Italian Literature Commons^™

San Francesco D'Assisi E Santa Caterina Da Siena. La Loro Influenza Sulla Letteratura, La Cultura, La Religione E L'Arte Italiana Dei Primordi, Ann-Frances Hamill

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Examines the works and thoughts of two Italian saints: Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) and Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). Explores the common ideological denominator in the works of these major figures and analyzes their impact on Italian society and culture.

Flarr Pages #55: Teaching Curzio Malaparte's The Skin: Life Is Not Always Beautiful, Victor Berberi

FLARR Pages

Anxiety over whether or not to teach literary works that may be deemed offensive is not limited to the perennial example of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This problem is felt at least as keenly by foreign language teachers, who act as ambassadors of cultures even less familiar to our students than the former British Empire. In deciding whether to assign Curzio Malaparte's novel The Skin (La Pelle, 1949) in a recent course on Italian civilization through literature and film, I was hesitant for a number of reasons.

Juveniles In Early Modern Jewish-Italian Communities Between Family Control And Kabbalistic Piety, Roni Weinstein

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The presentation discusses conceptions of childhood, youth, and marriage in Italian Jewish Culture.

The text reproduced is an excerpt from a mid-seventeenth century work by Pinhas Baruch Monselice.

Sidney’S Poetics: Imitating Creation, Joshua S. Reid

Joshua S. Reid

Cultural Commentary: "If You Like The Book, You'll Love The Tour": Seeing Italy With Dante, Barbara Apstein

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Macbeth And Ugolino: Another Verdian Encounter With Dante, David Rosen

Verdi Forum

No abstract provided.

Primo Levi And Bruno Piazza: Auschwitz In Italian Literature, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

To focus on the literature of the Shoah more than 50 years later and 7,000 miles away inevitably creates some sense of dissociation due to both historical and geographic distance. While on the one hand, an analysis of the literature of the genocide might grant further insights through a retrospective look, on the other, however, this distance of time and space risks leading to an oversimplification of the Shoah, in the sense that the plight of the Jews, their individual stories and the overwhelming sense of emptiness caused by the depletion of the intellectual Jewish cultural communities in Europe might …

Cristina Trivulzio Di Belgiojoso's Western Feminism: The Poetics Of A Nineteenth-Century Nomad, Claire Marrone

Languages Faculty Publications

The ninettenth-century Italian activist, feminist, and Princess, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, expressed her views on gender and politics through writing and through action. Included in Belgiojoso's corpus are not only travel writings, fiction and letters, but also texts on religion, history and politics. The tale Emina (1856), which shall be the focus of this study, emerged from the Princess's eleven-month journey across Turkey and Syria to regions little known to Westerners at the time -- to European women in particular. Belgiojoso's political convictions, and her experiences as a social reformer in Italy and Turke set the scene for Emina and …

La Science, La Science-Fiction Et La Mémoire Dans L'Œuvre De Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Primo Levi était doué, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire diront certains, d'une étrange mémoire, méthodique, photographique et inépuisable où s'entremêlaient les souvenirs de ses aventures de jeunesse, de ses longue randonnées avec Sandro Delmastro dans les montagnes du Piedmont, de ses années passées à étudier la chimie à l'université de Turin, de sa courte expérience de partisan, de l'extermination des juifs dont il fut témoin à Auschwitz et de son « autre vie » après la deuxième guerre mondiale. Lorsque les Nazis planifièrent la destruction et la crémation de tous les témoins de leurs crimes, et de ce …

Machiavelli's Prince: A Renaissance Pasquinade, Nancy A. Hahn

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

The Power Behind The Pronoun: Narrative Games In Calvino's If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler, Inge Fink

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Primo Levi: The Drowned, The Saved, And The "Grey Zone", Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. Even though his first book Se questo è un uomo–published in English as Survival in Auschwitz–did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it was accepted unanimously in Italy as a literary masterpiece and a great witness to history when Einaudi republished the volume in 1956. From that moment on, Italian readers and critics have acknowledged the literary beauty and importance of Levi's writings. He …

"Official Science Often Lacks Humility": Humor, Science, And Technology In Levi's Storie Naturali, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Primo Levi's third book, written under the pseudonym of "Damiano Malabaila," was published for the first time in the fall of 1966 by Einaudi. Storie naturali is a collection of fifteen short stories which represent the beginning of a new Cours in the author's narrative. After the autobiographical Survival in Auschwitz of 1947 and his second book of 1963 The Reawakening–both dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath–Storie Naturali ("Natural Stories," not yet published in English) represented such a break in the literary patter established by Levi up to that point, that the author decided to use a …

Language, The Other And God: On Italo Calvino's Last Novels, Richard Grigg

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

To the extent that Italo Calvino's novels point us toward a God beyond the God who died with the advent of modern nihilism, they are an important resource for constructing just that kind of notion of the divine that is required by the contemporary cultural situation: a notion that is an alternative to both theism and atheism. While theism cannot withstand the corrosive forces integral to the modern world view, atheism makes the fatal mistake of supposing that there is no longer any dimension of ultimacy available to contemporary persons. The God we have been led to by Calvino's last …

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 …