Italian Language and Literature Commons^™

Italian Studies In Southern Africa, Vol. 35 No. 1 (2022): Diversity, Decolonisation, And Italian Studies, Simone Brioni Dr., Marie Orton, Graziella Parati, Gaoheng Zhang

Department of English Faculty Publications

This special issue explores the intersections of diversity and decolonisation within the field of Italian Studies. By engaging with postcolonial theory, migration, and critical race studies, the contributors reframe traditional narratives of Italian culture and history. The issue investigates the legacies of colonialism, the experiences of racialized communities in Italy, and the role of Italian Studies in fostering inclusive and equitable academic practices. Through interdisciplinary approaches, the essays call for a critical re-evaluation of the field, advocating for a more diverse, decolonial, and globally conscious understanding of Italy's past and present.

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 …

The Divine Comedy- Healing Trauma With Literature, Catherine Giorgi

Italian 347: Out of Florence: Dante in Exile

No abstract provided.

Resisting The Mafia’S Oppression Through Children’S Literature, Giordana Poggiolo-Kaftan

Italian Languages and Literature

Attraverso l’analisi di quattro libri per l’infanzia ed adolescenza sulla mafia ed antimafia, questo articolo mette in risalto sia le funzioni narrative di tali racconti che quelle più propriamente sociali e culturali. Per l’analisi delle funzioni narrative, l’articolo si serve delle teorie strutturali di Vladimir Propp – soprattutto quelle relative alla persona drammatica dell’eroe e del “cattivo” – come delle teorie della narrazione del trauma. Queste ultime sono particolarmente favorevoli all’interpretazione degli orrori e tragedie causate dalla mafia nelle vite dei protagonisti. È proprio attraverso l’analisi delle funzioni narrative e letterarie che i racconti assumono il valore di testimonianze di …

Derek Johnson Dante's Inferno Mini Magazine, Derek Johnson

Italian 347: Out of Florence: Dante in Exile

No abstract provided.

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 …

An Inside View: Gendered Perspectives On Freedom In Decameron 7.5, Brittany Asaro

Italian and Italian Studies: Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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.

A Tale Of Two Biennales: How Contemporary Art In Italy Reflects Current European Politics, Hannah Rosabel Capucilli-Shatan

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

No abstract provided.

Fake Italian: An 83% True Autobiography With Pseudonyms And Some Tall Tales, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

In a city torn apart by racial tension, Damien Cavalieri is an adolescent without a tribe. His mother -who pines for the 1950s Brooklyn Italian community she grew up in- fears he lacks commitment to his heritage. Damien’s fellow Staten Islanders agree, dubbing him a “fake Italian” and bullying him for being artistic. Complicating matters, his efforts to make friends and date girls outside of the Italian community are thwarted time and again by circumstances beyond his control. When a tragic accident shakes Damien to his core, he begins a journey of self-discovery that will lead him to Italy, where …

Critical Success Factors For Implementing Blockchain In The Supply Chain For Product Traceability, Gary Lee

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Satashi Nakamoto’s introduction of blockchain in 2008 initially directed the technology for the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (Nakamoto, 2008). In recent years the technology has been identified for other use cases. Businesses are currently developing this technology to reduce or eliminate transactional costs. Along with this anticipated use, businesses are using this technology to include traceability across the supply chain. This research looks at implementing blockchain technology in supply chain traceability. Clohessy (2019) identified critical success factors for implementing blockchain, but what is not existing in the literature are the relative importance of each factor for implementation of …

Modernity’S Fears Of Depopulation And Sterility In Mario Sironi’S Urban Landscapes, Giordana Poggiolo-Kaftan

Italian Languages and Literature

This article focuses on Fascist artist Mario Sironi’s urban landscapes as a site of modernity and its contradictions. With their gloomy buildings and deserted streets, Sironi’s landscapes highlight two of modernity's woes: The periferia of the “liberal” city and the fear for its inhabitants’ degeneration and sterility. In his “Il discorso dell’Ascensione,” Mussolini openly accuses industrial urbanism of its sterilizing effect on the Italian race, thus, jeopardizing his imperial ambitions. By giving an aesthetic form to the Regime’s fears, Sironi reaches two goals: The aestheticization of fascist politics, as described by Walter Benjamin, and the creation of the Soreal social …

Brown's Stages Of Morphosyntactic Development Applied To The Typical Development Of Italian, Marie Laiche

LSU Master's Theses

Background: In A First Language (1973), Roger Brown called for an increase in crosslinguistic data and analysis of morphosyntax across languages as more research in this field is crucial for working out the overarching determinants of language acquisition order and for the ability to accurately compare child language acquisition across different languages. An increase in this research would benefit linguistic researchers and speech-language-pathologists offering services to or evaluating children speaking a different language or more than one language. The current study seeks to add to the field of crosslinguistic research by adapting Brown’s guidelines of English language acquisition to the …

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 …

Millennial Representations Of Medieval Religious Schism In Western Media: An Iconographic Analysis Of Dante’S Inferno 28 And The Twenty-First Century Films Dracula Untold And Kingdom Of Heaven, Nafise Shajani

Languages and Cultures Publications

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno 28 is the place of the sowers of discord and scandal who are responsible for causing a split within their own communities; among them in the ninth bolge of the eighth circle is Muhammad whose mutilated body represents the division he brought to Christianity. A historical contextualization of the Inferno, however, confirms that the hostility between Christianity and Islam had emerged earlier with the rise of Islam as a political power in the seventh century. This paper examines Medieval and twenty-first century visual representations of this division within Christianity, which mirror the schism within Inferno 28. …

The Communicative Function Of Gender In Italian, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

An analysis of gender in modern literary Italianbased on attested examples from various genres. The evidence-based hypothesis, thoroughly noncanonical, proposes a system of morphologically signaled meanings, and these are not the traditional categories “feminine” and “masculine.” Even the familiar and misleading term “gender” is replaced. The analysis concerns primarily what is typically called “gram­matical gender,” although it stands to inform too the use of Italian in communication having to do with human cultural gender. The analysis concerns primarily what is called here “variable gender” (essentially, adjectives) although it stands to inform too the problem of “invariable gender” (essentially, nouns).

Educatori Paulo Freire E Don Lorenzo Milani: Una Rilettura Del Loro Lavoro Nel Xxi Secolo, Simone Gugliotta

Italian Studies: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

La Fantascienza Italiana Dalla Prospettiva Degli Studi Sulla Traduzione E Postcoloniali, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

A partire dai più recenti studi sulla fantascienza e sulla circolazione dei testi in contesti letterari diversi, l’articolo presenta un’analisi della produzione di fantascienza italiana dalla prospettiva degli studi sulla traduzione e postcoloniali. A lungo considerate come semplici imitazioni dei modelli inglesi e statunitensi, tali produzioni spesso le adattano e ripensano creativamente. Investigare le complesse relazioni intertestuali da cui emerge la fantascienza può permettere di comprendere come l’altro e l’altrove sono stati immaginati e rappresentati in Italia.

The Unmaking Of A Nation: Maria Messina’S “Casa Paterna”, Giordana Poggiolo-Kaftan

Italian Languages and Literature

Questo articolo mette in risalto la presa di coscienza di Vanna, protagonista del racconto di Maria Messina, della sua subalternità, come donna, all’interno della nazione. Vanna, mancando di soggettività sociale e politica, è forzata a vivere in una condizione di dipendenza economica e, quindi, di dislocamento, non avendo neanche il diritto a possedere lo spazio domestico al quale è relegata. Non potendo più vivere all’interno di codici comportamentali e ideologici della borghesia liberale dell’Italia a cavallo tra i due secoli, Vanna vive in una condizione di oltrepassamento, e quindi di esilio, non dissimile da quella del soggetto coloniale. Per tanto, …

The Decameron: Past Meets Present, An Overview, Brittany Asaro

Italian and Italian Studies: Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Zoomprov. Improvisation Exercises For Language Learning In Online Classes With Zoom Or Similar Tech For Beginning And Intermediate Learners And Beyond, Mona Eikel-Pohen

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

The improv language exercises in this compilation are chosen from the experience I gathered 20 years ago, but also from the amazing work of Lauren Esposito and Scranton Improv & Comedy that have been more real than anything else to me this past summer, and from Jim Ansaldo, who taught me how to structure improv exercises online. They are organized by level, referring to the Common European Framework of References for Languages. That means, A1 exercises can be conducted at the beginners level but also at all other higher levels, but B2 exercises should not be imposed upon beginners or …

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 …

The Forest, The Trees, The Bark, The Pith: An Intensive Look At The Circulation Rates Of Primary Texts In Ten Major Literature Areas At The University Of Oregon Libraries, Jeff D. Staiger

Charleston Library Conference

This poster looks at the circulation rate for literary primary texts, which constitute a unique area of collecting in academic libraries: while they do not in most cases meet immediate research needs, it is assumed that libraries ought to acquire them, for reasons including future research needs, preservation of the cultural record, and the ability of members of the intellectual community to stay current, those these remain primarily tacit. The circulation trends of contemporary literary works in ten areas of literature (English, American, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin American, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian) over the past twenty years at the …

"Authors On The Hill " Presents Prof. Giovanni Spani, Giovanni Spani

Authors on the Hill

Professor Giovanni Spani of the World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department at the College of the Holy Cross will present his work on Dante's Florence, a multimedia educational app for Android and iOS.

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …

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 …