Italian Literature Commons^™

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.

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 …

Alessandro Baricco: A Modern Homer / Alessandro Baricco: Omero Modern, Whitney Losapio

Honors Scholar Theses

Alessandro Baricco is an Italian author, pianist, journalist and music critic, among a wide range of many other talents. His novels have won great critical acclaim in Italy and France and are popular around the world. While generally considered among the postmodern writers, some critics have accused him of being a forerunner in a 1990s movement dubbed letteratura giovanile, that is juvenile literature that is simplistic, targets a young audience and is created for the sole purpose of making money. This criticism is unwarranted. Baricco is a multitalented author who pays strict attention to the quality of his work and …

A Postcard From The Library: A Study Of Perceptions Of Italy And Foreigners Abroad Through Time, Kathlyn Valianti Collins

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

A representative selection of European and American literature reveals a culturally constructed function ofItalyas the place of revelation for foreign visitors. This literary construction, founded in a long history of travel from pilgrimage to mass tourism, contextualizes the experience of American students such as myself when we live and study in Italy whether we realize it or not.

Storia, Fiaba, E Un Decennio Di Calvino, William Carney

CMC Senior Theses

An exploration of the similarities and differences between two major works of the writer Italo Calvino, this thesis delves into the use of historical background and fable as allegory for 1945-1956 Italy.

The Dilemma Of The Italian American Male, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

“The Dilemma of the Italian American Male.”

Originally published in Pimps, Wimps, Studs, Thugs and Gentlemen: Essays on Media Images of Masculinity. Ed: Elwood Watson. McFarland, 2009

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Flarr Pages #64: The Poetry Of Gezim Hajdari: A Sacred Non-Belonging, Viktor Berberi

FLARR Pages

No abstract provided.

Literary Influences On Dante's Use Of Fear In The Commedia, Andrew Pearson

Presentations

This presentation explores the literary influences that may have guided Dante's use and development of fear reflected and directed by his use of the word paura. These influences include Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, and St. Thomas Aquinas. The presenter also suggests a distant echo of fear finding its way into John Milton's Paradise Lost.

An Existentialist Interpretation Of Four Novels By Alberto Moravia, Megan Chiusaroli

Honors College Theses

This analysis seeks to explore the existential qualities in four novels by Alberto Moravia: The Time of Indifference, The Woman of Rome, The Conformist, and Boredom

The Voice Of Dioneo: Women In Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, Caitlin E. Williams

Honors Scholar Theses

Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, a famous piece of Italian literature written during the early Renaissance period, has created much debate among critics about its ambiguous position as a feminist, or anti-feminist piece of literature. This study seeks to explore this popular debate by examining Dioneo, one of the ten narrators Boccaccio creates for this collection. Dioneo is commonly referred to as the main voice of Boccaccio, or as the leader of the narrators. His character provides some of the most feminine stories within the Decameron as well as the most mysogynistic tale. Dioneo acts as a transgressor throughout the piece …

Guareschi's "Mondo Piccolo" And The Sacrality Of Conscience, Alan R. Perry

Italian Faculty Publications

This study adopts a Christian hermeneutic to explore sacred themes in several of the 346 Don Camillo short stories that Giovannino Guareschi wrote between 1946 and 1966. Such a critical approach may seem non-traditional to use in analyzing a post-World War II, twentieth-century author. And yet, Guareschi defies convention in many ways beyond his profession as a journalist, humorist and popular author: he openly opposed the anti-clerical and Marxist literary establishment; defined himself as an anti-intellectual; and, as a layperson, he wrote unromantically about matters of faith. Especially as editor of the immensely popular weekly newspaper Candido, he had …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

"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 …

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 …

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 …