Italian Literature Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Walking And Cycling As Modalities Of Political Enunciation In Paolo Rumiz’S A Piedi (2012 ‘On Foot’) And Tre Uomini In Bicicletta (2002 ‘Three Men On Their Bikes’), Barbara Siller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The great number of travel narratives written by Paolo Rumiz from Trieste, Italy, include books about walking and cycling, as well as travelling by train or ferry. On the one hand, these accounts present detailed descriptions of the routes taken on these journeys, depict illustrations of historic buildings, and display various types of maps, and as such, are meant to serve as walking guides (Rumiz 2012, 12). On the other hand, they become a space of reflection for a wide range of themes, including walking slowly as a way to clear your mind, to comfort your heart, and to heal …

Pirandello Proto-Modern: A New Reading Of L’Esclusa, Bradford Masoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel, L’Esclusa, written in 1893, but not published in its definitive edition until 1927, straddles two literary worlds: that of the realistic style of the Italian veristi, and something new, a style and approach to narrative that anticipates the theory of writing Pirandello lays out in his long essay L’Umorismo, as well as the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with early-20^th-century modernism in general, and with Pirandello’s later work in particular. The novel’s living in both worlds, however, makes it an interesting and problematic text. First, it gives readers insight into …

Mermaid Song: The Notebooks Of The Writing Woman, Gianna T. Ward-Vetrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is built on the model of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, that is, it is a feminist project of holistic integration that does not reject fracturing, ambiguity, or contradiction, but aims to attain a more complex and thus truer portrait of the woman writing. Lessing’s notebooks examine conflicts between communism and capitalism, racial conflict in Africa, conflict between men and women, and the conflict between the protagonist Anna Wulf’s identity as a woman and her identity as a writer, each of which she then attempts to integrate into the singular golden notebook of the title. I propose …

Between Life And Literature: The Influence Of Don Quixote And Madame Bovary On Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, Victoria Tomasulo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project demonstrates the influence of two foundational novels in the Western canon, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, on twentieth-century British, Italian, and Anglo-American women’s fiction. Both novels illustrate the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist literary critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative power of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identities, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. Drawing upon textual and paratextual evidence such as interviews, journal entries, and essays, I argue …

Everyone’S Their Own Worst Critic Or How I Learned Not To Fear The End, Audrey Belle Rosenblith

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Jean Genet, author ofThe Balcony, and Dante Alighieri, author of Inferno, have more in common than you might think. For one thing, they were both obsessed with death.

The Vestibule (a devised theater piece) was made to examine this obsession with (and fear of) death further.

Art is a tool we can use to confront our fear of death. All people fear death.

Auctor In Fabula: Umberto Eco And The Intentio Of Foucault's Pendulum, Douglas Stephens Iv

Senior Honors Theses

Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum weaves together a wide range of philosophical and literary threads. Many of these threads find their other ends in Eco’s nonfiction works, which focus primarily on the question of interpretation and the source of meaning. The novel, which follows three distinctly overinterpretive characters as they descend into ruin, has been read by some as a retraction or parody of Eco’s own position. However, if Foucault’s Pendulum is indeed polemical, it must be taken as an argument against the mindset which Eco has termed the “hermetic”. Through an examination of his larger theoretical body, including …

Speed And Convulsive Beauty: Trains And The Historic Avant-Garde, Marylaura Papalas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The train, an invention and evocative symbol of the 19^th century, somewhat ironically continued to fascinate avant-garde artists and writers of the 20^th century, when faster and more exciting modes of transportation were in use. Locomotive imagery in Italian futurism and French surrealism, however, demonstrates a lasting fascination with speed, locomotive space, and their effect on perceptions of reality. Considering the work of more recent theorists like Paul Virilio, Michel Foucault, and various others who have contributed to the growing field of mobility studies, this paper aims to understand the persisting presence of the train as a symbol …

The Obstacles To And Solutions Of Female Characters' Speech: Beatrice In Dante's Vita Nuova And Purgatorio And Susan In J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Tamara Savage

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the speaking and silencing of two female characters, Beatrice from Dante’s Vita Nuova and Purgatorio and Susan from J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. The texts are viewed through postcolonial and feminist lenses to show the problems with male characters speaking for female characters and the obstacles the female characters face when attempting to speak. Dante’s solution to this problem is to transform Beatrice from a silent and demure woman into a character who issues commands with a powerful voice. Coetzee’s solution is instead to refuse to provide a solution, since no one but Susan can speak for …

Futurism In Venezuela: Arturo Uslar Pietri And The Reviews Indice And Válvula, Giovanna Montenegro

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

The short-lived revue válvula, published in Caracas in 1928, was symbolic of the cursory invasion of Futurism into Venezuela, and of the fate of the avant-garde in that country between the 1920s and 1930s. At a time, when the nation was struggling to shake itself from the patriarchal influence of the caudillo Juan Vincente Gómez (1857-1935), and was simultaneously on the eve of a shift from an agricultural to an oil-based economy, artistic avant-garde movements arrived in cultural centres such as Caracas and Maracaibo not with the boom and thunder appropriate to war-loving Futurism but, rather, trickled in slowly, gradually …

The Dilemma Of The Italian American Male, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

“The Dilemma of the Italian American Male.”

Originally published in Pimps, Wimps, Studs, Thugs and Gentlemen: Essays on Media Images of Masculinity. Ed: Elwood Watson. McFarland, 2009

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Efigie De Luigi Corsaro, Leysser L. Leon

Leysser L. León

Ha fallecido en Perugia, a los 72 años, el Prof. Luigi Corsaro (1940-2012), que auspició y dirigió mis investigaciones jurídicas e interdisciplinarias por seis años (2000-2005). En el 2007, a pedido de una revista dirigida y editada por varios de mis alumnos más destacados, escribí estas páginas evocativas de sus enseñanzas y de su papel en mi formación académica. Las vuelvo a publicar, por este medio, confiando en que pueda difundirse entre el mayor público posible (especialmente entre los jóvenes estudiantes) la imagen de un jurista, de un Maestro cuyas lecciones universitarias y de vida me acompañarán por siempre.

The Order Of Bourgeois Protest, Geoffey Waite

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Relatively little theoretical work is currently being produced by Western "Leftists" on committed protest culture. Simultaneously and not by chance, Western Marxism has drifted increasingly away from solidarity with the concept and practice of the vanguard party and toward a more or less easy compact with the problematic of poststructuralism and postmodernity. This relative paucity of discussion of commitment and protest stands in significant relationship to two critical moments: first, a powerful, overtheorized tradition of Western Marxist debate about commitment and protest (Benjamin, Sartre, Barthes, Marcuse, Adorno, among others); second, a wide-spread, undertheorized work-a-day practice of "traditional" liberal …

Eco's Echoes: Fictional Theory And Detective Practice In The Name Of The Rose, David H. Richter

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a serio-comic pastiche of the detective story set in the middle ages, which uses history as "a distant mirror" to comment, from a Western Marxist perspective, on contemporary political issues. Structurally, however, The Name of the Rose is a fictional enactment of many of the semiotician's recent critical and philosophical ideas. ( 1) Eco's discussion of "abductive" reasoning in C. S. Peirce and Aristotle appears in a detective not only more fallible than Sherlock Holmes but more aware of what his powers consist of and why they work and fail. (2) Eco's …

The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno To Paradiso, David Matual

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is apparent from the title of his novel The First Circle and from various details there and in other works that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is familiar with at least the imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy. One direct and several indirect references to it also suggest a Dantean subtext in his longest and most ambitious project, The Gulag Archipelago. Indeed, the loci of the Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—are transformed in the Gulag into metaphorical representations of the various stages in the development of man's consciousness—and especially Solzhenitsyn's consciousness—during the ordeals of arrest, inquest, imprisonment, …

Bradomín And The Ironies Of Evil: A Reconsideration Of Sonata De Primavera, Sumner M. Greenfield

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Of the four novels that form Valle-Inclán's tetralogy of seasonal Sonatas, the most problematical and dissonant is the springtime segment, which is the third in the order of composition. Valle-Inclán uncharacteristically subordinates seasonal esthetics in favor of a peculiarly ironic manipulation of the theme of conflict between good and evil set in an Italian context redolent of the Renaissance and rife with religious fanaticism. The ingrained theatricality of the young Marqués de Bradomín leads him to affect the pose of a "devilish" don Juan in order to break down the defenses of a young would-be nun who seems destined …