Search Results (16)

This article focuses on the life writing narratives of diasporic writers in Europe, such as the Italian writer of Somali descent Igiaba Scego, who, through her writing and public role, manages to create powerful interventions on issues of belonging, diversity, and creativity, contributing to a renewed understanding of gender knowledge and cultures of equalities in localized as well as global contexts. This article focuses on her role as a writer as well as a postcolonial intellectual, as she is not just a spokesperson for her community, nor simply a promotor of universal values, but someone who straddles complex positionalities in their location in imperial–colonial orders. We align ourselves with the notion of postcolonial intellectuals as those who speak truth to power on issues of cultural integration and gender equalities). In her autobiographical work titled La mia casa è dove sono, published in 2010, Scego draws a subjective map of different places inhabited by her family: Somalia, Italy, and Great Britain, contributing to the understanding of unbelonging and transnationalism through topics of migration, biculturalism, gender, race, and identity. Full article

This article explores the niche sector of literary tourism with a focus on the works of Italian writer Beppe Fenoglio in the Langhe-Roero and Monferrato area of Piedmont, Italy. It questions whether literary tourism can contribute to the cultural sustainability of a landscape. Nowadays, this area is already a well-established tourist destination known for its food and wine; however, Fenoglio’s work offers a different perspective, highlighting a specific heritage comprising the area’s rural life, local culture, and history of the Resistance movement. The research used a mixed method approach with documentary analysis, questionnaires, and in-depth interviews. “Fenoglians” (tourists motivated by Fenoglio’s life and works) were identified, and their characteristics were explored. The results cannot be generalized, as the chosen sampling method does not provide sufficient materials for broad application. While being a small group, these special interest tourists represent an opportunity for tourism diversification. This article concludes that Fenoglio’s literary tourism offers a distinctive experience, fosters new interpretations of the landscape, and strengthens collective memory of the Resistance. It highlights the importance of local communities in understanding how fictional narratives shape tourist perceptions of a destination as well as their role in preserving the community’s collective memory and landscape. Full article

This article introduces one of the forgotten figures of religious and literary studies: the Italian scholar, philosopher, metaphysician, poet and writer Silvano Panunzio (1918–2010). His contribution has so far been relegated to the margins of academic debate, and, currently, there are no academic studies on his work, in which mysticism plays a pivotal role. Panunzio believed that the transcendental and mystical dimension is fundamental for fully understanding the social, cultural, historical and political events of humanity. Another relevant aspect of his work is the importance he gave to literature and its relationship with mysticism, as in the case of Dante’s Divine Comedy or other European and Eastern writers and poets, such as Goethe, Shakespeare, Ibn Arabi and Dostoevsky. Significantly, Panunzio saved from oblivion the work of a forgotten man of letters of the nineteenth century, Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854), who proposed the first symbolic and esoteric interpretation of Dante’s literary production and of European medieval love literature. Raising awareness of the intellectual amnesia around the figure of Silvano Panunzio may be a useful contribution to future research, both in the field of religious and literary studies. Full article

The purpose of the present paper is to further investigate the mathematical structure of sentences—proposed in a recent paper—and its connections with human short–term memory. This structure is defined by two independent variables which apparently engage two short–term memory buffers in a series. The first buffer is modelled according to the number of words between two consecutive interpunctions—variable referred to as the word interval, $I_P$—which follows Miller’s $7\pm 2$ law; the second buffer is modelled by the number of word intervals contained in a sentence, $M_F$, ranging approximately for one to seven. These values result from studying a large number of literary texts belonging to ancient and modern alphabetical languages. After studying the numerical patterns (combinations of $I_P$ and $M_F$) that determine the number of sentences that theoretically can be recorded in the two memory buffers—which increases with the use of $I_P$ and $M_F$—we compare the theoretical results with those that are actually found in novels from Italian and English literature. We have found that most writers, in both languages, write for readers with small memory buffers and, consequently, are forced to reuse sentence patterns to convey multiple meanings. Full article

Baldassarre Peruzzi’s cosmological vault fresco (1510–11) in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, prominently featuring a scene of Perseus and Medusa, showcases a dynamic operation that was often at work in the early modern period between the beholder and an immobile work of art. These types of representational objects participate in the discourse around materiality, not by employing the signifying powers of their constituent materials, but by encouraging thought about their material presence. I explore the process of haptic engagement that the fresco painting urges in its beholders, raising the possibility that the trope of petrification, made popular by Dante and other Italian writers of amorous poems, unlocks the work’s layered meaning. Full article

Recently, scholars have looked at the ethnic press through a social constructionist lens, examining the process through which immigrants developed a sense of identity and the role of print culture in forming “imagined communities” (Anderson). Here, I analyze the coverage of the 1909 assassination of police Lieutenant Petrosino in both mainstream and Italian-American press and popular culture. This shocking event ignited a debate over the nature and origin of the Mafia and the dangerousness of the Italian community, a debate involving discourses of racial difference, immigration restriction, and the capability of Italians to assimilate. This debate became an important arena in which Italian immigrants defined themselves and their place in America. Italians were represented predominantly in the context of criminality, so immigrant writers constructed their own counter-representations in newspapers, re-coding stereotypes and negotiating a collective Italian-American identity. In the press, Petrosino became a contested symbol: on the one hand, of the rhetoric of the inclusiveness of the American melting pot and, on the other, of the possibility of redemption from the discredit that the actions of a small minority threw on the whole community. Full article

The literary topic of Siamese twins is not unfamiliar. American literary history tells us of the genealogy from Mark Twain’s pseudo-antebellum story The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), Karen Tei Yamashita’s postmodern metafiction “Siamese Twins and Mongoloids: Cultural Appropriation and the Deconstruction of Stereotype via the Absurdity of Metaphor” (1999), down to Shelley Jackson’s James Tiptree, Jr. award winner Half-Life (2006). Rereading these works, we are easily invited to notice the political unconscious hidden deep within each plot: Twain’s selection of the Italian Siamese twins based upon Chang and Eng Bunker, antebellum stars of the Barnum Museum, cannot help but recall the ideal of the post-Civil War world uniting the North and the South; Yamashita’s figure of the conjoined twins Heco and Okada derives from Hikozo Hamada, an antebellum Japanese who made every effort to empower the bond between Japan and the United States, and John Okada, the Japanese American writer well known for his masterpiece No No Boy (1957); and Jackson’s characterization of the female conjoined twins Nora and Blanche Olney represents a new civil rights movement in the post-Cold War age in the near future, establishing a close friendship between the humans and the post-humans. This literary and cultural context should convince us that Yamashita’s short story “Siamese Twins and Mongoloids” serves as a kind of singularity point between realist twins and magic realist twins. Influenced by Twain’s twins, Yamashita paves the way for the re-figuration of the conjoined twins not only as tragi-comical freaks in the Gilded Age but also as representative men of magic realist America in our Multiculturalist Age. A Close reading of this metafiction composed in a way reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Bruce Sterling will enable us to rediscover not only the role conjoined twins played in cultural history, but also the reason why Yamashita had to feature them once again in her novel I Hotel (2010) whose plot centers around the Asian American civil rights movement between the 1960s and the 1970s. Accordingly, an Asian American magic realist perspective will clarify the way Yamashita positioned the figure of Siamese Twins as representing legal and political double standards, and the way the catachresis of Siamese Twins came to be naturalized, questioned and dismissed in American literary history from the 19th century through the 21st century. Full article

Research has shown that academic success is strongly associated with positive academic self-efficacy beliefs and that individuals with learning disabilities (LDs) usually report a lower perception of competence than their peers in most learning domains. The aim of this study was two-fold: (1) To compare the performance of inaccurate writers who were not diagnosed with an LD with that of students who were diagnosed with an LD, in order to identify which tasks were the most challenging for individuals with LDs, and (2) to investigate whether inaccurate writers with and without a diagnosis differ in terms of self-perceived difficulties. Two groups were selected from a total sample of 639 students attending seven Italian universities: The first group included 48 participants (24 females) with scores on writing tasks below the 5th percentile, and the second included 51 participants (24 females) who were diagnosed with an LD. The results showed that the two groups significantly differed in the articulatory suppression condition tasks, but not in the standard condition tasks. When groups were matched for performance on writing tasks, students who were diagnosed with an LD reported significantly more perceived difficulties than students without an LD. The implications of these results in terms of the self-efficacy beliefs of students with an LD are discussed. Full article

The aim of my paper is to examine children’s literature written in Italy and centred on the Holocaust. It is quite common for people to deem the subject matter inappropriate for young audiences, whilst it is also considered disrespectful to write inventive literature for children about the death camps. Nevertheless, it seems necessary to inform children about such a major historical event. Moreover, the stories written on this subject aim to introduce children to themes like prejudice, discrimination and racism. My research focuses on the recurrent patterns that occur frequently in these books. In these books, the focus lies on the victims rather than the perpetrators. They deal with the story of a Jewish family and frequently feature a child as the protagonist. These books will undoubtedly provoke questions by young readers, but they are most likely best read with an adult who can answer any questions appropriately and deepen the historical frame. These narratives are important because educators have a responsibility to teach others and read about the Holocaust. Full article

This paper examines how migration redefines family narratives and dynamics. Through a parallel between the mother and the mother tongue, I unravel the emotional, linguistic, social, and ideological connotations of the mother–daughter relationship, which I define as a ‘condensed narrative about origin and identity’. This definition refers to the fact that the daughter’s biological, affective, linguistic, and socio-cultural identity grounds in the mother. The mother–daughter tie also has a gendered dimension, which opens up interesting gateways into the female condition. Taking this assumption as a starting point, I examine how migration, impacting on the mother–daughter relationship, can redefine gender roles and challenge models of femininity, which are culturally, socially, geographically, and linguistically embedded. I investigate this aspect from a linguistic perspective, through a reading of a corpus of narratives written by four Italian-Canadian writers. The movement from Italy to Canada enacts ‘the emergence of alternative family romances’ and draws new routes to femininity. This paper seeks to illustrate how, in the narratives I examine, these new routes are explored through linguistic means. The authors in my corpus use code-switching to highlight contrasting views of femininity and reposition themselves with respect to politics of gender. Full article

The aim of this article was to reflect on how settings are used as narrative practices in the work of Renata Viganò, one of the most famous Italian female writers. Drawing upon Well’s concept of geo parler femme, this article examined the extent to which the setting plays a role in Viganò’s fictional works and essays. Focusing on the most common stereotypes of gendered spatiality, the intention of the analysis was to point out that at specific historical moments, such as the Italian resistance movement and the post-war years, the traditional gender assignment of spaces was no longer valid. The idea of a well distinguished ‘limit’ that separates certain places as feminine from others as masculine in time of war becomes blurred and destabilizes the traditional dichotomy of public–private spaces. The dialectic masculine–feminine places are nonexistent and often completely reversed, turning the setting into one of the main narrative practices in novels, such as L’Agnese va a morire or Una storia di ragazze, as well as in politically engaged essays dedicated to female partisans and rice-workers. Full article

Recent decades have seen the rediscovery of a significant number of texts authored by Italian women between 1560 and 1630. And yet the commonplace that the Counter-Reformation silenced women writers has persisted. One figure useful for teaching a more nuanced vision of post-Tridentine Italy is the Bolognese nun Diodata Malvasia (c. 1532–post-1617). She authored a pair of histories recounting her convent’s efforts to maintain their way of life amidst an era of convent reform, employing strategies that capitalized on their education, familial and civic connections, and position of spiritual privilege. Malvasia’s writings demonstrate the ways in which women not only published in this period but began to speak with increasing authority. I offer some possibilities for how Malvasia’s chronicles can be used to teach students about women writers’ agency in post-Tridentine Italy, as well as the complex thinking with which one must approach a regime like the Counter-Reformation. Full article

The Marian writings of the Roman poet Vittoria Colonna (1490/92–1547), the Venetian polemicist Lucrezia Marinella (1579–1653),¹ and the Florentine educator Eleonora Montalvo (1602–1659) present an accessible model of the Virgin Mary in the early modern period that both lay and religious women could emulate in order to strengthen their individual spirituality. While the Catholic Church encouraged women to accept and imitate an ideal of the Virgin Mary’s character traits and behavior for the good of society, these three women writers constructed a more fruitful narrative of the Virgin’s life and experience that included elements and imagery that would empower women to enhance their personal practice of meditation. Full article

Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam, was born in Benghazi in 1927 into a family of Maronites from Aleppo and spent most of his life between Libya and Italy, speaking several languages and writing in Italian. He may be described as the “unsung” writer of Italian colonial and post-colonial past in North Africa. Spina’s oeuvre—collected in an omnibus edition, I confini dell’ombra. In terra d’oltremare (Morcelliana)—charts the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the Ottoman province, to 1966, when the country witnessed the economic boom sparked by the petrodollars. The cycle was awarded the Premio Bagutta, Italy’s highest literary accolade. In 2015, Darf Press published in English the first instalment of Spina’s opus with the title The Confines of the Shadows. In Lands Overseas. Spina always refused to be pigeonholed in some literary category and to be labeled as a colonial or postcolonial author. As a matter of fact, his works go beyond the spatial and imaginary boundaries of a given state or genre, emphasizing instead the mixing and collision of languages, cultures, identities, and forms of writing. Reading and re-discovering Spina in a transcultural mode brings to light the striking newness of his literary efforts, in which transnational lived life, creative imagination, and transcultural sensibility are inextricably interlaced. Full article