Italian Literature Commons^™

Immigration, “Literary Value”, And The Logic Of Late Capitalism In Piersandro Pallavicini’S Il Mostro Di Vigevano (1999), Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

According to Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), postmodern culture functions as an expression of the logic of late capitalism, manifesting in stylistic pastiche, the dominance of spectacle, a waning of historical consciousness, and a corresponding erosion of affect. Central to Jameson’s critique is the contention that postmodernism forecloses the possibility of imagining alternatives to capitalism. This article argues that Piersandro Pallavicini’s Il mostro di Vigevano (1999) exemplifies some of these features, and it shows how its description of immigrants to Italy as ingenuous, innocent, and simple-minded insinuates that they come from backward places …

Italian Culture Through Film, Monica Rossi-Miller

Open Educational Resources

Introduction to important themes of Italian culture by viewing and analyzing
representative Italian films from the post-World War II era to the present. Topics examined include: the Italian family, how World War II has shaped contemporary Italian culture, Italy as a country of emigrants and immigrants, and an examination of religion and the Catholic Church.
This is a Writing Intensive course conducted in English, and all films have English subtitles.

A Writing Intensive Course Specifically is a designated course sections that—in addition to providing the established disciplinary-oriented student outcomes—incorporate approved instructional strategies and course assignments designed to enhance students’ writing …

The Divine Comedy: A Work Of Medieval Mythology, Jamie Alexander

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Prior to The Divine Comedy (1308-1321), ideas about Purgatory were in the early stages of development. Purgatory had loose rituals surrounding its existence and it lacked depiction in written works. Yet in the following centuries, the fear of Purgatory and the practices of penance and indulgences reached a fever pitch, ultimately leading to the Protestant Reformation. Purgatory as a celestial location, and not just the “purgatorial fires” of the Bible, only began to develop in the twelfth century, but its fearful description and imagery in The Divine Comedy not only solidified previously nebulous understandings of Purgatory, but also increased anxiety …

Creatività Diasporiche Dialoghi Transnazionali Tra Teoria E Arti, Simone Brioni Dr., Loredana Polezzi Dr., Franca Sinopoli

Department of English Faculty Publications

Creatività diasporiche è un volume bilingue costituito da tredici conversazioni tra studiosi/studiose di materie umanistiche e artisti/artiste il cui lavoro si concentra sul tema della migrazione e dell’identità. I contributi nella raccolta abbracciano forme di produzione che vanno dalla letteratura alle arti visive, dal cinema alla performance teatrale, dai podcast alla musica rap, mentre tra le tematiche ricorrenti emergono dibattiti su identità, lingua, migrazione, memoria e cittadinanza. Questo volume è anche un invito a ripensare il lavoro creativo e quello accademico, in area umanistica, come intrinsecamente legati al dialogo e alla collaborazione. Ciascuna conversazione si concentra sull’Italia intesa come un …

The Structure Of Human Redemption As Demonstrated In Dante's The Divine Comedy, Erick S. Flores

Student Research

Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy is renowned all around the globe for its impact on literary history as a whole. This research paper delves into the structure of human redemption as portrayed in Dante's epic masterpiece. Through a comprehensive analysis of the narrative structure, allegory, and symbolism, employed by Dante, this study illuminates the underlying framework that guides the protagonist and readers on a transformative journey through the afterlife. By examining the divisions of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, this paper reveals the hierarchical nature of sin, the ever-progressive path of spiritual growth, and the ultimate attaining of salvation and understanding …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

Strangely Dark, Unbearably Bright: From The Volto Santo To The Veronica And Beyond In The Divine Comedy, Alexa Sand

Art and Design Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Poesía Amorosa De Una Erudita Del Xvii: Traducción Y Creación En El Pastor Fido De Isabel Correa, Almudena Vidorreta

Publications and Research

Este trabajo pretende insertar en el contexto humanista de su tiempo la escritura poética de Isabel Rebeca Correa, erudita portuguesa del siglo XVII que residió en Ámsterdam. Aunque no se conserva buena parte de su obra, podemos conocer el estilo de la autora a través de su traducción al español de El pastor Fido, tragicomedia pastoril de Guarini. Se incluye por primera vez una transcripción completa y modernizada de los fragmentos de dicha versión que, según la traductora, proceden de su propia inventiva. Por medio de esta amplificación de la obra del italiano, Isabel Correa legitima y justifica su …

Review Of "Printers Without Borders: Translation And Textuality In The Renaissance", Joshua Reid

ETSU Faculty Works

Review of Selene Scarsi . Translating Women in Early Modern England: Gender in the Elizabethan Versions of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies Series. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. x + 207 pp. index. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6620–2.

Storie ‘Vere’ Ed Eroine Dei Romanzi. Rappresentare La Somalia In 'Ilaria Alpi. La Ragazza Che Voleva Raccontare L’Inferno' E 'Non Dirmi Che Hai Paura'., Simone Brioni

Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Faculty Publications

This article analyses Gigliola Alvisi’s Ilaria Alpi: La ragazza che voleva raccontare l’inferno [Ilaria Alpi: The Young Woman Who Wanted to Narrate the Hell] (2014) and Giuseppe Catozzella’s Non dirmi che hai paura [Don’t Tell Me You Are Afraid] (2014), two novels that deal with two recent events in Somali and Italian history, the killing of the journalist Ilaria Alpi in Mogadishu in 1994 and the death of Samia Yosuf Omar while she was trying to reach the Italian shores from Libya by boat. Alvisi’s text is analysed in comparison with other fictional and journalistic representations of Ilaria Alpi, while …

Matteo Garrone's Reality:The Big Brother Spectacle And Its Rupture, Anna Paparcone Bronner

Faculty Journal Articles

In Garrone’s film, Reality, the protagonist Luciano Ciotola becomes obsessed with his participation in the reality TV show Big Brother to the point that his whole life turns into a spectacle. In Italian cinema studies no other scholar had yet analyzed this film, despite its success and the very engaging and up-to-date topic. In my article, at the diegetic level, I show that the spectator experiences an overlap and a (con)fusion between Luciano’s everyday reality and his life as a member of the reality TV show. However, keeping in mind Guy Debord’s seminal work The Society of the Spectacle and …

Review: 'Unfinished Business: Screening The Italian Mafia In The New Millennium', Renato Ventura

Global Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book review on Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millenium by Dana Renga. University of Toronto Press, 2013. ISBN: 9781442615588.

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 …

Fantahistorical Vs. Fantafascist Epic: “Contemporary” Alternative Italian Colonial Histories, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

This article focuses on Enrico Brizzi’s L’inattesa piega degli eventi [The Unexpected Turn of Events, 2008], La nostra guerra [Our War, 2009], and Lorenzo Pellegrini e le donne [Lorenzo Pellegrini and the Women, 2012], a trilogy of alternative history novels that imagines what would have happened to the Italian empire if Italy had not allied with Germany during the Second World War. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on contemporaneity (2009), I analyze how this trilogy represents Fascism and its colonial legacy in relation to the history of politics and soccer in Italy. I also compare Brizzi’s trilogy to Mario Farneti’s …

Sonata Divina Commedia (Part I: Inferno), Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

Part 1 of planned 3-part violin and piano sonata modeled after Dante's "Divina Commedia." Part 1 "Inferno" is a wild modernist adventure for violin and piano, echoing the terrors of inferno. As the piece is incredibly virtuosic, the composer allows for variation, adaptation, and some minor changes if necessary for performers to execute the piece, as faithfully as they can. The work was written in honor of two superb musicians, who by random chance, the composer met or had connections with separately, before realizing the violinist (Mr. Kerr) and the pianist (Mr. Wallace) actually met and went to school together …

Estudio Y Edición De Las "Poesías Varias" De José Navarro (1654), Almudena Vidorreta

Graduate Student Publications and Research

José Navarro Bermuz, an Aragonese intellectual who worked for the Italian family of the Ludovisi, was known for his active participation in the literary academies and poetic competitions of his time, and for his collection of Poesías varias. My research entails an in-depth study of the intellectual and political landscape of the second half of the 17th century in which Navarro lived and wrote. My aim was emphasize the significance of his literary production within the context of Spanish Early Modern literature, together with the critical edition of both his Poesías varias, and the Loa para la comedia …

Autotraduction, Traduction Interculturelle Et Intersémiotique Dans La Quarta Via De Kaha Mohamed Aden, Simone Brioni

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Postcolonialismo, Subalternità E New Italian Epic: Intervista Con Wu Ming 1, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Migrant Stories And Italian Colonialism: A Report On Two Documentaries, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Political Persecution Of A Poet: A Detail Of Dante's Exile, Jason Ader

A with Honors Projects

Durante degli Alighieri, known throughout the world as simply Dante, was a fourteenth century Italian poet, philosopher, literary theorist, and politician. He is best known for his epic Commedia, which was later dubbed The Divine Comedy. Commedia is generally considered the greatest Italian literary work and a masterpiece of world literature. Due to the turbulent political atmosphere of his time and place, Dante spent over a third of his life living in exile. This paper will explore the details of Dante's exile and the influence that it had upon his work.

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

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student 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 …

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.

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 …

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.