; they isolate or coordinate elements within and between clauses.
Savoca argues that the subtlety with which the poet used the pause guarantees the musicality of the Canzoniere and the accretion of meaning. This is the principal innovation of the edition. In compensation, the musicality of each work is enhanced, as is the fluidity of the entire Canzoniere as the reader passes from one composition to the next. The first line is punctuated with a colon, which charges the remainder of the sonnet, an accumulation of hyperbole praising the singularity of the beloved, to serve as a proof for the sweeping initial pronouncement.
The thirteenth line again ends with a colon, and the sonnet concludes with a first person description of the poet as a man bewitched by the qualities of this woman: Unlike Contini, but in keeping with Vat. According to Savoca, the comma in line three invites the reader to reflect on the happy contrast between the blond youth and the white head of maturity, and to mediate and harmonize the sound and sense. Removing the comma in line ten means losing a stylistic trait absolutely specific to Petrarch, that is, the use of the comma before the conjunction e, et.
La breccia di Porta Pia. This was an event in which De Amicis himself had participated as a young army officer and military journalist. These accounts are truly passionate, but still embellished, in order to imprint Rome in the hearts of the Italian people, as future capital of the still incomplete kingdom of Italy.
His memories, however, are more pamphlets than detailed reports. Real events and fictional invention are commixed, and his stories become tools to build memories, rather than to preserve them. His stories are presented in a delectable way to involve people in the national effort to unify Italy. De Amicis distinguishes people in three groups However, general enthusiasm among population for the new fate of Rome is the goal to reach, rather than the genuine representation of an already given fact: Ci fu entusiasmo davvero?
Thus, as ideological as he would appear, he wants to sell enthusiasm, because it is more moving than rigorous thinking. On the one hand, De Amicis reassures his reader that the unification process is not determined to suppress the Catholic Church. De Amicis reassures the woman: More than on papal Rome, the new Italian capital will have to be modeled on the classical one. Rather than Catholic churches and altars built by popes to redefine the symbolic value of public spaces, the open-air monuments of Ancient Rome should inspire politicians and common people to shape the new secular Italian capital city.
However, the Italian national army, as opposed to the papal one, is presented as the embodiment of a national unity that, while preserving the variety of idioms and characters, is able to move with one heart and mind: Similarly, there is no reference to Roman Jews still obliged to live in the Ghetto, although most of them interpreted the breach of Porta Pia as a messianic event. U of Nebraska P, This is how Mantegazza imagined life to be in the year The Isle of Experiments comprises other little states, such as Poligama where men have many wives , Polyandra where women have many husbands , Cenobia where men live in ascetism , Monachia where nuns are devoted to the cult of Sappho and, finally, Peruvia where life is modeled on the ancient socialist regime of the Incan Empire.
A Dream is a book that bespeaks more of its own era than of the future it purports to unveil. Utopia, and Antonio Ghislanzoni Abrakadabra. A Dream constitutes an important addition to the relatively small number of nineteenth-century Italian novels available in English and is an invaluable text to add to any class, whether within a comparative context or not, teaching nineteenth-century Italian literature. La parola scritta e pronunciata. Nuovi saggi sulla narrativa di Vincenzo Consolo. San Cesario di Lecce: I vari contributi, disposti cronologicamente a seconda del testo di cui si occupano, sono chiusi da un saggio dello stesso Consolo che, per la sua pregnanza di significati ed allusioni ne arricchisce il volume.
Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. Nella seconda sezione, gli interventi si concentrano sul rapporto tra alcuni modelli teorici o aspetti concettuali e il pensiero postmoderno. Alessia Ronchetti, invece, analizza il postmodernismo alla luce della scuola italiana della differenza sessuale, basando le proprie riflessioni sui lavori di Luisa Muraro e Adriana Cavarero. Il volume, attraverso i suoi quattordici interventi, affronta in maniera molto seria una questione fondamentale di tutta la letteratura e del postmoderno in particolare: Domande di comprensione e suggerimenti per la discussione in classe seguono ogni sezione di testo.
Gli studenti possono anche consultare due appendici, che offrono una selezione di saggi, racconti e testimonianze, a illustrazione delle problematiche precedentemente toccate. Anche in questi capitoli, Bartalesi-Graf integra la propria sintesi storico-sociale con testimonianze documentarie, tra le quali interviste da lei condotte in Basilicata nel A Levi e alla sua opera sono dedicati i tre capitoli centrali.
Laddove opportuno, le schede contengono indicazioni per considerazioni inter-testuali rispetto al Cristo oppure ad altri quadri.
Il capitolo si chiude con due sezioni dedicate ad argomenti di ricerca e discussione, e con una breve ma completa bibliografia e lista di siti internet dove trovare riproduzioni dei dipinti di Levi. Il capitolo si sofferma soprattutto sul confronto tra il testo e il film, approfondendone poi alcune tematiche comuni. I testi nelle appendici, inoltre, permettono di ascoltare, oltre a quella di Levi, altre voci dal sud. Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars. Remapping Cultural History 7. While connected by these concerns, each chapter in Journeys through Fascism is nonetheless fairly autonomous, not simply with regard to the geographical region under consideration, but also in terms of the kind of writer examined and, to some extent, the critical approach adopted.
Wisely, Burdett restricts the scope of his study in a number of ways: Geographical displacement is often accompanied by a sense of temporal displacement. Moreover, as Burdett suggests, Journeys through Fascism may well provide stimulus for future research in a number of disciplines: This important work certainly points toward other complimentary areas of research, including the broader phenomenon of domestic and foreign tourism among the general public already examined by Richard Bosworth.
Italian Comics of the s and s. UP of Mississippi, The number of rigorous, book-length studies devoted to the critical evaluation of comics can scarcely fill one shelf in an average-sized bookcase. Although the study of comics is beginning to gain the status that the study of cinema attained on university campuses in the s, the volume of scholarship is playing catch- up.
Italian Comics of the s and s represents the still rare effort that focuses on a relatively narrow part of national, aesthetic, and cultural comics history, and for that reason alone is a welcome addition to the field. In his first section, Castaldi discusses the post-war Italian comics that tended to feature adventure stories, or riffs on American genres such as the western, that were produced primarily with a younger audience in mind.
As Castaldi notes, the artistic quality of these comics varied widely. The magazine also routinely carried American strips, such as Peanuts, along with the left-leaning strips Pogo and Doonesbury. He points to the introduction of the independently published Cannibale in the spring of as the beginning of new adult comics. Additionally, the comic addressed contemporary issues often as they were happening that few publications and certainly no other comics were featuring, including drug addiction and homosexuality.
The most popular of all adult comics, Il male, began in February The comic which carried Cannibale as a supplement until it stopped publishing was overwhelmingly satirical in tone, adhering to no strict political line other than to attack any dominant value or convention of the era. Il male reached the peak of its popularity during the Moro kidnapping. Cannibale, which ceased publishing after nine issues, resurfaced in late as the less political Frigidaire. It found an audience in a generation tired of the political slant of the previous decade by embracing characteristics of the Italian high-post-modernist phase in the s.
This dilemma makes the third section, in which Castaldi provides thorough evaluations of key artists and writers, all the more essential. I found myself on Amazon, searching in vain for the work of Pazienza, Tamburini, the Valvoline Group, and others mentioned by Castaldi, and had no luck with the exception of the occasional used copy, usually in Italian. Hopefully, Drawn and Dangerous will inspire a new and heightened interest in these artists, leading to greater awareness and availability of their works in the U.
Viaggio nella narrativa sperimentale italiana del XX secolo. Ma Scrivere contro si segnala soprattutto per la coerenza del metodo. Decisamente un ottimo lavoro questo di Paolo Cherchi e Cosetta Seno Reed che proprio nel carattere divulgativo del progetto ha il suo maggior pregio. Anzi proprio la grande fortuna della gastronomia, secondo quanto ricostruiscono Paolo Cherchi e Cosetta Seno Reed, sembra ricucire quella cesura originaria di due formati, di due culture, di due Italie divise.
I vocaboli sono divisi per campi semantici di appartenenza abbigliamento, alcolici, architettura, ecc. Sono fornite anche informazioni sulla specie grammaticale e notizie sulla storia dei termini e sulle eventuali mediazioni o interferenze con altre lingue. Quali previsioni si possono fare?
Quali saranno i prossimi italianismi che entreranno ad ogni diritto nel vocabolario inglese per rimanervi? Se lo chiedono i due autori del volume e non hanno dubbi: Due to these circumstances, the notion of italicity must be expanded beyond the borders of the Italian peninsula to include a transnational network of people who are connected with or interested in Italian culture. Italian Bookshelf According to the author, the catalyst of this movement was the increased possibility of communicating and traveling at a low cost.
The benefit of this new and more inclusive definition of citizenship is that it will allow Italy to claim a more significant role in the international arena and to incorporate into Italian culture the richness of a transnational network of experiences. Notwithstanding the interesting premises offered by Bassetti, however, a question remains unanswered: Does this category include everyone who has ever been interested in Italian culture? Or does membership demand some type of accompanying action? It should be noted, however, that despite numerous examples throughout the text, a solid definition of the new Italic is absent.
Interestingly enough, an Italic shares a passion for Italian culture, as does the readership of the magazine in which these articles first appeared. Despite the necessity of acknowledging the growing importance of Italophiles outside the borders and the increasing interest in Italy culture outside the peninsula, the theorization of this network lacks a real rigor, and thus the category becomes much too broad: If an Italic is simply someone with a strong interest in Italian culture, can we include people who strive to migrate to Italy?
If so, how should those Italics be included? Their inclusion within or exclusion from the paradigm expands the basis for debate, and would have enriched this work significantly. Italic Lessons, when read together with Italici, represents a stimulating introduction to the study of the concept of citizenship in Italy. With the approach of the year-anniversary of Italian Unification, the number of publications regarding this topic has vastly increased.
To orient oneself in relation to this vast literary corpus, the two texts constitute a conversational introduction that covers a vast range of contemporary issues in a captivating style. The publishing house itself was founded in as a non-profit publisher of the semi-annual magazine Voices in Italian Americana, dedicated to Italian American Literature and cultures, as well as the periodical Italiana, devoted to Italian language writing in the United States. The Crossings series was established in to promote works just like this volume by Leonilde Frieri Ruberto.
Italian Bookshelf Leonilde Frieri was born in in the small town of Cairano in the Avellino province of Campania. Having completed the fourth grade, she eventually followed her husband to America with her four children in These memoirs were recorded at the prompting of one of her daughters following the Irpinia earthquake that destroyed more than half of her village.
Ruberto, is the principal translator of this memoir, although several family members contributed along the way as well. Also, Ilaria Serra, an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University, wrote the introduction to this work. The preface, composed by Ruberto, explains that Frieri wrote eighty pages over two weeks in while her husband was visiting Cairano and she stayed with her daughters on Long Island. Written in cursive and in a mix of standard Italian, the Cairanese dialect, and a smattering of English, Ruberto translated these pages between and The introduction by Ilaria Serra provides information on several aspects that are particular to this type of work.
First of all she provides some background on the rarity of immigrant biographies, particularly those written by women. Furthermore, she highlights that 14 of the 19 different dates used to situate the events historically are related directly to family events while only 5 are world historical events such as wars. The text, indeed, does flow like a river. In the 46 pages of prose, there are only 44 sentences and most of those hold no grammatical correctness. In the Italian, which occupies the second half of the book, the reader notices that there are major stylistic and grammatical inconsistencies.
For example, there is no standard capitalization of words, many spelling errors since most words are spelled phonetically, no accents, a lack of agreement and a distinct lack of appropriate punctuation. In the English translation, Laura Ruberto was faithful to the original composition only altering spelling and grammatical correctness to allow the sentences to make sense to the reader. Another particularly interesting element is the emotional detachment that permeates much of the text.
The author seems to have very little emotional investment in so many of the events in her life. The majority of this memoir is focused on the daily activities and goings-on of a small rural Italian village. The only elements about which the reader will note any particular emotional reaction pertain to the family, to which Frieri is fiercely dedicated. Of her life in America, she explains that she did everything a good wife should: It seems that that sadness also defined America for the author since America never held any of the beauty or happiness or familial tradition that Italy held for her.
It is written as if a grandchild suddenly turned to her and asked if she too played this game as a child and the response was recorded on paper. Part of the brilliance of this work is the lack of planning, a lack of attention to what to include and what to omit, and a lack of attention to chronological accuracy. This is an authentic account of life after Italy. Laura Ruberto has produced an incredibly faithful translation of the original text, while Ilaria Serra has created an introduction that provides the necessary background information for a reader to appreciate the nuance not only in the story but in the relationship of this memoir to this particularly genre of literature.
Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy. In the preface to his work, Furno provides a broad discussion on how categories of identity, race, migration, and especially intra-ethnic relations shape the work of the Albe performers. Furno also devotes a few paragraphs to making a case for the importance of the work of the Albe. In other words, the stage-work of the company offers migrants the possibility for cultural agency and self-affirmation, empowering them to voice their presence and rights in the destination culture.
Furno argues that whereas up to the Renaissance, Catholicism was generally accepting of black Africans as human beings capable of participating in the grace of God through the evangelical project, during the late Renaissance race became part of a utilitarian policy that legitimated world colonization while justifying racial subjugation. For Furno, this missed opportunity is reflected in the generalized perception towards blackness of contemporary Italian media. By featuring the black actor Awa Niang in the role of Arlecchino, I ventidue infortuni short-circuits racial boundaries and questions easy constructions of blackness versus whiteness but also of dominating and dominated, central and peripheral, mainstream and marginal.
The multiple concerns of this play indicate how in Ruh the connections between Africa and Romagna were still at an embryonic stage. The remainder of the chapter discusses the work of the first Senegalese actors who collaborated with the Albe. The reader learns that they were street vendors who eventually left the company to go back to more profitable work. According to Furno, this episode was a watershed in the public perception of migration inasmuch as Italian culture was forced to acknowledge the reality of migrants and embark on a political debate about racism in Italy and the inhuman living conditions of many immigrants.
Despite the significance of nationally televised broadcasts such as Nonsolonero, Un mondo a colori, Shukran, and the two columns from La Repubblica, Metropolis and Gli altri noi, mainstream media continue to present migration as a temporary state of emergency rather than a reality that demands a reassessment of the Italian juridical system. Furno also dwells at length on the erosion of a social welfare system that widens the gap between the wealthy and the poor. The multiple sites of the performances and the dispersed models of social engagement and solidarity that the play creates in the mind of the spectators are interpreted by Furno as the only strategies to resist a power that, in an era of globalization, has become dislocated and de-territorialized.
Dalle avventure ai miracoli. Massimo Bontempelli fra narrativa e metanarrativa. Fifty years after his death, Massimo Bontempelli remains a somewhat under- recognized figure in the landscape of Italian modernism. While there are several studies that offer a panoramic view of his life and literary production, much still remains to be done when it comes to the investigation of individual works. As she rightly argues, the prose works of this period are characterized by the proliferation of self-referential and meta-narrative devices — something that has been noted in passing by several critics but never seriously analyzed in detail.
The book is divided into six chapters, preceded by a short theoretical introduction on the notion of meta-narrative. In the remaining five chapters, one or more meta-narrative devices or strategies are discussed in relation to a specific work. Indeed, Giordano is at her best when, as here, she engages in the close reading of individual texts. Less convincing, on the contrary, is her use of theoretical material.
The subject of chapter four is the novella La scacchiera davanti allo specchio Writing, like the ludic activity of children, involves the construction of a fictional world that interprets and re-invents reality in a creative and playful way. By identifying in Eva ultima some typical anti-realist motifs of this second kind of magic realism — the carnival spirit, the enchanted journey, primitivism etc.
Dalle avventure ai miracoli is not without problems. In places, it reads a bit too much like the doctoral thesis from which it seems to be derived, especially in its over-reliance on secondary sources, profusely quoted at the expense of a more personal elaboration of the material. Finally, the book would have benefited from a more careful editing, as there are numerous grammatical and lexical infelicities as well formal inconsistencies that suggest a somewhat rushed production it is not clear, for instance, why bibliographical references are sometimes given in an endnote and sometimes included parenthetically directly in the text.
On the positive side, this book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of Bontempelli and, more in general, of that middle-brow experimentalism on the border between the transgressive spirit of the avant- garde and the orthodoxy of the realist mainstream that characterizes the s. In other words, far from being an eccentric writer of sophisticated fables, Bontempelli in fact emerges here as a forerunner of much of post-modern fiction, of which he anticipated a number of central themes and concerns. Image, Eye and Art in Calvino. A questo scopo Martin McLaughlin privilegia Gli amori difficili, raccolta finora fin troppo poco studiata.
Margarethe Hagen porta alla ribalta che le Cosmicomiche contengono due racconti che costituiscono una riscrittura del mito di Orfeo da prospettive diametralmente opposte. Si riposizionano in modo irrevocabile la figura del narratore, quella del lettore, ma anche il testo stesso. La parte successiva, dal titolo Arte,contiene tre capitoli relativi alla pittura. Ne testimonia la scelta delle varie copertine che entrano in una dialettica con il discorso narrativo o altro. Maria Pia De Paulis-Dalembert. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, Esso fa seguito a un convegno sulla letteratura poliziesca italiana tenutosi nel alla Sorbona, organizzato dal C.
Da questi punti di partenza si sviluppano i saggi che compongono la raccolta. Pie Peter Lang, Le storie di De Cataldo offrono dunque spunti talmente interessanti da far pensare che le ipotesi avanzate nella finzione letteraria possano portare a delle utili conclusioni nella vita reale. Somigli si sofferma sui gialli storici di Loriano Macchiavelli, sottolineando come essi non redimano gli errori del passato ma anzi li presentino come cause principali dei problemi del presente.
La De Paulis si sofferma sul modo in cui Corrado Augias ha rappresentato in Quella mattina di Luglio il bombardamento, avvenuto nel , del quartiere San Lorenzo a Roma. Chirumbolo si esprime invece con toni critici nei confronti di chi, come Giampaolo Pansa, negli ultimi anni ha sottolineato il lato oscuro della lotta partigiana. Per Alessia Risi il problema di trovare una memoria collettiva presenta aspetti di carattere storico, ma anche sociale e geografico. Per De Boer caricare di nuova suspense un fatto passato ne riapre le interpretazioni, svolgendo dunque un ruolo fondamentale nel modo di relazionarsi con la storia.
Civitella in Val di Chiana AR: These poets include T. Eliot and Giuseppe Ungaretti, indubitably canonical figures in any discussion regarding text-life relationships. This book establishes a number of fundamental problems involved in defining autobiographical poetry, particularly in the Italian and English traditions. At the same time, because of its limited space, the volume cannot offer a systematic treatment of the topic, a task that a larger-scale study might aim to undertake.
Bulzoni, , is another defining feature of the lyric subject at hand, one to which a broader study on this issue might potentially pay further attention. Divided in two sections, the volume could have developed a greater cohesion in its two parts. The study is clearly a stimulating introduction to the topic, so much so that readers might wish for a more in-depth analysis of the myriad reactions of the contemporary interviewees, whose answers display a range of responses, from the comprehensive and incisive e.
Certain Italian models of the lyric tradition, such as Dante and Petrarch, constitute a consistent point of reference in the interviews in the second section e. Notions of performativity and gender such as in the work of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero might also have been used to greater effect in the volume, which, because of its brevity, cannot deal in depth with questions of gender, race or sexuality, and the implications of these issues for a poetic mode of self-representation.
These theorists, who are mentioned in passing both by Lerro himself in the theoretical introduction, and by a number of the interviewees, are by necessity situated outside the scope of the volume, and yet they might prove interesting critical touchstones for a larger and more exhaustive study. Given the brevity of the volume, one cannot quibble with the limitations of the final bibliography, or the few entries from unexpected sources, including online encyclopedias and dictionaries. Bulzoni, , and Il testo autobiografico nel Novecento ed.
Reimar Klein and Rossana Bonadei, Milano: Guerini e Associati, might have proved stimulating points of reference. Studies in Italian Americana 2. This anthology is the English translation of the Italian book previously published as Quei bravi ragazzi, Il cinema italoamericano contemporaneo Venezia: Marsilio Editori, , edited by Muscio and Spagnoletti.
Its purpose is to study how Italian immigrants and their descendants use film as a means to address issues of identity, and examines the representation of Italian Americans in film, as well as their contributions as directors, screenwriters and actors. She summarizes the cultural history of the children of the motherland as she reviews the different stages of Italian assimilation in the United States: The first group contributed to the world of entertainment through maintaining traditions common to Italian popular theater.
Furthermore, they were granted unrestricted access by immigration officers if they declared themselves musicians and actors. Muscio reviews the conditions that led to the Southern Italian immigration to North America which had different conditions and consequences for the cohort that immigrated to South America , and the negative stereotypes and myths that emerged and labeled them instinctive, passionate, violent, and with ties to the Mafia. The outbreak of World War II made Italians enemies in their new homeland, and in their self-defense led to the erasure of their cultural heritage.
A new generation of directors emerged in the s: Many of these documentaries focus on religious processions and rituals and with their rich anthropological content, form a genre all their own. Pointing to the achievements of the Italian American community, Muscio quotes statistics from the U. Between Ethnic Identity and the Racial Question. Notwithstanding, nearly three quarters of the U. Grifitth is a name often quoted as responsible for early movies that helped to spread this stereotype in films such as The Cord of Life , At the Altar , In Little Italy , and The Coming of Angelo There are twenty-one essays written by Italian and United States scholars who discuss the primary indicators of Italian-American identity as manifested in its music, religion, food, family and work ethic and how these traits are reflected in film and other arts.
Issues concerning negative stereotyping and defamation of images of Italian Americans in film and racism prompted by widely acclaimed and influential films such as The Godfather and highly rated television series such as The Sopranos problematize the depiction of Italian Americans in the media. The conversation concerning Italian American stereotyping continues, and attempts to redress the gangster images often fail.
I contributi, di autori italiani e stranieri, hanno il pregio di toccare numerose zone del dibattito che, allora come oggi, continua a svilupparsi attorno al principale gruppo culturale del nostro secondo Novecento. In che modo un Gruppo che si vuole avanguardistico costruisce il proprio discorso critico? Rebbecca West, infine, si concentra su una figura ancora molto marginalizzata dalla critica, quella di Giulia Niccolai.
In his work Paratexts: Surrounding and infiltrating the work itself, the paratext, whether located under the same cover as the work or extrinsic to it, informs and contextualizes its reception and, in part, contributes to the generation of its meaning. Amelia Nigro has divided her painstakingly organized study into several large sections, each highlighting a separate strain of Calvinian paratexts. Nigro correctly notes that the preface, then, is an invaluable record of this process of shedding superfluous elements that leads to the creation of a text.
Additionally, by enhancing what has already been written within the text proper, the preface confirms that not all has been said, and that Calvino the Editor could continue to generate text and meaning at will according to what he deemed advantageous to his public reception. Nigro identifies the role of memory as another constant theme.
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Calvino readily alluded to moments from his past when contextualizing his writing, yet at times — and particularly in several interviews cited by Nigro — he also toyed with the potential authorial pleasure of lying to his audience about the concrete facts of his personal history.
Amelia Nigro concludes her analysis with a clear recapitulation of what she has illustrated, but caps it with an image that, perhaps inadvertently, provokes a due measure of sympathy for the shy, stuttering Calvino. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorism It includes digressions on critical and theoretical concepts that, while being appropriate to dissertations, are by now part of the scholarly idiom and therefore do not require the lengthy explanations that one often finds here. That said, this newly published English version of Tragedia includes several expanded treatments of the topic, such as discussions of films by Amelio, Rosi, and more recent directors.
The remainder of the preface is devoted to outlining the seven chapters of the book. The chapter concludes with a description of the corpus of films according to categories i. A second section of this chapter focuses on films that commemorate the victims of the right-wing violence that led to the bombings in Brescia and Bologna in and , respectively.
Yet, he finds that the television film Per non dimenticare, by Martelli, overcomes the limits of most commemorative films by providing viewers with portraits of the victims as unique individuals. Thus, the full integration of the trauma of terrorism in the national heritage remains an unfulfilled project. While the study would have benefited from a more thorough revision of the Italian version, it surveys an impressive corpus of films and, for the most part, makes convincing arguments.
As such, this volume will be a useful title to film and cultural studies scholars alike. Polemiche novecentesche, tra letteratura e musica. Franco Casati Editore, A dieci anni di distanza dalla pubblicazione del suo primo lavoro I generi letterari nella critica italiana del primo Novecento.
Servono ancora i generi artistici? Da qui in avanti, abbandonata la musica, Pennings si concentra esclusivamente su fenomeni letterari. In Il paradosso di una retroguardia: Its focus is the impact of films, theatrical, and television programs on Italian political and cultural debates on the Holocaust. What kind of public discussion have such works stimulated and produced? Historical debates and reception of works divide the book matter into eight chapters, the first being the introduction while the last bears the conclusive remarks and ideas for a follow-up.
The other six chapters periodize the history of reception of separate works. Il Generale Della Rovere set in Genoa ranked 8th among the highest-grossing films of the season. He decides to be shot, and he chooses his own punishment for no atonement is possible for his misdeeds and misconduct due to the sin of card games to which he has lost not only the lives of those who were then sent to the camps but also his own soul.
They share a renewed sense of the event. It is only with the mids that a wider debate starts in Italy about Italy. The shift of historical discourse from Resistance to Holocaust is the topic of Chapter six. Perra has successfully accomplished several tasks at once: In the process, works are divided into three discrete categories depending on the proximity of their subject to the Holocaust Subjective choices are made about under what category works should fall.
If you wish to reach a good understanding of media and film production reception through an educated and brilliant reading of recent history and culture and how all that Perra unravels is relevant to Italy and Italian historical and cultural discourse, his book is a must.