Italian Language and Literature Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Female Spaces And Exceptional Women Under Fascism: Anna Banti’S Early Writings (1930s–1940s), Matilde Fogliani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the early literary production of Anna Banti during 1930’s and 1940’s in newspapers and magazines. Female Spaces and Exceptional Women Under Fascism studies how Banti was able to publish and portray women who did not always comply with fascist propaganda’s standards, despite the harsh censorship. Banti employed dissimulation using umorismo, in order to avoid the censorship. Many scholars attributed the use of irony to Banti’s early writings to ridicule her female characters. She instead used umorismo because it leads the readership to an initial amusement but later to a reflection on women’s conditions. This research …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

Paroimia: Brusantino, Florio, Sarnelli, And Italian Proverbs From The Sixteenth And Seventeenth Centuries, Daniela D’Eugenio

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Proverbs constitute a rich archive of historical, cultural, and linguistic significance that affect genres and linguistics codes. They circulate through writers, texts, and communities in a process that ultimately results in modifications in their structure and meanings. Hence, context plays a crucial role in defining proverbs as well as in determining their interpretation. Vincenzo Brusantino’s Le cento novella (1554), John Florio’s Firste Fruites (1578) and Second Frutes (1591), and Pompeo Sarnelli’s Posilecheata (1684) offer clear representations of how traditional wisdom and communal knowledge reflect the authors’ personal perspectives on society, culture, and literature. The analysis of the three authors’ proverbs …

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.

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 …

A Tale Of Two Nations’ Histories The Application Of Literary Fairy Tales As A Firsthand Account Of History, Nicholas Gottlob

Honors College Theses

Fairy tales are often thought to be solely for children as a means of education and entertainment. The literary fairy tale provided a medium that allowed authors to express their opinions under the guise of a story. This has not always been the case as literary fairy tales have been utilized as political instruments by authors and intended for a highly educated audience. Using fairy tales as a facade provided protection for authors, as outright criticisms against those in power usually resulted in dire consequences such as imprisonment or even death for the objector. The literary fairy tale provided a …

Literary Response To Plague, Mark Host

Developing Pedagogy Graduate Student Showcase

This is a unit with a series of assignments that has been conceptualized as a drop-in that can be included in a variety of classes such as History/Western Civilization, English, Humanities, etc. and uses The Decameron to illustrate how react to the trials of disease through artistic expression. The target students would be advanced high school students or freshman-level college students. The assignments progress to higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, starting from asking the students to simply answer reading comprehension questions about the introduction to asking students to develop their own imitative stories in the vein of The Decameron and …

Italian Jews: A Surprising And Understudied Influence In The Enlightenment, Lura Martinez

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

The experience of Italian Jews during the Enlightenment is deserving of much more attention. Not only did Italian Jews such as Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto, a man born in a ghetto, later embrace a form of secularism, but his works and others written by his peers made an impact on the Italian Enlightenment and seemingly contributed to the practice of toleration that appeared in sporadic installments throughout Europe. While the Jewish experience in Europe hails from a long tradition of persecution, with sporadic and incomplete periods of toleration at various points in its history, it is clear that through a promotion …

Narrating Intensity: History And Emotions In Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza And Elena Ferrante, Stefania Porcelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the representation of emotions in My Brilliant Friend and in two Italian novels written between the 1960s and the 1970s – La Storia (1974, History: A Novel) by Elsa Morante (1912-1985) and L’arte della gioia (The Art of Joy, 1998/2008) by Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996). However, rather than remaining centered on these works’ emotive landscapes alone, I seek instead to trace the continuities that link these two “historical” novels of the past to Ferrante’s successful and more recent tetralogy. I look at the representation of emotions and at what I call “moments of intensity” – …

Il Giudizio Universale Tra La Scolastica Medievale E La Divina Commedia Di Dante, Amanda R. Latrenta

Theses and Dissertations

In The Divine Comedy, Dante presents his readers with an interpretation of The Last Judgement. Although this interpretation bears distinct markers of Dante’s originality, it also closely aligns with medieval scholastic writings on the phenomenon. This thesis examines how Dante’s interpretation aligns with or diverges from medieval theology.

Scrivere Di Islam. Raccontare La Diaspora, Simone Brioni Dr., Shirin Ramzanali Fazel

Department of English Faculty Publications

Scrivere di Islam. Raccontare la diaspora (Writing About Islam. Narrating a Diaspora) is a meditation on our multireligious, multicultural, and multilingual reality. It is the result of a personal and collaborative exploration of the necessity to rethink national culture and identity in a more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist way. The central part of this volume – both symbolically and physically – includes Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s reflections on the discrimination of Muslims, and especially Muslim women, in Italy and the UK. Looking at school textbooks, newspapers, TV programs, and sharing her own personal experience, this section invites us to change the …

The Prince -- Brief Synopsis -- Powerpoint, Zach Davidson

Open Educational Resources

This is a very brief PowerPoint covering some key ideas in Machiavelli's THE PRINCE.

Latin Poetry. Ludovico Ariosto. Ed. And Trans. Dennis Looney And D. Mark Possanza. The I Tatti Renaissance Library 84. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2018., Alessandro Giammei

Transnational Italian Studies Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

La Compiuta Donzella Of Florence (Ca. 1260): The Complete Poetry, Fabian Alfie

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Translation into English of extant poems of the thirteenth-century Italian poet La Compiuta Donzella of Florence with poems addressed to her by Mastro Torrigiano and a letter to her from Guittone d'Arezzo.

The Venetian Arsenal And Dante's Poetic Purpose, Eliot Davila

Augsburg Honors Review

John Ruskin remarked that if we were to pick an "honestly studious" three or four out of every hundred of Dante's admirers, then "we should rarely find one who knew why the Venetian Arsenal was described." Indeed, the wonderfully elaborate description of the Arsenal in Inferno XXI has long posed a problem for readers of the Commedia. This paper approaches Dante's representation of the Arsenal from a new perspective and finds that a more complete understanding of the image offers readers an original insight into what can be called the poetic purpose of Dante. For clarity of presentation, the paper …

Primo Levi’S Journey Home From Auschwitz In The Light Of Ancient Civic Pilgrimage: Levi’S The Truce As A Form Of Theōria, Robert Pirro

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Primo Levi, a Jewish-Italian chemist captured with other members of a partisan band in German-occupied northern Italy and deported to Auschwitz, survived his ordeal to write one of the more acclaimed testimonies of Nazi inhumanity, Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz). Taking as a starting point a parallel Levi explicitly draws between the aims of postwar pilgrimages to Auschwitz commemorations and the effect he hoped his books would have on his readers, this article shows how his second book, La tregua (The Reawakening), which relates his roundabout and oft-delayed journey home to Turin after the Red Army’s liberation …

The Manuscript Copy Of Sfera In The Morgan Library, Dana Hart

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the literary origins of the fifteenth century text Sfera, a rhyming Italian treatise by Gregorio Dati, and considers the patronage, creation, and function of the manuscript copy in the Morgan Library and Museum, focusing on the illustrated maps and cities.

The Body And Its Signifiers: Bodily Depictions In Niccolò De’ Conti And Odorico Da Pordenone, Antonella Dalla Torre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines textual, bodily depictions in two western European, medieval and late-medieval travel accounts, which describe the eastern travels of the Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti and those of the Franciscan friar Odorico da Pordenone. My analysis show how a connection between the characterizations of the body and the process of identity definition is forged and sustained in these texts.

Through a cultural-studies perspective, my work focuses specifically on depictions of the body in Poggio Bracciolini’s account of the travels of Niccolò de’ Conti and in the text of a vernacular rendition of Odorico da Pordenone’s Relatio, the …

Magic Performances: Rituals And Practice In Italian Theatre And Culture, 1520–1650, Erika Mazzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation investigates theatrical and historical sources that deal with early modern magic, in order to re-evaluate its role in Italian society between the 16th and the mid-17th century. During this period, many were the attempts carried out by the Catholic Church to avoid the spread of heretical beliefs among people. By the middle of the 16th century, the battle against heresy focused on magic, which was considered a dangerous practice. Despite the Inquisition’s prohibition of books of magic and the condemnation of magic rituals, magic still survived in literary works, especially theatrical. Many performances brought magic on the Italian …

Italian Americans In Bronx Doo Wop-The Glory And The Paradox, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

Ansiedades Épico-Criollas Y El Mecenazgo De Indias En El Arauco Domado De Pedro De Oña, Andrea L. Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Among the characteristics of epic poetry are the topic of war, love encounters, heroism of exemplary individuals, and the narration of events contemporary to the audience to reinforce a collective historical identity. Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña, born in Angol (modern Chile), reiterates these traditional expectations with its protagonist, characters, setting, and latter theatrical representations within the viceregal context. The poem was made possible by the sponsorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, IV Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Peru. If the title of “espíritu cesarino novelo” [Caesar’s new spirit] (V.76.3) corresponds to the patron, Pedro de …