Italian Literature Commons^™

The Middle Of The Middle: Purgatory, Pilgrimage, And Human And Plant Mobility In A Time Of Climate Crisis, Stephen S. Collis

The Goose

This paper, adapted from a talk given for the Institute of the Humanities at Simon Fraser University on April 26 2023, explores intersecting issues taken up by an in-progress long poem I am currently writing. That long poem, “The Middle,” explores questions of climate displacement, migration, and refuge via a writing-though of Dante’s Purgatorio—itself a poem of pilgrimage. A further context for both the poem and the paper about the poem is an ongoing project of walking in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, and immigration detainees that the author has been involved with since 2015. In seeking to “override …

Smarginatura: The Art And Politics Of Elena Ferrante, Ryan A. Lillestrand

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

In the Neapolitan Quartet, a sprawling epic following the lives of two women in post-war Italy, the author, Elena Ferrante, explores the intimate relationship between politics and art, pushing at the borders we often construct between the two. At a particularly critical moment in the novels, the central character, Elena Greco, a poor girl from Naples who rises to the position of a successful novelist, is told by her more politically radical friends that she is not doing enough, that “this, objectively, is not the moment for writing novels.” But then, when is? The current political climate in Italy is …

Creatività Diasporiche Dialoghi Transnazionali Tra Teoria E Arti, Simone Brioni Dr., Loredana Polezzi Dr., Franca Sinopoli

Department of English Faculty Publications

Creatività diasporiche è un volume bilingue costituito da tredici conversazioni tra studiosi/studiose di materie umanistiche e artisti/artiste il cui lavoro si concentra sul tema della migrazione e dell’identità. I contributi nella raccolta abbracciano forme di produzione che vanno dalla letteratura alle arti visive, dal cinema alla performance teatrale, dai podcast alla musica rap, mentre tra le tematiche ricorrenti emergono dibattiti su identità, lingua, migrazione, memoria e cittadinanza. Questo volume è anche un invito a ripensare il lavoro creativo e quello accademico, in area umanistica, come intrinsecamente legati al dialogo e alla collaborazione. Ciascuna conversazione si concentra sull’Italia intesa come un …

What Our Hearts Crave For: An Examination Of The Paradoxical Attraction To Dante’S Inferno, Ketzalt E. Marquez

Honors Projects

This paper serves to analyze and explain why audiences are attracted to stories with elements of Horror in them, using Dante’s Inferno as the vehicle for this conversation, as the Inferno’s setting is in the worse possible place imaginable. Horror narratives arise feelings of fear and disgust in its audiences through the use of monsters, as audiences relate to the fear and disgust the positive characters in the narratives are feeling because of the monster’s presence. Since these emotions arise in a safe space, such as in literature or film, where the source of the emotions is not endangering the …

L’Espresso: Uno Stimolante, Una Bevanda, E Un Pilastro Dell'italianità, Salvatore Joseph Lupo

French and Italian Undergraduate Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

I Mondi Incrociati Di Machiavelli: Il Principe E La Mandragola, Carrie Tighe Cristiano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Machiavelli’s ideas of virtù and fortuna and how, through an exploration of these terms, we can better understand the writer and theorist. By examining his works, principally Principe and Mandragola, we see many consistent ideas as well as gain a clearer understanding of Machiavelli’s character.

The Structure Of Human Redemption As Demonstrated In Dante's The Divine Comedy, Erick S. Flores

Student Research

Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy is renowned all around the globe for its impact on literary history as a whole. This research paper delves into the structure of human redemption as portrayed in Dante's epic masterpiece. Through a comprehensive analysis of the narrative structure, allegory, and symbolism, employed by Dante, this study illuminates the underlying framework that guides the protagonist and readers on a transformative journey through the afterlife. By examining the divisions of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, this paper reveals the hierarchical nature of sin, the ever-progressive path of spiritual growth, and the ultimate attaining of salvation and understanding …

"Perché Il Mondo È Cambiato": Second Generation Italian Hip Hop And The Authorization Of Postcolonial Italian Identities, Anthony Sargenti

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Second generation Italian hip hop artists negotiate, contest, and decolonize italianità through their lyrics, music, and activism. Italian Postcolonialism, Cultural Theory, and Musicology inform my approach to understanding the struggle over contemporary Italian politics of identity and belonging. I utilize Discourse Analysis to contextualize lyrics, music, and music videos that resist hegemonic notions of italianità and champion inclusive citizenship. Artists analyzed include Amir Issaa, Karima DueG, Ghali, Tommy Kuti, Cécile, Chadia Rodriguez, and Alessandro Mahmoud. Centralizing hip hop as a collective site of resistance demonstrates the movement towards recognition as well as equal representation. Second generation artistry and lyricism starts …

Amorous Poems And Passionate Letters: An Analysis Of The Contributions Of Two Female Authors To The Literary Scene Of 16th Century Italy, Ava Buchanan

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

Vittoria Colonna and Chiara Matraini were well known women in intellectual and public Italian society during the 16^th century. However, the history surrounding their individual impacts has often been limited due to the common practice of grouping these two women together or focusing more intently on their male connections. This thesis aims to advance women’s history on the Early Modern period by providing holistic accounts of Vittoria Colonna and Chiara Matraini’s careers that provide a better understanding of the unique contributions that these women made to distinctly female literature in the Early Modern period in Italy. This thesis utilizes …

Futurism In The City Of The Future: Marinetti’S Avant-Garde In New York 1909-1930, Giovanni Angelo Falcone

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

This project seeks to explain some of the reasons why it took four decades for Futurism to be recognized and understood in America. Using archival sources and other records from 1909 to 1930, this project charts the entrance of Futurist ideas into America and the reasons why the movement never found a following in the United States. Focusing on the years after the launch of the movement, the Armory Show of 1913, and the 1928-1930 stay of Fortunato Depero, this project argues that there were certain unbridgeable divides between …

Women's Work With Wool In Fairy Tales: From Baroque Text To Textile Craft, Sophia Frye

Scripps Senior Theses

Fiber art has a complex, long-standing history; the relationship between the craft and the craftsman is intimate and goes beyond the commodification of the product. Business records from Florentine guilds give insight into the wool industry, but are unable to capture the social history of wool crafts in Renaissance-Baroque era Italy. In response, this project turns to Italian Baroque fairy tales: Giambattista Basile’s The Pentamerone (1634-36) and Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Le Piacevoli Notti (1555). These fairy tales depict scenes of women engaging in fiber crafts, which reveal the poverty of the women textile laborers, the women’s relationship to textile work, …

Una Comprensione Computazionale Della Psiche Emotiva E Ordine Nelle Ballate Del Decameron: Stilometria E Elaborazione Del Linguaggio Naturale, Nothando Khumalo

Honors Projects

The present thesis, written in Italian, explores the emotional psyche and narrative order embedded within the ballads of the Decameron, a renowned literary masterpiece by Giovanni Boccaccio. Leveraging the advancements in stylometry and natural language processing techniques, this research aims to convince medieval Italian literature scholars to produce more on scholarship of the ballads and uncover the intricate patterns of human emotions and narrative organization in the ballads. The study begins by establishing a comprehensive corpus of ballads from the Decameron, utilizing digital libraries and text repositories. Subsequently, using stylometric analysis, the research examines the linguistic and stylistic features that …

Review Of The Life And Legend Of Catterina Vizzani: Sexual Identity, Science And Sensationalism In Eighteenth-Century Italy And England, By Clorinda Donato, Ula E. Lukszo Klein

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani: Sexual Identity, Science and Sensationalism in Eighteenth-Century Italy and England, by Clorinda Donato, written by Ula Lukszo Klein. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool University Press, 2020, 347 pp., 3 b/w images. ISBN: 978-1-789-62221-8

Exploring Dante’S Sources Online: Interactive Reading, Visualizations, And The Study Of Dantean Intertextuality In The Digital Age, Julie Van Peteghem

Publications and Research

Dante’s Commedia is a highly allusive text, and readers throughout time have noted the many parallels between Dante’s verses and those of others. Now that the text of the Commedia and various scholarly and artistic interpretations of the poem (commentaries, translations, illuminated manuscripts) have become accessible online, also the concordance, the lists of parallel passages in Dante’s poem and other works, has become a digital resource. In this essay I explore the study of Dante’s sources in a digital environment mainly through the Intertextual Dante project and its Dante-Ovid edition, published on Digital Dante. Intertextual Dante visualizes moments of …

Scarico: It’S Only A Movie, Most Of The Time, Thomas Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Exploitation cinema is a domain of motion picture content catering to a viewership interested in imagery that is more provocative than what mainstream audiences desire to see. These types of films are typically considered lowbrow entertainment and have been made in every era, albeit in a limited capacity proportional to the niche audience demand for them. Some time periods see a rise in exploitation film productions in response to a growing demand for such content from a larger share of the broader cinematic audience. This relationship indicates that period-specific cultural factors can cause mainstream audience members to seek out more …

Beatrice: A Representation Of Christ, Michelle Wincell

Augsburg Honors Review

Everyone is subject, at some time in life, to an astonishment of the mind resulting from an awareness of something wonderful. Such an awareness creates awe and curiosity and makes one want to know more. In Dante's life, it was simply the sight of the Italian girl Beatrice that moved him to such a state. Beatrice was the image that inspired all of his work and increased his worship and knowledge of God. She was an image of many things, in particular, virtue, redemption, new life, light and God are symbolized. But her representation as a Christ figure is most …

L’Italia, L’Altrove Luoghi, Spazi E Attraversamenti Nel Cinema E Nella Letteratura Sulla Migrazione, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

This monograph is a meditation on how transnational migrations have influenced how the sense of place and the politics of space are represented in literature and film about migration to, from and within Italy. It examines work produced in Italian and English, and it emphasizes how culture and national identity can be reconsidered in a more inclusive way within a world marked by increased mobility. The text is divided into three main sections – “Places”, “Spaces” and “Crossings” – each of which contains two chapters. Chapter 1 argues that bridges, as they are represented in literature, movies and paintings about …

Rethinking Italy’S Margins Through Walking: Mobility, Activism And Positionality In Wu Ming 2’S Il Sentiero Luminoso (2016) And Giuliano Santoro’S Su Due Piedi (2012), Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

The article argues that Wu Ming 2’s Il sentiero luminoso (2016) and Giuliano Santoro’s Su due piedi. Camminando per un mese attraverso la Calabria (2012) describe walking as an activity which allows one to recognize the social modifications of space, and to rethink the geographies of suburban areas in Italy. This analysis resounds with Robert P. Marzec’s invitation to study how literature has represented the privatization and the capitalist and neoliberal organization of space, revealing forms of internal colonization which epitomize a pillar of colonial ideology. Il sentiero luminoso and Su due piedi reconfigure walking as an epistemological, ecocritical …

Maurice Scève Avant La Délie (1535–1544). Une Étude Des Genres Mineurs À L’Origine D’Une Nouvelle Esthétique Poétique, Elizaveta Lyulekina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse propose d’étudier l’influence du poète lyonnais Maurice Scève, actif entre 1535 et 1562, sur la formation de genres littéraires et le développement de la poésie française de la Renaissance. Elle explore également la contribution considérable du poète à la création de l’identité linguistique et culturelle française.

This dissertation studies the influence of the Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève, active between 1535 and 1562, on the formation of literary genres and the development of French Renaissance poetry. It also explores the poet’s considerable contribution to the creation of French linguistic and cultural identity.

A House Of One’S Own: Challenges And Re-Definitions Of Female Subjectivity And Domestic Space In Italian Women Writers From The 1950s To The Early 2000s, Nicole Paronzini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With an in-depth analysis of selected Italian novels written by female writers from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this dissertation addresses and discusses the challenging relationship between female identity and the home, perceived both as constraining space and metaphor of human interiority. The projects aim to show that these characters, as representative of the female individual, are capable to use the domestic space as a privilege universe in which re-defining themselves, modifying their own and other perception as passive objects of patriarchal society to the one of subjects in fieri.

If, on one hand, the house has been …

Virility And Defeat: Masculinities In Italy Between Fascism And The Sexual Revolution, Davide Giuseppe Colasanto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is the history of how masculinity evolved in a postfascist western European country. Militaristic virility was a core tenet of fascist Italy. World War Two weakened it profoundly, as men’s and women’s conceptions of their own sexual identities were fundamentally reshaped by violence and defeat. At the same time, consumer culture, exemplified by American GIs and expanding continuously through the 1950s and 1960s, encouraged the emergence of a new kind of man, only for this type, too, to be contested in turn in the wake of the New Left rebellions of 1968 and through the tumultuous 1970s. In all …

Twenty-First-Century African And Asian Migration To Europe And The Rise Of The Ethno-Topographic Narrative, Nelson González Ortega, Olga Michael

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise in the publication of narratives concerning contemporary African and Asian migration to Europe, written individually or collectively, by Asian, African and/or European authors. While scholarly attention has increasingly turned to these texts, our purpose is to further investigate them from a pan-European perspective and to propose a model for their analysis as a distinct literary genre. We therefore introduce the "ethno-topographic narrative" to define, classify and systematically analyze twenty-first-century migration narratives published in Europe in relation to theory, method, corpus, generic type, individual or collective authorship, border and …

How Caregivers Experience Reading Aloud To Children In Kindergarten Through Second Grade: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Heidi B. Grimshaw

Theses and Dissertations

According to Hudson, Koh, Moore, and Binks-Cantrell, (2020), The National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) 2019 testing data revealed that 32% of U.S. fourth-grade students are reading below basic levels. This issue calls for interventions to increase reading achievement levels for elementary students. One way to accomplish this is to increase studies regarding what motivates caregivers to read to children. This present study examines how caregivers perceived the at-home read-aloud experience for children in primary grades: kindergarten through second grade. This study employed Bandura’s observational theory. The study consisted of a qualitative interpretative phenomenological analysis of 20 caregivers of students …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

Quod Inane Vocamus: Lucretius’ Void In Seventeenth-Century Italy, Carlo Bottone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the seventeenth century, the revival of atomic theories and the beginning of barometric experiments sparked a philosophical debate on the existence and the nature of void, which in turn generated new attention to the ancient disputes on void and prompted new interpretations of Lucretius’ examination of inane (De Rerum Natura, I.329-397). Commentators began to discuss the passage beyond the ancient philosophical tradition and in relation to modern ideas and recent discoveries, while Vacuists appealed to Lucretian arguments to prove or deny the existence of an absolute void interspersed among corpuscles.

My research contributes to the scholarship on …

Dante's Dream: A Jungian Psychoanalytical Approach, Gwenyth E. Hood

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

An artist or mystic can refresh and revive a culture’s imagination by exploring his personal dream-images and connecting them to the past. Dante Alighieri presents his Divine Comedy as a dream-vision, investing considerable energy in establishing and alluding to its dates (starting Good Friday, 1300). Modern readers will therefore welcome a Jungian psychoanalytical approach, which can trace both instinctual and spiritual impulses in the human psyche.

Mappare La Letteratura, Tessa Endresen

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Veni, Pati, Scripsi: The Maghrebi Diaspora In Driss Chraïbi’S Les Boucs And Salah Methnani-Mario Fortunato’S Immigrato, Mohamed Baya

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The empire knows how to write back even after it shrinks, but the formerly colonized who move to the metropolis write differently. Two Maghrebi diasporic novelists – Driss Chraïbi, a Moroccan living in France and Salah Methnani, a Tunisian who found shelter in Italy --, scan the territories of their adoptive countries, produce maps of tortured inner experience, and amalgamate the autobiographic with the fictional. They write in the respective languages of their adoptive countries: Chraïbi, at the very beginning of the Maghrebi diasporic literature in France, published Les Boucs in 1955 and Methnani (in collaboration with Mario Fortunato), published …

The Surreal Voice In Milan's Itinerant Poetics: Delio Tessa To Franco Loi, Jason Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the course of Italy’s linguistic history, dialect literature has evolved a s a genre unto itself. The scope of research presented in this study examines the question of dialect literature as a valid genre which bears lines of demarcation that would assign it the distinction of genre. Research reveals that in fact the simple election of a language, or dialect, does not itself constitute a genre; moreover, most dialect literature bears characteristics that would neatly place it in another genre.

To examine this verity, this research compares two dialect poets who employ Milanese as a means of transmission …

Francesca's Sweet Lament: An Operatic Adaptation Of Canto V From Dante's Inferno, Javen Cristina Lara

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College