Italian Language and Literature Commons^™

Teaching Italian Romanticism Through Philately And Choral Works, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Philately and choral works can be excellent integrative pedagogical tools when teaching Italian Romanticism at the undergraduate level. In the classroom, postage stamps provide an historical narrative for students and can help clarify the political, artistic and cultural mood of the time. The intrinsic symbolism of stamps represents the way a nation wants to be seen by the rest of the world. Instrumental and choral music, in their infinite combination of tones, combine sound with sung words, creating an artistic subtext that reveals the complexity and variety of human aesthetic expression. For the current generation of students accustomed to visual …

When Good Girls Go Bad (Or Do They?): Nymphomania And Lycanthropy In Verga’S “La Lupa”, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

At some point during early development, most children are afraid of the imaginary wolf under the bed or the wolf that hides in the closet at night. Traditional bedtime stories such as Little Red Riding Hood certainly do not help assuage such fears: these are atavistic dreads, similar to being scared of the dark or of death.1 In childhood culture, the wolf represents the “other,” the “furry non-human,” and almost always the viciously violent. Later, as adults, the occasional dream of wolverine violence, or of human transformation into a wolf (a lycanthropic aversion) might very well create anxiety and apprehension.2 …

Dante’S Understanding Of The Two Ends Of Human Desire And The Relationship Between Philosophy And Theology, Jason Aleksander

Faculty Publications

I discuss Dante’s understanding that human existence is “ordered by two final goals” and how this understanding defines philosophy’s and theology’s respective scopes of authority in guiding human conduct. I show that, while Dante devalues the philosophical authority associated with the traditional Aristotelian emphasis on the significance of contemplative activity, he does so in order to highlight philosophy’s ethico-political authority to guide human conduct toward its “earthly beatitude.” Moreover, I argue that, although Dante subordinates earthly beatitude to spiritual beatitude, he nonetheless maintains that philosophy’s authority to reveal a path to spiritual beatitude requires its fundamental independence from theology.

Reconciling The Controversy Of Animal Cruelty And The Shoah: A Look At Primo Levi's Compassionate Writings, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Is it ethically admissible to compare the suffering of Jews during World War II to the general suffering of animals in the Western world? Who considers this parallel to be morally obscene, and who supports the comparison? Based on the historical evidence of Nazis insulting Jews with animal verbiage and herding them into the gas chambers of concentration camps, this study looks at a few textual examples by the Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, finding a conciliatory position in his poetry and prose.

The Partisan And His Doppelganger: The Case Of Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Published in 1982, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?) is Primo Levi's first novel proper. Perhaps Primo Levi is regretted not fully living life as an Italian Jewish partisan that he re-created his lost dream through its pages, and had his partisan brigade not been captured, perhaps Levi's underground fighting might have continued until the end of the war. If Not Now, When? thus might reflect Levi's need to explore that sought-after life as a partisan, which he had been denied after only three months of activity. Did Live write If Not Now, When? as a …

Walters Ms W720: Chapters To Be Observed By The Singers Of The Cappella Giulia (1574), Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

The manuscript W720 that bears the title Capitoli che hanno da osseruare gli Cantori della Cappella di San Pietro is an unstudied and unpublished document held in the archives of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland. As one of the earliest surviving written texts of its kind, W720 documents in detail the rules that the singers of the Julian Chapel had to obey during the year 1574. The following critical edition of the manuscript and the accompanying English translation are intended to provide materials that will assist Renaissance specialists in a number of areas (art history, philology, history, musicology, …

"Life Is Beautiful, Or Is It?" Asked Jakob The Liar, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

In 1999 the 71st Academy Awards ceremony awarded to the film The Last Days the prize for Best Documentary Feature. Underwritten by Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, this documentary depicts in a compelling, historically objective fashion what the Nazi regime called the "Endlösung" ["Final Solution"]: the effort to annihilate all of European Jewry. In the film, five Hungarian survivors are interviews with honesty and compassion. Their answers record history as it unwound. Clearly, the intent of the interviews is to assure that historical facts are not falsified, nor taken for granted. Documentaries of this kind can …

Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Born in Turin, 31 July 1919, to Cesare Levi, engineer, and wife Ester (née Luzzati). Studied at Liceo-Ginnasio D'Azeglio from 1934; University of Turn, degree in chemistry, 1941. Joined partisans in Valle D'Aosta to fight German invaders, 1943; arrested and sent to Carpi-Fossoli internment camp near Modena. Deported to Auschwitz, February 1944; worked as slave laborer at rubber factory of Buns-Monowitz (I.G. Farben, Auschwitz III). Liberated by Soviet army, 1945; after long journey through central and easter Europe, reunited with family in Turin, October 1945. Married Lucia Morpurgo, teacher, 1947; two children. Worked as industrial chemist for SIVA (paints, enamels, …

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 …

Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Chemistry and literature, viewed by most people as widely different subjects, come together in the works of Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was both a professional chemist and a professional writer. Levi said that he wanted to fill the gap between the imaginative world of literature and the analytical world of science. Believing such a gap absurd, he was never daunted by the purported incompatibility between the two fields of knowledge. Levi's literary work is also marked by his experience in Auschwitz's concentration camp, where he was interned from February 1944 to January 1945. Through his characteristically clear 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 …

Goethe's Die Leiden Des Jungen Werthers: An Epistolary Novel, Or A Stage Drama In Disguise?, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Photography of the late 1920s generated repercussions in other fields of the arts. It sparked an interdisciplinary interest in critics who balked at viewing the frozen images as merely one moment's reality, and who wanted, instead, to recompose and integrate underlying cultural, literary, or political discourse within the photographic frame. This fertile interdisciplinary backing guaranteed an in-depth interpretative dissection of artistic expression which had not been previously possible. The small photograph, a still visual image, became connected to the larger visual images of stage sets-these, a series of visual, immobile backgrounds which framed the caracters acting within.

Proposte D'Insegnamento Per Corsi Di Civiltà Italiana A Livello Universitario Negli Stati Uniti, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

In an effort to initiate a dialogue on the teaching of Italian culture, the author describes her classroom experiences. She indicates which topics are successfully used in her syllabi, and defines the role of the teacher as a "cultural translator" in courses of culture and civilization.

Presenting Italian Comparative And Superlative Forms Of Adjectives To College L2 Beginners, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

This study treats the necessity to de-emphasize the focus on grammar teaching alone in L2, and to introduce methods which are not teacher-centered, so as to enable students to interact more among each other.

By using comparative and superlative forms of adjectives – but in reality using a sequence of teaching techniques that could be applied to other grammatical situations – this article presents the use of sea shells as a visual and tactile aid which allows students to shift their L2 efforts from an abstract notion to a concrete usage.

This study offers a tool to attempt a balance …

Dante And The Franciscan Movement, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Consider what might happen if, instead of nuclear bombs and pollution, twentieth-century technology had provided us with time machines; affordable, handy appliances to be bought readily and kept in living rooms, perhaps next to the sofa. In order to travel through time, one would only need to sit back comfortably and turn the electronic control panel's time knob in the proper direction; then, push a button when the indicator reaches the year one wants to visit. . .

The Order Of Santo Stefano In The Levant: An Unpublished Account Of A Voyage In 1627, Ilona Klein, Christopher Kleinhenz

Faculty Publications

On 12 April 1627 a fleet of six galleys belonging to the Order of Santo Stefano set sail from Livorno on their expedition "contro il comune nemico"–the Turks. This journey would take them along the western and southern coast of Italy, through the Ionian Sea to the Peloponnese and across the Aegean Sea to the Dardanelles. Along the way the sailors encountered many vessels, both friend and foe, heard reports of sea battles and movements of ships in those waters, and listened to an account of a miracle wrought by the Virgin Mary. After having engaged in two fierce skirmishes …

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 …

For A More Accurate Reading Of Goethe's "Classiker Und Romantiker In Italien . . ", Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

The second volume of Uber Künst und AltertJmm, published in 1820, contained an article by Goethe, the first part of which he had already written two years earlier, entitled "Classiker und Romantiker in Italien, sich heftig bekämpfend" (classicists and romantics in Italy fighting intensely). This report was meant to be a description of the Italian literary scene.during the second decade of the nineteenth century.

Tommaso Campanella's La Città Del Sole: Topography And Astrology, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dominican friar from Calabria, fra' Tommaso Campanella, had already solidified his anti-Aristotelian theories, had been persecuted and arrested, and was simulating madness in order to save his life while incarcerated in Naples. When Campanella conceived La Città del Sole under these circumstances in 1602, he was interpreting Telesio's naturalistic philosophy in a metaphysical manner, and was expressing in nuce the fundamental theories he would amplify two years later in Del Senso delle Cose e delle Magie.

Über Goethes "Classiker Und Romantiker In Italien [...]", Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Der zweite, 1820 veröffentlichte Band von "Über Kunst und Alterthum" enthielt einen Artikel Goethes, dessen ersten Teil er bereits zwei Jahre zuvor verfaßt hatte. Der Aufsatz mit dem Titel "Klassiker und Romantiker in Italien, sich heftig bekämpfend" sollte die literarische Szene Italiens im zweiten Jahrzehnt des 19. Jahrhunderts beschreiben. Der zweite Satz des Artikels lautet folgendermaßen: Das Publicum theilt sich in zwei Parteien, sie stehen schlagfertig gegen einander, und wenn wir Deutschen uns ganz geruhig des Adjectivum romantisch bei Gelegenheit bedienen, so werden dort durch die Ausdrücke Romanticismus und Kriticismus zwei unversöhnliche Seiten bezeichnet.