Saturday 28th February 2015

University College Cork

Keynote Speaker Dr Ruth Glynn, University of Bristol

Conference Poster

Call for Papers (Archive)

Abstracts

Panel 1A: Evolution of Italian Poetic Paradigms through the Centuries
Chair: Dr Daragh O’Connell Room 2.12

Matteo Trillini - Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Giusto De’ Conti: un protagonista della lirica del Quattrocento

La poesia del Quattrocento, nonostante gli sforzi sempre più cospicui degli studiosi, rimane ancora un settore poco frequentato e troppo spesso considerato di produzione letteraria “minore”, soprattutto per quanto riguarda la poesia in volgare. Su tale giudizio pesa senz’altro l’etichetta di Croce di “secolo senza poesia”, in cui nessun poeta sembra in grado di raccogliere l’eredità delle Tre Corone. In realtà il XV secolo è stato molto di più di un secolo di transizione come ha messo in evidenza Pasquini, che ha posto l’accento invece sull’elaborazione sperimentale. La Bella Mano di Giusto de’ Conti, un poeta che oserei definire d’avanguardia, è senz’altro l’esempio più evidente del pregiudizio della critica letteraria nei confronti della lirica quattrocentesca. I numerosi manoscritti che la contengono, la diffusione di singoli componimenti in sillogi poetiche del secolo, il nome di Giusto ricordato ed esaltato da scrittori tardoquattrocenteschi, e l’influenza esercitata da questi su poeti come Boiardo e Sannazzaro ne testimoniano un’importanza a cui oggi fa da contraltare la mancanza di un’edizione critica.
Il mio intervento mira, quindi, a contribuire alla riscoperta di un autore e di un’opera che hanno giocato senz’altro un ruolo di prim’ordine nella letteratura del Rinascimento, cercando di mostrare la peculiare abilità versificatrice di quello che è stato recentemente definito da Marco Santagata il Pietro Bembo del Quattrocento.
Matteo Trillini si è laureato in Lettere Classiche specializzandosi in Filologia Medievale e Umanistica presso l’Università di Macerata, con voti 110/110 e Lode. Ha successivamente ottenuto il titolo di Master in Didattica dell’italiano L2/LS presso la medesima Università e sta attualmente ultimando la propria tesi dottorale sulla Bella Mano di Giusto de’ Conti presso l’Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Insegna, inoltre, lingua e letteratura italiana all’Istituto Italiano di Cultura e al Liceo francese di Madrid.

Stefano Renga - Università degli Studi di Padova
Matteo Peregrini tra stile e prudenza

Attraverso la presentazione di un personaggio annoverato tra i “minori” del primo Seicento italiano, il bolognese Matteo Peregrini, sarà possibile mettere in evidenza come determinati tratti retorici e stilistici del tempo siano espressione diretta di precisi modelli etico-culturali.
Trattatista civile, accademico, insegnante di logica e filosofia morale, per anni al seguito del cardinal Barberini, poi consultore del senato di Genova e, infine, custode della Biblioteca Vaticana: ripercorsa la produzione del nostro autore, una lettura comparata del trattato retorico Delle Acutezze  (1639) e delle declamazioni della Politica Massima (1640) mostrerà come un’attitudine civile possa tradursi in una teoria dello stile. Il modello comportamentale dell’autore, il savio derivato dall’interpretazione tardo-rinascimentale del principio del giusto mezzo, sembra potersi esprimere compiutamente e mantenere un profilo riconoscibile solo in campo retorico, tra le pagine del Delle Acutezze, mentre si appesantisce di contraddizioni e compromessi, rimanendo sepolto dalle confuse formule di convenienza in cui è costretto ad indugiare, tra quelle della Politica Massima
Il sistematico confronto tra i due testi rivelerà che proprio i limiti espressivi che hanno pregiudicato la fortuna del Peregrini, il cui pensiero politico paga il prezzo di un affettato convincimento assolutista, rendono riconoscibile un comportamento prezioso per l’interpretazione della cultura e della società del Seicento.

Stefano Renga ha conseguito la Laurea Triennale in Lettere Moderne presso la facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Padova nel 2009 con una tesi dal titolo La metafora del labirinto. Borges e le definizioni di letteratura.
Nel 2010 ha conseguito, presso il medesimo ateneo, la Laurea Magistrale in Filologia Moderna – Curriculum di Teoria e Critica Letteraria con un elaborato, Un barocco-moderato: Matteo Peregrini tra stile e prudenza, che costituisce il nucleo di partenza della ricerca proposta, con la quale Stefano Renga è oggi PhD candidate presso l’Università di Padova.
 

Adele Bardazzi - University of Oxford
Lame, lamelle, lime, lamiere, lastre, sciabole, scaglie. A Reading of Eugenio Montale’s Ossi di seppia
Avendo sentito fin dalla nascita una totale
disarmonia con la realtà che mi circondava, la
materia della mia ispirazione non poteva essere che
quella disarmonia.

This paper explores the several tensions between absence and presence in Montale’s first poetic collection. It reveals that on the one hand corporality is rejected by the protagonist of the Ossi who aims to acquire the features of a mere shadow, but, on the other hand, that samecorporality penetrates at the level of language as well as in the natural landscape which emerges in all its materiality. In doing so, the highly concrete landscape becomes a metaphor for a state of being: the male di vivere. Attention will be given on the three key elements in Eugenio Montale’s Ossi di seppia: starting with the very solid objects that inhabit the Ligurian landscape, going on to the more fluid sea and its waves, and ending with the almost incorporeal wind and its blowing. It is through these three elements that disharmony that the poet denounces emerges in all its materiality, and it is in this way that Montale is able to concretise the abstract and intangible concept of the male di vivere. Moreover, this chapter will reveal all the images around the topos of sharp and knife-edge objects which keep returning throughout the Ossi, something that goes beyond the stylistic sharpness of Montale’s style, but, I claim, powerfully encapsulates the poetic strategy of making palpable the intangible sense of disharmony as felt by the poetic subject. There is therefore a simultaneous presence and absence in the Ossi: corporality is rejected by the lyrical ‘I’, but, at that same time, that very corporality penetrates the language and the poetic landscape of Montale’s first poetic collection.

Adele Bardazzi is currently undertaking a D.Phil. in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford (UK). Before that she has been studying at Royal Holloway University of London where she received a B.A. in English & Italian with First Class Honours. Her current doctoral research explores the multiple tensions between absence and presence in the poetry of the twentieth-century Italian poet Eugenio Montale and aims to offer a diachronic analysis, covering from Ossi di seppia to the Diario del ’71 e del ’72, of how the boundaries between absence and presence are constantly negotiated. It is through tensions between absence and presence and their intertwinements that paradoxical present absences and absent presences emerge. She is also interested in feminist and queer theory, and the thought of Michel Foucault, to which one of her two undergraduate dissertations was devoted. In slightly shorter versions, both of her undergraduate dissertations have been recently published: 'What Ever Happened to the Subject? A Critical Re-evaluation of Power: Re-thinking the Human Subject in Today's World' in the G8 & G20 Alumni Association Conference Journal (2013) and 'The Sound of Silence in Eugenio Montale. A Critical Analysis of Ossi di seppia' in Harts & Minds Journal (2014).

Panel 1B: Bodies and Sexualities
Chair: Dr Louise Sheehan Room 2.44

Beatrice Mabrey – University of Texas

(Re)membering the Female Body: Memory and Nostalgia in Cristina Comencini’s Il cappotto del turco and Due Partite

In Il cappotto del turco (1998) and Due Partite (2006), Cristina Comencini utilizes memory to explore feminine experiences during two events in recent Italian history that have become bastions of Italian social and political identities: the student movement of 1968 and the economic miracle, respectively. Both the novel and the play examine these two events through the eyes of a subset of women whose memories have often been obfuscated by the dominant narratives of patriarchal structures and organizations. Through Il cappotto del turco’s depiction of two sisters navigating the shifting sociocultural climate of the 1960s and through Due Partite’s evocation of the well-delineated private sphere as embodied by the 1950s bourgeois sitting room, Comencini opens these events to a renewed engagement on the part of the reader or spectator. I argue that although these works implement nostalgic cues (such as songs, references, etc…) to draw in a postmodern audience well versed in the consumption of nostalgic mementos, they do not limit themselves to what Frederic Jameson would describe as a “cannibalization of the styles of the past.” Rather, they utilize nostalgia as a point of entry into a deeper examination of the mnemonic legacies of these events, particularly with regards to current feminist identity politics. In these two works, nostalgia therefore provides a space for the articulation and renegotiation of unspoken yet embodied memorial legacies that continue to shape the performance of femininity.

Beatrice Mabrey completed her master's degree at the University of Texas in 2011. She is currently in the process of writing her dissertation which she will defend in May 2015. Her research interests include memory and post-modern Italian literature.
Mario Inglese (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Mario Inglese – National University of Ireland, Galway

Cartografie del corpo: Valerio Magrelli e le narrazioni di viaggi interiori

In questa comunicazione verranno esaminati i rapporti tra Nel condominio di carne di Magrelli e alcuni esempi di narrazioni di viaggi nel corpo. Dai testi letterari, alle trattazioni scientifico pedagogiche e alle incursioni nell’arte e nel cinema, le opere sui viaggi interiori formano una lunga tradizione. L’opera di Magrelli si segnala per l’originalità e la ricchezza dei rimandi intertestuali. La tematizzazione del corpo rappresenta una ‘catabasi’ nella carne ma sembra moltiplicare gli interrogativi alla base della quest. Anziché garantire una familiarizzazione con una dimensione scarsamente conosciuta, l’esplorazione delle cavità del corpo ha schiuso molto spesso scenari di straniamento, rafforzando la convinzione che ancora limitata è l’esperienza del nostro supporto mortale. Paradossalmente alla conquista del corpo non ha corrisposto una conquista del sé. Dalla visione parcellizzata dello sparagmós, dalla separazione di anima e corpo, o dalle posizioni dualistiche cartesiane si è passati all’esaltazione della sensualità o della reificazione della carne. Anche in Magrelli avviene uno spostamento dell’asse cartesiano a favore di una tematizzazione marcata della fenomenologia della corporeità a cui assistiamo in Nel condominio.

Mario Inglese è PhD scholar di italiano alla National University of Ireland, Galway. Ha insegnato alla University of British Columbia, University of New England e University of Houston. Si occupa di italianistica, comparatistica, poesia e linguistica applicata. Ha pubblicato un libro sulla lirica di Magrelli e uno sulla didattica della poesia. Suoi versi sono apparsi su “Gradiva” e “La libellula”. Ha scritto il volume di poesie L’approssimata effigie. È inoltre autore di saggi e articoli per Marietti, Guerra, MEP (Oxford), «Fogli di anglistica», «Annali d’italianistica» e «Italica». Ha scritto anche su Bunyan, Joyce, Heaney, Svevo e Camilleri. Ha tradotto, tra gli altri, poesie di Heaney e J. Armstrong.

Mariangela Sanese – University College Cork

The Emotional Construction of Female Space in Natalia by Fausta Cialente.

According to Hogan’s research in the field of emotions and their involvement in the process of building a novel, literary works can be considered important for the development in emotions’ studies.
In What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (2011), The Mind and its Stories (2003), and in Affective Narratology (2011), Hogan stresses the idea that literature, or verbal art, is produced by people. First of all people share ideas, perceptions, desires, aspirations, and, what is most important for our purpose, emotions. Quoting Hogan ‘literature is first of all, and most significantly, human’,
in fact it can help to understand the function of the mind. Secondly, Hogan states that literary fiction
is a representation but it is also a process of ‘reshaping’ emotions, once belonged to the writer. He
also analyses the ways literature depicts real life emotions and fosters emphatic versions of those
emotions in readers.
Given this theoretical background, this paper investigates the representation of emotional spaces in the first Cialente’s novel Natalia (1925). This analysis will focus on Natalia’s lesbian relationship with Silvia, hence, I examine the spaces represented by the author in order to narrate the Natalia and Silvia’s emotions. I therefore argue that the category of space can be used as a strong and valuable point around which concepts of sexual identity can be investigated. Drawing on the methodology I am employing in my thesis, the main purpose of this paper is to analyse this novel through the conceptual lens of Affective Narratology Theory, in order to point towards the ways in which emotional systems interact in creating a story.

Mariangela Sanese is a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian at University College Cork (UCC), working under the supervision of Dr. Silvia Ross. She completed her BA in Comparative Literature at the Università degli Studi Gabriele D’Annunzio in 2010. Her primary research interest is the Twentieth Century Italian fiction and poetry, in particular the emotional construction of Alexandria of Egypt in the works of Ungaretti, Marinetti and Cialente.

Panel 2A: Politics and Culture
Chair: Donald O’ Driscoll Room 2.12

Angelo Silvestri – Cardiff University
Political use of religion versus religious use of politics. A comparative study on the power of the Church and its prelates in Cremona and Lincoln from the mid XI to the mid XIII century
Bishops during the Middle Age were among the most powerful lords in Europe enjoying political, religious and economic power. Politics and Christian religion, sometimes in alliance, sometimes in contraposition most often simply intertwined, were the basis of their power. And yet, the understanding of the full scale of this combination still eludes us. Nowhere the connection and the overlapping between politics and religion were more evident than in English and Italian bishops in the central centuries of the Middle Ages. In particular, Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln and Bishop Sicardo of Cremona provide two of the most manifest examples of the difficulty for the religious and the political power to work together and to be shared successfully by the same person. Their actions demonstrated that politics and religion were indispensable to one another and yet that their blending represented a mortal embrace in which one of the two powers was doomed to succumb. In this paper I will try to get closer to an understanding of how the struggle between “sacred and profane” involved every aspect of the society and transformed the power of the bishop in Lincoln and in the north Italian city of Cremona in the XIII-XIV centuries. The similarities and the differences between the roles and the functions of the prelates in the two cities as indicated by the available evidence and by the questions asked by their historians allow me to offer a broader and more satisfying picture.
Angelo Silvestri: I am a Language Tutor and I am teaching Italian language and Italian history. My personal interests lie in English and European Medieval history. Specifically I am studying the structure of the medieval church and its influence on the medieval society. My attention is focused on the authority and the role of the bishop in England and in Europe from the Norman Conquest to the middle of the fourteenth century.

 

Enrico Riccardo Orlando – Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia – Universitè Paris IV Sorbonne
I «Tarli» di Emilio Cecchi

My research project is a complete edition of the review of literary criticism «Libri nuovi e usati», written by Emilio Cecchi and signed under the name of "Il Tarlo". The series was published in Rome between July 15, 1921 and November 30, 1923 in the newspaper "La Tribuna": I've already recovered all the texts, I introduced them with an extensive historical-critical essay and I'll put at the end of the volume an apparatus of notes. In «Libri nuovi e usati» the critic wrote a review of Italian and foreign books and articles, with special attention to the works written in French and in English: one of the most famous of these texts is an article in which Cecchi, the first in Italy, wrote about «Ulysses» by James Joyce. With a half-seriously tone, supported by a culture of the highest level, the italian critic introduces the readers of «La Tribuna» to the international literary debates: this cultural operation is symbolically even more valid, if we consider that takes place when Mussolini comes to power.
Enrico Riccardo Orlando: I'm enrolled in PhD in Italian Studies (second year) and I work on Italian literature of the early twentieth century, with a focus on writers who founded "La Voce". I studied in particular the figure of Giovanni Boine: about this author, I published in «Lettere Italiane» a bibliographic review of thirty years and I recently attended a meeting organized by the foundation Natalino Sapegno in Morgex (AO). For the one hundreth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, I also worked on authors linked to the conflict.

Alessandro Luchetti – National University of Ireland, Galway
Il passato che riaffiora: la rimozione della memoria coloniale italiana dagli anni Ottanta ai giorni nostri

L’intervento si aprirà con l’analisi delle reazioni scaturite dal recente fatto di cronaca che ha coinvolto il comune romano di Affile nei mesi successivi all’inaugurazione di un sacrario dedicato a Rodolfo Graziani, gerarca fascista macchiatosi di crimini di guerra in Libia ed Etiopia durante le guerre coloniali del primo Novecento. L’episodio ha portato alla luce profonde lacune all’interno della memoria storica italiana, vittima di ripetute rimozioni del ricordo legato all’epoca coloniale. Negli anni, ma soprattutto nell’ultimo trentennio, queste mancanze hanno suscitato reazioni di colpevole silenzio alternate a veementi manovre di censura. L’intervento proseguirà a ritroso nel tempo con l’analisi di due testi cinematografici prodotti negli anni Ottanta, Il leone del deserto e Fascist Legacy, due titoli che forse non ci ricordano nulla, ma che, in realtà, sono il simbolo di una “lacerazione non rimarginabile” sconnessa. Queste due pellicole sono incorse in un repentino offuscamento per via dei forti contenuti mostrati e sarebbero state sdoganate solo negli anni Duemila, vittime di una censura che aveva impedito per anni lo scaturire di un qualsiasi dibattito a livello nazionale. Per chiudere il cerchio e riavvicinarsi cronologicamente al ‘caso Affile’, si parlerà quindi dell’annosa questione della riconsegna dell’obelisco di Axum, iniziata nel 1997 quando, per la prima volta, l’allora che l’Italia tenta ancora oggi di lenire in maniera disordinata e Presidente della Repubblica Oscar Luigi Scalfaro riconobbe pubblicamente i crimini commessi durante l’epoca coloniale, inaugurando un nuovo capitolo di fratellanza e collaborazione con il popolo etiope. Nonostante tali premesse, la resa di questo simbolo della sopraffazione sarà lunga, travagliata e non scevra di polemiche, a testimonianza del fatto che il processo di elaborazione del passato coloniale è sì finalmente iniziato, ma è tutt’oggi, dolorosamente, in fieri.
Alessandro Luchetti, nel 2006, ha conseguito la laurea triennale in Lingue, letterature e culture e straniere presso l’Università degli Studi di Macerata con una tesi in letteratura e cultura anglo-americana dal titolo “Festeggiare con i Peanuts: istruzioni per l’uso”, lavoro incentrato sul significato della festività nella cultura popolare nordamericana attraverso le strisce di Charles M. Schulz. Nel novembre 2010 ha conseguito la laurea specialistica in Lingue e letterature moderne euroamericane, anche questa presso l’Università di Macerata, con una tesi incentrata sul genocidio coloniale in Australia e Canada visto attraverso i lavori di Mudrooroo e Michael Crummey. Il titolo della tesi è “’The other is lost, but saved in the text’. Il romanzo storico post-coloniale in Australia e Canada: Mudrooroo e Michael Crummey”. Nel settembre 2012 ha intrapreso un dottorato di ricerca sulla scrittura post-coloniale italiana presso la National University of Ireland, Galway: nello specifico si occupa dei romanzi di Erminia Dell’Oro e di Gabriella Ghermandi, del loro rapporto con le scienze storiche e delle eventuali ripercussioni sulla memoria collettiva nazionale.

Panel 2B: Cinema and Political Commitment
Chair: Dr Laura Rascaroli Room 2.44

Sarah Culhane - University of Bristol
Behind bars in post-war Italian cinema: the popolana’s experience of female prison

In an effort to expand the discourse around the popolana as an archetype of Italian post-war cinema, this paper will illustrate how the figure is used to offer a window onto the world of female prisons in Italy. With reference to films such as L’onorevole Angelina (1948) Pane, Amore e Fantasia (1953), Nella città l’inferno (1959) and Ieri, oggi, domani (1963), I will explore the role of the popolana in narrating the female experience of prison. The commonality of the prison experience in these films allows for the comparison of the embodiment of the popolana by different actresses: Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren respectively.
By firstly considering the films from a historical and sociological perspective, I will look at the role of religious orders in the running of female prisons and the Italian government’s failure to enforce the secular treatment applied to male prisoners. As Mary Gibson (2009) notes ‘little [has] been written about the juridical status of female criminals’ in the Italian context, and as such these films can to some extent be viewed as valuable historical documents that provide insight into the ways that the female experience of prison was imagined at the time .
Through comparative textual analysis of the films mentioned, I will show how prison becomes a site of reflection to which the popolana is consigned when she attempts to transgress and/or break away from the confinement of the domestic space. I will also illustrate the ways in which prison is a space that allows for the (de)construction of traditional gender roles. Finally, I will look at prison as a site of female community and the popolana’s role within it.
Sarah Culhane is a PhD candidate in Italian studies at the University of Bristol. She is currently researching female stars active in Italian cinema in the 1940s and 1950s as part of the AHRC funded project ‘Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-1960’. Her thesis looks at the reception of Italian and non-Italian female film stars in light of both audiences and press discourse in the post-war period. She has an honours degree in Italian and Film Studies from Trinity College Dublin (2010) and a Master’s in Italian Studies from University College Dublin (2013).

Jonathan O’Neil – Florida Atlantic University
Censorship, Religion and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Ricotta: Vestiges of Fascism in Italy’s Post-War Criminal Code

This study examines the impact of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 short film, La Ricotta, on evolving standards of censorship in Italy. State use of censorship in suppressing works of art perceived as provocative is nothing new. Evolving standards, however, have reduced the legitimate uses of censorship to the most pressing considerations of security and public safety. Italy in the 1960s, removed by only two decades from a fascist government, retained many of its moral standards from this earlier period. Moreover, as a Catholic country, these standards were largely defined by the moral prescriptions of the Church. Artists from all media would begin to challenge these standards, and one auteur filmmaker in particular, Pasolini, would ostensibly lead the way in Italy towards more openness in the film industry. His short, La Ricotta, about a cinematic production of Christ’s passion, so offended the Italian governmental apparatus that he was convicted on criminal charges. The schism caused by the film in Italian society (and even among members of the clergy) exposed the obsolescence of outdated laws in the Italian penal code and began to effect change. Through an analysis of the film itself and its perceived offenses (blasphemous tableaux vivants, profane music playing over sacred scenes), an examination of court records outlining the criminal and civil proceedings that followed (in addition to the statutes that led to charges of vilipendio and how these changed in the aftermath of the trial), and a consideration of the changing environment in Italy in the 1960s (including the Second Vatican Council), this study will focus on the effects of La Ricotta and its underlying social themes on the Italian film industry, religion, and society in general.
Jonathan O’Neill holds Master of Arts Degrees in both Comparative Literature with a concentration in Italian Studies and Political Science from Florida Atlantic University. He is currently a PhD student in Comparative Studies at the same institution. This inherently interdisciplinary doctoral program has enabled Jonathan to pursue a range of topics in politics, history, and literary studies. His research interests include the role of literature in documenting important historical events, particularly the role of creative non-fiction in the years of democratic transition in Eastern and Central Europe and the non-fiction work of Italian novelist Erri De Luca.

Michele Ronchi Stefanati – University College Cork
L’avventura e l’ossessione. Fondamenti etico-politici del cinema di Gianni Celati tra Antonioni e Visconti

Gianni Celati (Sondrio, 1937-) è critico, traduttore, autore di alcuni tra i libri più influenti della narrativa italiana contemporanea, da Comiche a Lunario del paradiso, da Narratori delle Pianure a Verso la foce. Meno nota e studiata è la sua produzione cinematografica: Celati figurainfatti come regista di quattro documentari usciti tra il 1991 e il 2010: Strada Provinciale delle Anime (1991), Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri (1999), Case sparse. Visioni di case che crollano (2003) e DiolKadd. Vita, diari e riprese in un villaggio del Senegal (2010). Ha inoltre scritto la sceneggiatura, insieme a Giuseppe Tornatore e Alberto Sironi, del film di quest’ultimo dedicato al ciclista Fausto Coppi e intitolato Il grande Fausto (1995) e di quello di Paolo Muran La vita come viaggio aziendale (2006). Celati compare poi, come protagonista,nel film Mondonuovo (2003) di Davide Ferrario, con cui aveva collaborato già nel 1997 per i testi di Sul 45esimo parallelo, e nel documentario RAI Narratori di pianura e da bar (2010) per la regia di Francesco Conversano e Nene Grignaffini.
Lungi dall’interessare soltanto l’ultima parte della carriera dello scrittore, il cinema informa l’intera opera letteraria di Celati. Dallo slapstick movie (Laurel & Hardy, i Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton) ai capisaldi del documentario (Vertov, Flaherty, Ivens), il ragionamento sul cinema occupa una parte consistente del percorso celatiano. Di particolare rilevanza sono i riferimenti a Michelangelo Antonioni (soprattutto per Gente del Po, L’avventura e Il grido), a cui Celati dedica il saggio capitale La veduta frontale. Antonioni, l’avventura e l’attesa (1987), e a Visconti, iniziatore, con Ossessione, di quel nuovo cinema italiano del dopoguerra, la cui peculiarità sta per Celati proprio nella “visione documentaristica” come “apertura all’imprevisto”, da Rossellini a De Sica a Fellini.
Questo intervento si concentra sulle premesse etico-politiche del Celati film-maker: i suoi documentari, infatti, sembrano partire sempre da una radicale critica della società contemporanea, che dà luogo, anche nel suo cinema, a forme di impegno etico-estetico (Spunta 2008). Si prenderanno dunque in considerazione, da un lato, l’avventura con i fotografi per Viaggio in Italia (1984) e le sue ricadute sui documentari di Celati, attraverso il concetto di “qualsiasità”, tra Cesare Zavattini e Luigi Ghirri, dall’altro, l’ossessione per il tempo, centrale nel Celati documentarista soprattutto nei lavori degli anni Duemila.

Michele Ronchi Stefanati si laurea in Filologia medievale e umanistica presso la Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Bologna (2010) con una tesi sulle intertestualità ariostesche relative all’episodio dell’impazzimento di Orlando nel Furioso. Nel 2013 si laurea in Italianistica presso la medesima università discutendo, nel marzo del 2013, una tesi magistrale in Filologia italiana dal titolo “Riscritture. Studio sul Furioso del '32 alla luce delle due precedenti edizioni e degli autografi ariosteschi”. Due sono le aree di studio privilegiate: da un lato la letteratura umanistico-rinascimentale e i poemi cavallereschi (Valla, Poliziano, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso), dall’altro la poesia contemporanea (D’Annunzio, Ungaretti, Gozzano, Gruppo 63). Nel 2012 è Affiliate Student presso University College London (UCL) grazie ad una borsa di studio. In tale periodo ha approfondito il romanzo (Sciascia, Celati, Tondelli) ed il cinema contemporanei (Antonioni, Sorrentino, Garrone).
Attualmente “Eduardo Saccone PhDScholar” in Italian Literature presso University College Cork (UCC), Department of Italian, Michele Ronchi Stefanati si occupa di letteratura italiana contemporanea e impegno, con particolare riferimento all’opera di Gianni Celati.

Panel 3A: The Dialogue Between Human Sciences: Literature as Philosophy/Anthropology/Psychology
Chair: Antonio Lunardi Room 2.12

Claudia Zavaglini – University Palacký, Olomouc
Michelstaedter e l’inattualità del dialogo come forma della dialettica
Nel panorama della letteratura italiana, il dialogo ha avuto un grande successo nel Rinascimento e, dopo aver pressoché esaurito tutte le sue potenzialità, la sua fortuna è andata via via diminuendo.
Dopo il caso sui generis delle Operette morali leopardiane, il dialogo continua ad essere presente in varie forme anche nel Novecento: da quelle più estreme legate a Michelstaedter (Dialogo della salute) e a Pavese (Dialoghi con Leucò) a quelle della narrativa e della poesia, che ne sperimentano pure usi diversi.
Il mio intervento intende soffermarsi sull’uso singolare che fa del dialogo Carlo Michelstaedter, autore a tutt’oggi poco conosciuto ma ampiamente rivalutato non soltanto in Italia ma a livello internazionale.
Dalla Persuasione e la rettorica alle poesie e al Dialogo della salute, il pensiero di Michelstaedter viene sempre più considerato una delle vette della filosofia primonovecentesca. Dopo aver passato tanti pomeriggi durante gli anni dello Staatsgymnasium a dialogare con gli amici più intimi negli spazi ristretti a angusti di una soffitta, Michelstaedter trasfigura i dialoghi reali in dialoghi letterari di stampo platonico. Nel dialogo più noto, il Dialogo della salute, Michelstaedter si rifà apertamente a Socrate e alla dialettica socratica: il dialogo diviene uno strumento di ricerca della verità; si tratta di una ricerca infinita perché l’uomo persuaso di Michelstaedter somiglia al Sisifo di Camus e non finisce mai di salire la montagna. La curva si avvicina all’asse cartesiano infinitamente senza toccarlo mai – perché la verità è appunto ricerca continua su una via che non conosce soste.

Claudia Zavaglini è dottoranda presso il dipartimento di Lingue e letterature romanze dell’Università “Palacký” di Olomouc (Repubblica Ceca). Si è occupata a lungo della vicenda di Carlo Michelstaedter con particolare riferimento al Dialogo della salute. Attualmente si occupa del dialogo nell’ambito della letteratura moderna e contemporanea. I suoi principali interessi di ricerca vertono sulla letteratura italiana del Novecento, la letteratura comparata e la filosofia.

 

Francesco Della Costa - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Un altare per la madre: Ferdinando Camon’s Literary Lamentation
From my anthropological research perspective, literary writing can be studied as a cultural practice, not only as an aesthetic product: in socio-cultural terms, it could be considered a specific “instrument” elaborated by modern western culture to make sense of the world and of individual’s place in that world. In such a meaning, it is possible to highlight a “religious” function of writing, and to compare a novel with such a ritual as the lamentation was within the Italian folkloric culture. Ferdinando Camon, a very relevant Italian writer in the second half of 20th century, after his mother’s death, wrote Un altare per la madre (Premio Strega 1978), a novel which he himself defines “un’epigrafe”, a mourning writing. By the means his literate culture provides him with, Camon performs a ritual which helps him to overcome what the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino calls “crisi del cordoglio”. The first novel’s pages describe the writer’s cultural and psychological distress during the burial: he does not belong to the mother’s rural world and he does not share anymore its ways to behave properly in that context. Thus, he feels a dangerous identification with the dead mother and he risks to be unable to transcend that situation: this is the risk the lamentation prevented from, in De Martino’s observation of folkloric mourning. What Camon can do is to find, in his own cultural world, a way to neutralize the dangerous flow of time and to metaphorize the painful reality, as both the ritual and the writing do. They both share the power of narration, which creates unhistorical times, as Paul Ricoeur maintained, and possible worlds according to Lubomír Doležel. Narrating his mother’s life, the writer finds in literature the symbolical power which fills a private emptiness with a collective sense, which transforms disorder into order.
Francesco Della Costa had a Master degree (cum laude) in “Discipline etnoantropologiche” at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, then he carried out his PhD double degree in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Naples “l’Orientale” and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. His research fields are anthropology of writing, anthropology of literature, autobiography, memory and ritual. Currently he is Post-Doctoral Student in Italian Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is working on autobiographical contents in Alberto Moravia’s novels. He is also Editor in Chief of Primapersona. Percorsi autobiografici, journal published by the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, with which he collaborates since 2007.

Giovanni Miglianti - Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge

Primo Levi fra antropologia e letteratura
Primo Levi has been recalled as an ‘exemplary witness’ of Auschwitz (Tzvetan Todorov), and his success as a survivor-writer has spread far beyond the borders of Italy. Works like Se questo è un uomo and I sommersi e i salvati can be better understood if considered in terms of multiple disciplines: in the light of history and literary studies, but also from an anthropological perspective. Following the method of literary anthropology, this paper analyzes the role of participant observer which Levi intentionally plays inside Auschwitz and carefully recounts in his writings, a role that some scholars (Anthony Rudolf, Daniele Del Giudice, Stefano Levi Della Torre) defined as that of ‘ethnologist’. In the light of such a line of thought, this paper aims to show how Levi faces the extreme environment of the concentration camp: on the one hand he is a prisoner, trapped in an eternal present by physiological needs; on the other, he uses his mind to distance himself from his actual situation, prefiguring a future narration that proves to be a means of resistance and an eventual source of (immanent) salvation. The anthropological connotation of Levi's inquiring outlook on the condition of people in Auschwitz leads to ethical considerations that are valid for mankind in general, both inside and outside the Lager, and pertain to showing what human beings never cease to be capable of, be it good or evil. Awareness of this anthropological limit, which is inherent to mankind, is the necessary premise for a fuller understanding of humanity.
Giovanni Miglianti has a BA Hons Humanities (Udine, 2014), with a five-month internship at the Wiener Library, London; currently MPhil student in European Literature and Culture (2015); primary interests include Holocaust studies and Primo Levi.

Sara Boezio - University of Warwick

Degeneration as Aesthetic Category in the Fin de Siècle Italian Literature

According to the polymath Max Nordau, literature has a massive influence on life and is to be considered one of the primary sources of the degenerative process characterising the culture of the second half of the 19th century, as he claims in his book Degeneration, published in German (Entartung) in 1892 and translated into Italian in 1893-94. The feeling of bewilderment stemming from the decline of philosophical systems like Positivism faced by the Western society is deemed, in his personal interpretation of the Darwinian evolutionistic paradigm, a sign of the degeneration of the entire European society. Nordau is also strongly influenced by the research about men of genius carried out by the Italian physician and anthropologist Cesare Lombroso who is also the dedicatee of Degeneration. However, Nordau outpaces Lombroso’s studies by considering genius and madness as directly but negatively connected. As a matter of fact, he believes that the major literary and artistic movements of his time are “pathological”, and classifies as insane the most famous intellectuals and writers of the 19th century. He states that hysteria and neurasthenia, the typical diseases of the Fin-de-siècle, are fostered by those so-called works of genius that are instead, in his opinion, noteworthy examples of degenerative art. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the concept of degeneration, primarily born in the biological field, became an aesthetic category and how it was incorporated by Italian literary critics in philosophical and narrative theories in the Fin-de-siècle period. While this process was global to Europe, I explore and highlight its peculiarities in the Italian context, by looking at the role as a mediator played by Nordau. In my presentation I argue that Lombroso and Nordau’s theories were, although often criticised, extremely elevant in the Italian intellectual milieu by paying particular attention to some authors, such as De Roberto, Svevo and Pirandello. The analysis takes into consideration both novels and literary reviews in order to compare the praxis and the theory of Italian writers and critics.
Sara Boezio completed her university studies both at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the University of Pisa. Her interests were concentrated on Renaissance literature and on the relationship between poetry and figurative arts; she studied particularly the poems of the painter-poet Bronzino. Subsequently she studied nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and wrote her MA thesis on Federico De Roberto’s essay production inside the framework of the aesthetic fin-de-siècle debate in Italy and France. She spent extended periods at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and in Lyon. Sara Boezio also has a vivid interest for questions in literary theory and cognitive poetics. In particular her interests lie in how the cognitive science can influence and contribute to studies in literature. Currently Sara Boezio is doing her PhD at the University of Warwick (UK) where her research deals with fin-de-siècle French and Italian literature. One of the question she is focusing on is the effect on late 19th century literary criticism of psychologists’, physicians’ and para-physicians’ works, like Max Nordau’s and Cesare Lombroso’s studies about the genius and the madness. She investigates how, when sociology and psychology were just beginning to come to light, intellectuals tried to answer the question about the origin of creativity by putting together the intuitions both of literary scholars and of scientists.

Panel 3B: Women in Public and Private Sphere
Chair: Dr Silvia Ross Room 2.44

Martina Viscardi – University College Cork

“Poca conoscenza della lingua”: Lady Morgan’s Vision of Italy Offents; Ginevra Canonici-Fachini Responds
When Lady Sydney Morgan published her travelogue Italy in 1821, she provoked much reaction. Although some negative criticism was to be expected, most notably from Morgan’s arch enemy in the publishing world, John Wilson Croker, who reviled her work on a regular basis in the Quarterly Review, a parallel umbrage raged in Italy itself, penned by Canonici-Fachini in her Prospetto biografico delle donne, a text taking Morgan to task about her comments on Italy and Italian women, published in 1824. Central to her scathing criticism of the Irish author’s ‘difinitive’ work on Italy, is the finding by Canonici-Fachini, having read the French translation L’Italie, that Morgan was lacking in sufficient linguistic ability with regard to Italian, to render her any expert on Italy or Italians. This paper explores the authority of the celebrity Anglophone travel writer in fashioning an image of Italy, as compared to the little known Italian authorship. Underpinned by mobility studies, travel writing and post-colonial theory, my paper will further examine the question of cultural knowledge of the Other through language acquisition. Essentially operating within early nineteenth-century Italian space, both authors embody a dichotomous gaze on Italy, from within Italy, and without.
Martina Viscardi began her PhD at University College Cork in October 2013. Her thesis, Italian Vistas: Mobilities, Texts and Intertexts of Nineteenth-Century Italian and Anglophone Women Travel Writers, is a comparative, cross-cultural project, which analyses little known Italian travel texts, as compared to celebrity Anglophone authorship on Italy during the post-Napoleonic epoch. After a career in Interior Architecture, mainly working in Zurich, Switzerland, Martina returned to complete a BA in Italian and English at University College Cork, graduating with first class honours in 2013. The recipient of an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship in 2014, she hopes to publish a monograph based on her research.

Elaine Theresa Hoysted – University College Cork

Depicting the Maternal Bond: Reinterpreting the role of the wet nurse in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of the Virgin, Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella Florence
The premise of the paper is to examine the issue of how art was used to promote the societal ideals of Renaissance Florence and, specifically, how the frescoes executed by Ghirlandaio for the private chapel of Giovanni Tornabuoni in Santa Maria Novella promoted the ideal feminine societal role, namely motherhood. This paper will focus on an analysis of the representation of the wet nurse in the Birth of the Virgin scene, and its didactic role to instruct future generations of female family members of their duties as Florentine women. It will be demonstrated that the wet nurse acts within this image as a personification of a female member of the Tornabuoni family of child-bearing age, namely Giovanna degli Albizzi, the daughter-in-law of the family patriarch who had recently died in childbirth attempting to produce a second son for her husband. A number of elements of the fresco will be analysed to support this thesis, including an examination of the necklace worn by the wet nurse, which appears to be markedly similar to a necklace worn by Giovanna in a number of other scenes and images in which she appears. No other representation of a female servant in this cycle wears such a pendant. This raises the question as to why Giovanni, who carefully devised the extensive programme for each of these episodes, would choose to have the woman in question depicted wearing this distinctive piece of Tornabuoni jewellery. The second aspect of the scene to be explored is the interaction between the wet nurse and the swaddled child. The affectionate and intimate manner of the figures’ engagement, the woman smiling fondly down at the child with the infant reciprocating is unusual as displays of a bond between the servant and infant were not depicted in contemporary Florentine art.
Elaine Hoysted is a second year PhD student in the Department of History of Art, UCC. Her doctoral project entitled ‘Visualising the Privileged Status of Motherhood: The Role of Jewellery in the Portraits of Women in Renaissance Florence’, investigates the representation of women and motherhood in Renaissance Florentine portraiture, specifically how the jewellery worn by the depicted women acted as markers of motherhood to the contemporary audience. She is also the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences PhD Scholar 2014-2015.

Sara Delmedico – University of Cambridge

L’“onesto collocamento” della donna nello Stato Pontificio dell’Ottocento

Through consultation of various sources of law, proceedings documents and legal journals, I focus on what happened at crucial moments in the life of a woman, such as marriage or at the time of widowhood, and therefore inheritance, in the Papal State in the period between the Restoration
and the Pisanelli Code (1865). The Papal State, as well as the Italian peninsula as a whole, was characterized by a strong cultural and economic backwardness. The woman, regardless of her social
class, was juridically unable; she could not undertake any major act of civil life without the consent
of her father, her husband or a court. Besides, during the nineteenth century, women in the Papal
States, as in other areas, experienced a loss of status: in the early years of the Restoration, the return
to the legislation in force before the Napoleonic conquests constituted a deterioration in their legal
status. Then, various subsequent motu proprio before the unification of Italy, instead of improving
the status of women, marked a process of their gradual marginalization from the dynamics outside
their homes. For example, in contrast with what one might imagine, over the years legal protections
faded to a lesser level than they had originally been, to the point that, in the Papal States, the dowry,
from being equal to the legitime and therefore already quite poor, became “appropriate” to the social class of the wife. In other words, it went from an arithmetical definition to a random concept
of appropriateness.

Sara Delmedico: I am a PhD student in the Italian Department, University of Cambridge. I obtained my university degree in Political Sciences and in Theory and History of Politics, from the University of Milan
and the University of Urbino, respectively. My research interests cover women rights in the centre-north of the Italian peninsula in the nineteenth century. I am editor-in-Chief of the history journal Chronica Mundi and my recent publications are “Garibaldinismo fascista: il discorso di Ezio Garibaldi ad Urbino” and “Breve studio sulla condizione giuridica della donna nello StatoPontificio dell'Ottocento”.

Panel 4A: Women and Violence
Chair: Martina O’Leary Room 2.12

Matthew White – University College Cork
Performative Gender in 17th-Century Rome: A Post-Modern approach to Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holofernes

My aim in writing this essay was to navigate the dense scholarly literature on Artemisia and on feminist issues pertaining to art in order to come up with fresh insights into the painting itself, and into the artist’s condition when painting it. The main problems with current literature on Artemisia are tendencies which place upon her a feminist bias allowing only for very narrow readings of oeuvre, and also interpretations which project Artemisia into modern conceptions of how women can function in society, which does not do much to preserve the historiographical features of Artemisia’s time.
In my essay, I address these problems and attempt to untangle them by renewed focus on the letters written by Artemisia herself (they are generally merely inserted at the end of a monograph on the artist for the reader’s reference), examining how the artist presented herself within her patriarchal society and assessing the stakes this particular constitution of self can have for a reading of Artemisia’s art. Taking on board the insights presented by Artemisia's modelling of herself, my essay looks with fresh eyes at Artemisia's most notorious work – Judith Beheading Holofernes. In analysing Artemisia’s Judith, I adopt Judith Butler’s views on performative gender as a model through which to view the artist’s rendition of the biblical heroine, and indeed the artist's presentation of herself. To say that gender is performative is to say that it is a phenomenon which is constantly manifesting itself – it is a conscious adoption of certain cultural practices and norms which produce a particular effect or appearance, these then becoming manifest through the subject. This opposes the view that gender is merely a biological fact which is determined at birth.
By using Butler’s model as a lens through which to view Artemisia and her art, my essay asserts a much more satisfying reading of Artemisia's Judith, and how Artemisia herself would have been forced to style herself and her “version” of femininity among her male contemporaries. This makes clear how she adopted a unique visual language which allowed her art to take on a more striking meaning and impact in the male-dominated discipline of 17th Century Italian art.

Matthew Whyte: I am a recent graduate of History of Art and Philosophy in UCC. I intend to continue my studies to postgraduate level and am currently working on a research proposal with the intention of entering into an MPhil/PhD track under Dr. Flavio Boggi in September 2015. My main research interests lie in the art of the Italian Renaissance, with issues involving philosophical constitutions of self and art as manifestations of deep inner subjective reflection being at the heart of my work. The study here presented has been awarded by Sibéal, the Irish Postgraduate Feminist and Gender Studies Network in November 2014.

Nicoletta Mandolini – University College Cork
Problematizzare la violenza di genere: il rapport vittima/carnefice in La storia di Elsa Morante e Il portiere di notte di Liliana Cavani

Era il 1974 quando, in un’Italia attraversata dal furore politico di una stagione in cui si iniziava a respirare un’aria “già piena di piombo” (Garboli viii), la scrittrice Elsa Morante diede alle stampe La Storia, il suo lavoro più controverso e, al contempo, popolare. Nello stesso anno, inibito dalla censura ma destinato, in virtù della sua forza iconica, a mettere radici nell’immaginario dell’epoca, debuttò nelle sale cinematografiche della penisola il film Il portiere di notte, di Liliana Cavani. Nelle opere di Morante e Cavani, entrambe nate dall’inventiva di autrici che rifiutavano l’etichetta a quel tempo particolarmente in voga di “femministe”, gli scenari della seconda guerra mondiale e delle aberrazioni del nazifascismo fanno da sfondo a una narrazione che prende il via a seguito di un particolare evento simbolico: lo stupro perpetrato da un nazista nei confronti di una donna appartenente ad una delle categorie etnico-sociali discriminate dal regime (rispettivamente ebrea e socialista). In entrambi i casi, la violenza sessuale si tramuta presto in un rapporto di problematica consenzienza tra i due partner in cui i ruoli di vittima e carnefice sembrano sfumare e, apparentemente, contraddire le teorie sullo stupro come strumento di dominio patriarcale elaborate dal femminismo internazionale (Brownmiller 1975; Griffin 1986). Utilizzando come framework metodologico la distinzione, tratta dalla filosofia politica di Hannah Arendt, tra concetto di “potere” e concetto di “violenza” (Arendt 1996), il mio paper intende indagare il rovesciamento che le problematiche relazioni di genere delineano all’interno delle due opere analizzate e, conseguentemente, la modalità attraverso cui le dinamiche narrative sovversive interne alla sfera del privato lavorano al fine di decostruire la narrazione monologica e totalitaria del potere istituzionale e storico.
Nicoletta Mandolini: Nel 2013 ho conseguito il titolo di laurea magistralein Filologia Moderna presso l’Università degli Studi di Macerata con una tesi di laurea dal titolo: Figure della marginalità nella scrittura al femminile del New Italian Epic. Nel 2014 ho ottenuto il conferimento del Master di I livello in Didattica dell’italiano lingua non materna presso l’Università per Stranieri di Perugia. Attualmente, grazie ad una borsa di studio stanziata dall’ente IRC (Irish Research Council), sono dottoranda presso University College Cork (Irlanda), dove porto avanti un progetto di ricerca su narrativa italiana contemporanea, violenza di genere e femminicidio.

Claire Buckley – University College Cork, Dublin Institute of Technology
Neither Angel nor Monster: Normalizing Female Militancy in Marco De Franchi’s La carne e il sangue
Though statistically the number of women involved in political violence is fewer thanmen, women do also communicate dissatisfaction with their environment through the means of violence. However, women are rarely depicted as having consciously chosen to engage in violence, as to accept a woman's agency in a crime dismantles the belief that women are inherently peaceful. Depicted as 'mad' or 'bad', violent women's actions are 'explained away' by the media, while no such explanation seems necessary when covering a male perpetrated crime story. Marco De Franchi opts for an alternative approach in his crime novel, La carne e il sangue (2008), focusing on normalizing the figure of the female terrorist rather than depicting her as an exception to the norm. Serena, a police detective in charge of this case, continues to contemplate what she would do if she were in the militant woman's place. Lucia, wife to Stefano and mother to Valerio, works in a hospital in Florence and seems to lead a 'normal' middle-class life. However, unknown to her family, she is also an active member of The New Red Brigades, adopting the nom de guerre 'Federica', when in her militant role. While she attempts to keep her two identities separate, an interpenetration of Lucia's two roles takes place. It is my aim in this paper to analyze the character of Lucia, and examine her role as a liminal figure who navigates the space between 'woman' and 'terrorist'. As the woman/terrorist binary is accentuated during times of social unrest, I examine questions of identity and conflict in the novel at a time when it was feared a wave of political violence was about to re-emerge.
Claire Buckley is a PhD candidate with the Italian department in UCC and is conducting her research under the guidance of Dr. Silvia Ross. Her thesis title is Wild Woman: Representations of Female 'Deviance' in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature. She is currently working as an assistant lecturer of Italian at Dublin Institute of Technology.

 

Panel 4B: Regional Identities and Representations
Chair: Dr Mark Chu Room 2.44

Valentina Piccioni - Università degli Studi di Macerata
Pier Vittorio Tondelli e l’Emilia: gli anni Ottanta e l’altra faccia di un decennio
Il dolore dell’abbandono si perde e s’infiamma
nel dolore primario dell’abbandono
della madre e del suo corpo. [...]
forse per questo che l’altra sera,
stando malissimo,
riusciva ad intravedere come forma di desiderio
soltanto un quieto immaginario famigliare,
Correggio, la sua casa, la casa dei suoi genitori. (Tondelli, 1986)

«Alle volte, mi sento veramente di benedirla, questa provincia emiliana» (Tondelli 604). In questo modo, dalla sezione Giro in provincia, si avvia verso la conclusione Un weekend postmoderno di Pier Vittorio Tondelli, e così egli ringrazia, in calce, la fonte inesauribile di vita e di racconti che lo ha accompagnato per tutta la sua produzione letteraria. D’altra parte però, la cifra violenta condensata nell’opera del suo esordio - Altri libertini - è stata opportunamente riconosciuta come il frutto di una reazione ad un contesto sociale e culturale, quello di provincia, claustrofobico e inibente, ed è del resto lo stesso titolo del romanzo a manifestare la dimensione fondante dell’«alterità», della differenza rispetto alle coordinate dell’ordinario proprie delle «piccole patrie-prigione» di Reggio Emilia, Correggio, Modena e Parma.
Per decifrare il senso di tale passaggio e come questo si è dipanato nel pensiero e nell’opera di Tondelli, il mio studio prende le mosse dal rapporto tra lo scrittore correggese e la categoria del postmoderno, recupera le elaborazioni teoriche di chi, come Antonella Cilento (1994), Alessandro Manca (2013), Elena Buia (1999) e Anna Remelli (2013), ha postulato un ritorno alle origini da parte dell’autore, riscontrabile soprattutto nella sua narrativa odeporica, nei racconti di viaggio concepiti sempre con l’inestricabile doppia valenza dell’andare e del ritornare nella terra mitica dell’Emilia. Arrivo a stabilire cioè come proprio aderendo all’immaginario generazionale on the road, l’autore riesca a trasmettere il sentimento emiliano, sia esso in forma melanconica o entusiasta, servendosi di una «corporalità della scrittura» categorizzata dalla critica come il vero leitmotiv degli scrittori emiliano-romagnoli (Cilento, 1994). Ed è quindi attraverso un itinerario comparato e transdisciplinare fra i luoghi e le opere letterarie frequentate dall’autore - cito a titolo esemplificativo la fotografia di Luigi Ghirri, il viaggio Verso la foce di Gianni Celati (1989), la Casa d’altri di Silvio D’Arzo (1980) e l’Emilia Paranoica dei CCCP - che si intende dimostrare in che modo, seppur permanendo entro l’alveo di un indiscutibile senso estetico e tematico di matrice postmoderna, Tondelli sembri abbandonare e quasi moralmente rovesciare l’orizzonte di «frantumazione e “schizofrenia” dell’io» (Ciampitti, 2006) che l’ha caratterizzata.
Biografia: Sono nata e vivo in Italia, a Jesi (AN). Nel 2009 ho conseguito la laurea di primo di Macerata, Italia livello in Lettere, curriculum moderno e contemporaneo, presso l’Università degli Studi di Macerata, con una tesi di critica letteraria italiana su ‘Cesare Garboli e il teatro di Molière’. Nello stesso ateneo, ho proseguito i miei studi inscrivendomi al corso di laurea magistrale in Filologia e letteratura dal Medioevo all’Età Contemporanea, fino al conseguimento del titolo, nel 2012, con votazione piena. Un anno più tardi ho pubblicato un articolo tratto dalla mia tesi magistrale dal titolo ‘Alfieri tragico nell’Ortis’ sugli annali della Facoltà, per i tipi EUM (Edizioni Università di Macerata). Nel 2014 ho conseguito presso l’Università per Stranieri di Perugia il Master di primo livello in Didattica dell'italiano come lingua/cultura straniera (LS) e seconda (L2).

Amber Phillips – University of Bristol
Rethinking Representations of the ‘Ndrangheta: Corrado Alvaro and the Honoured Society
Despite being recognised today as Italy’s wealthiest and most powerful criminal organisation, the ‘ndrangheta has long been dwarfed by its Sicilian and Neapolitan cousins in terms of cultural representations. While the corpus is certainly smaller, however, representations of Italy’s least-famous mafia have existed for almost as long as the organisation itself. Although academic focus has increasingly been shifting onto Calabrian organised crime in recent years, and textual representations in particular are beginning to be incorporated into historical and sociological research, very little work has yet been carried out on these cultural products in their own right. This paper will present an argument for the incorporation of cultural representations into research on the ‘ndrangheta, stressing the importance of interrogating texts sensitively and, crucially, within context. It interrogates an article written by celebrated Calabrian writer Corrado Alvaro in 1955, entitled ‘La fibbia’ and published in Corriere della Sera in response to the first national police crackdown on organised crime in the region. The article has been referenced extensively by ‘ndrangheta scholars over the last few decades as an authoritative, first-hand description of the organisation at grass-roots level, but my research has revealed significant variations in even the most straightforward assertions about the author’s treatment of the organisation in his writing. Furthermore, analysing ‘La fibbia’ in the context of Alvaro’s work allows us to gain a perspective which is missing from the majority of previous approaches to the text, and question the accuracy of the picture it paints of the organisation.
Amber Phillips is currently in her second year of a PhD at the University of Bristol. Her work focuses on cultural representations of the ‘ndrangheta from 1955 to the present day, including novels, short stories, memoirs, and journalism. Prior to beginning her PhD in 2013, she worked for a time in Calabria with various anti-mafia organisations, having previously qualified as a translator with an MA from the University of Bath in 2011.

Sean Brady – Trinity College Dublin
Shifting Boundaries: Mobilisation and Sicilian Identities in the Wake of Caporetto, October 1917 – July 1918

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a long tradition of seeing Sicilian identity as singular, uncontested and unchanging. Politicians and intellectuals rooted their differences in appeals and counter-appeals to the ‘true’ Sicilian values, ideals and customs which they argued lay at the heart of this identity. This tradition has however been challenged in recent decades. Scholars have sought to highlight the multiplicity, flexibility and evolution of Sicilian identities over the centuries. This has led to re-evaluations of Sicilian politics, the nature of the mafia, as well as the island’s place in the history of the Italy and its peoples.
This paper engages with this recent scholarship through an examination of Sicilian responses to the military collapse at Caporetto in October-November 1917. Utilising a variety of archival sources, newspapers and other printed materials, it details the different ways that Sicilians at both the home and military fronts responded to events in the months that followed the battle. It examines the socio-economic and political tensions that arose between Sicilians and with other Italians, but also highlights the renewed sense of duty, solidarity and shared sacrifice that emerged in the period. The paper ends with an analysis of reactions to the Battle of the Piave in June 1918 – a redemptive battle for many contemporaries and a battle that accelerated debates over the nature and legacy of Sicily’s involvement in the war.

Sean Brady is a member of the Centre for War Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. In 2014, he completed his doctorate entitled ‘Sicily at War: The Province of Catania and the Experience of the Great War, 1914–1922’ under the supervision of Professor John Horne. An ex-Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar, he was awarded the Gail Braybon Prize for Best Postgraduate Paper by the International Society for First World War Studies in 2009.
Previous publications include ‘Des groupes mécontentes ou des agitateurs pacifistes? Les manifestations populaires dans la province sicilienne de Catane, mai-octobre 1917’, in François Bouloc, Rémy Cazals & André Loez (eds.), Identités troublées, 1914-1918: Les appartenances sociales et nationales à l’épreuve de la guerre, Toulouse, Ed. Privat, 2011; and ‘From Peacetime to Wartime: The Sicilian Province of Catania and Italian Intervention in the Great War, July 1914-September 1915’, in James Kitchen, Alisa Miller & Laura Rowe (eds.), Other Combatants, Other Fronts. Competing Histories of the First World War, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2011. His current research centres on the Sicilian experience of the Great War, comparative and transnational histories of rural war cultures in the Great War era, and an investigation of the inter-allied occupations of the Ottoman Empire in the period 1918–23.