-
Teresa Ciabatti’s Poetics of the Inanimate: Talking Dolls, Living Dolls, and Puppets The Italianist Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Marta Cerreti
The article examines the presence of dolls in the work of writer Teresa Ciabatti and isolates four narrative functions carried out by dolls. First, the protagonists' identification with broken doll...
-
Introduction: Cross-Cultural Articulations of Italian Ecocriticism The Italianist Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Claudia Dellacasa, Paolo Saporito
The title of this special issue, Cross-Cultural Articulations of Italian Ecocriticism, indicates the theoretical framework from which we move — material ecocriticism — and the direction in which we...
-
Fruit of Fascist Empire: Bananas and Italian Somaliland The Italianist Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Diana Garvin
This article investigates Italian banana plantations in Somalia and the Mediterranean fruit trade under Fascism. Bananas were the first African addition to Benito Mussolini's culinary battles for “...
-
Più forti dell'acciaio: Un'intervista con Chiara Sambuchi The Italianist Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Paolo Saporito, Claudia Dellacasa
I curatori di questo numero speciale di The Italianist intervistano la regista italiana Chiara Sambuchi a partire dal suo documentario del 2021 intitolato Più forti dell'acciaio. La conversazione c...
-
Eugenia Bulat’s Poetry: Geometaphors among the Stones of Venice The Italianist Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Ilaria Serra
The city of Venice has historically been open to travellers and newcomers, and its stones have spoken in many languages, engendering a myriad of cross-cultural dialogues between the human and the n...
-
Keep Your Dreams Alive: Lazzaro felice, Authoritarian Liberalism, and the Slow Death of Progress in the Italian Second Republic The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Aidan Power
This article considers Lazzaro felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018) as counter-history to the neoliberal takeover of the modern Italian state. Specifically, it argues the film’s characters serve as witn...
-
Editorial The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Danielle Hipkins, Elena Past, Monica Seger
Published in The Italianist (Vol. 43, No. 2, 2023)
-
Where Everything Seems to Begin: Antonioni and Branca in the United States circa 1968 The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Luca Peretti
This paper focuses on two films made by Italian directors in the United States at the end of the 1960s, Seize the Time by Antonello Branca (1970) and Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni (1970...
-
Travelling Through Memory: Transgender Road Narratives in Contemporary Italian Documentaries The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Danila Cannamela
The narrative of the journey has become a dominant visual trope in the representation of transgender identities. This article examines three Italian documentaries that engage with the trans road na...
-
Transnational Cinema, ‘It’s the Vibe’: An Interview with Santo Cilauro The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Emma Barron
The film The Castle (1997) is part of Australia’s cultural and national identity. Australians love how much we love the film, and we see ourselves in the working-class Kerrigan family at the centre...
-
Contemporary Italian Women Artists of African Descent: A Transnational and Intersectional Approach to their Lives and Works The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Anna Paparcone
This article considers the life and work of Afrodescendant Italian artists Iris Peynado, Nadia Kibout and Nadia Ali. Through my interviews with them and a critical analysis of their films, I underl...
-
Ugo Tognazzi, Raimondo Vianello, and Un, due, tre: Establishing Italian Television Audiences, Genres, and Expectations in the 1950s The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Rachel Haworth
During the 1950s, comedy actors Ugo Tognazzi and Raimondo Vianello were the famous faces of Italian variety television thanks to their roles as hosts of the popular series Un, due, tre (1954-1959)....
-
Haunting Authorship: Pasolini’s Murder in Glauber Rocha’s A Idade da Terra and Aoulad-Syad’s Fi Intidar Pasolini The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Alessandro Brunazzo
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death has been the subject of numerous works in media from cinema to graphic novels. Most focus on Pasolini’s assassination, its murky political implications, and the events s...
-
Italian Polizieschi of the Anni di Piombo and the Filmic Aesthetics of Random Violence: Children, Community, and Catharsis The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Massimiliano Luca Delfino
This article studies the cultural function of the representation of violence in Italian polizieschi of the 1970s within the historical context of the anni di piombo. Focusing especially on the repr...
-
‘Sicily Can Be Very Seductive’: The White Lotus and the Transnational ‘Making’ of the Mediterranean The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Margaret Renata Neil, Sean C. Wyer
This article examines how, in the second series of The White Lotus (2022), Sicily is portrayed as a backdrop for wealthy North Americans to live out touristic fantasies. This relies on a stereotypi...
-
Staging Interruption: Quotation, Montage, and Feminist Thought in Carla Lonzi’s Autoritratto The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Emily Antenucci
This article reads Carla Lonzi’s collective self-portrait Autoritratto (1969) through the interpretive lens of interruption. I identify interruption as a critical and unexplored stylistic feature a...
-
L’‘Immagine antica’. Leopardi, Warburg e la ricerca della nympha fugiens The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Tommaso Grandi
This paper focuses on the theme of the nympha fugiens in Giacomo Leopardi's works, by comparing his perspective on imagination – as shown in the Zibaldone – with Aby Warburg's works on the nymph. S...
-
Riflessioni sul linguaggio della divulgazione parascientifica: Il caso della pubblicistica vegana The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Edoardo Scarpanti
The paper aims to study some linguistic features of para-scientific language, by analysing seven brief texts, published online, which are linked to veganism and try to explain the benefits of this ...
-
The Pursuit of Feminist Language in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Carlotta Moro
The issue of women’s relationship to language is at the heart of Elena Ferrante’s thought and fiction. This article examines the Neapolitan tetralogy’s pursuit of a feminist tongue that would enabl...
-
Italian Studies and Digital Interdisciplinarity: From Text to Context, from Data to Image The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Giuditta Cirnigliaro, Angelica Federici, Valeria Federici
Published in The Italianist (Vol. 42, No. 3, 2022)
-
Manuscript Linking, Comparison, and Visual Annotation with IIIF: A Case Study on Leonardo’s Codices The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Giuditta Cirnigliaro, Glen Robson
This article explores the possibility of interrogating and analysing Leonardo da Vinci’s codices by means of digital open-source technologies for the visualization, annotation, and presentation of ...
-
Applying Humanities Approaches to Digital Investigation in Italian Studies The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Emanuela Patti
Published in The Italianist (Vol. 42, No. 3, 2022)
-
The Age of Datum or Data as a Methodological Paradigm The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Valeria Federici
This article illustrates how, like photography in the late nineteenth century, data often possesses an alluring appearance of objectivity which gives it affordance. It reflects on how data has alte...
-
New Frontiers of Applied Digital Humanities in the Italian Cultural Heritage Sector: The Case of the Domus Aurea The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Angelica Federici
The advent of digital technologies in the cultural heritage sector has revolutionized our critical engagement with the visual arts. The possibility of virtually reconstructing highly fragmented con...
-
The History and Science of Virtual Reality: An Experiment at Brown University The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Fulvio Domini, Massimo Riva
This article describes the design and implementation of an experimental undergraduate course, team-taught by a cognitive scientist and a scholar of Italian studies and focused on the history, scien...
-
Botanica postumana. Incontri dis-antropocentrici con culture indigene e vegetali The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Matteo Gilebbi
This essay explores how two Italian scientists, Stefano Mancuso and Monica Gagliano, promote a non-anthropocentric understanding of plant behaviour and intelligence. While Mancuso develops a non-a...
-
Climate Migrations and Reverse Colonisation in Italian Eco-Dystopias The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Marco Malvestio
This article investigates the representation of climate migration and climate colonialism in contemporary Italian eco-dystopias. After a theoretical introduction, I address the representation of mi...
-
Antonia Pozzi’s and Nan Shepherd’s Mountains: A Matter of Affect The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Claudia Dellacasa
This article undertakes a comparative reading of Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poetic and ecological relationship with mountain environments, combining affect theory and ecocriticism. The threefold struct...
-
Primo Levi’s Anthropological Readings in Scientific American The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Michele Maiolani
The present article investigates Primo Levi’s anthropological readings in Scientific American between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The fundamental importance of these anthropological publica...
-
From England to Italy via Paris: Gino Severini and the Sitwells at Montegufoni The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Giovanni Casini
By focusing on a specific case study, a commission the Italian modernist artist Gino Severini received in late 1920 from British patrons and collectors Sacheverell and Osbert Sitwell to decorate a ...
-
Writing the ‘Woman Destroyed’ in Elena Ferrante and Simone de Beauvoir The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-08-04 Alyssa M. Granacki
In I giorni dell’abbandono (2002), Elena Ferrante’s protagonist, Olga, remembers the women of Simone de Beauvoir’s short stories, La femme rompue [The Woman Destroyed] (1967), as ‘sentimentalmente ...
-
Il medium di Buzzati. Spiritismo e meccaniche della paura nel reportage In cerca dell’Italia misteriosa The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Fabio Camilletti
Nell’estate del 1965 Dino Buzzati realizza per il Corriere della Sera il reportage In cerca dell’Italia misteriosa, poi raccolto nel volume postumo I misteri d’Italia (1978). Opera pionieristica, q...
-
Podcasting the Italian Postcolonial: An Analysis of Black Coffee and S/Confini The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Anna Finozzi
This article examines two podcasts, Black Coffee and S/Confini, authored by Italian second-generation migrants. Podcasting has recently been recognised as an independent medium that allows unheard ...
-
Il sacrificio di Argillano: sedizione e orrore nella Gerusalemme liberata The Italianist Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Nazzareno Cicchi
The article presents the character of Argillano, a minor figure in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (cantos VIII-IX). Firstly, it examines the general narrative and Argillano’s symbolic functi...
-
Editorial The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Danielle Hipkins, Elena Past, Monica Seger
Published in The Italianist (Vol. 42, No. 2, 2022)
-
On the Making of Maka: Collaborative Practices, Autotheory, and Diversity The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-12-15 Simone Brioni
ABSTRACT This article draws on Mieke Bal's reflections about the use of the documentary film as a way to explore migration cultures from a scholarly perspective, and it chronicles the production of Maka (2022), a film about Geneviève Makaping's life and thoughts on race and belonging. It focuses on the collaboration and dialogue with Makaping and director Elia Moutamid, among other members of the creative
-
Netflix all’italiana: The Netflix Experience as Narrated by Italian Users The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-12-14 Valentina Re
ABSTRACT The present paper contributes to Internet-distributed television research by illustrating the results of a qualitative empirical study carried out in October 2019: by originally combining the tools of social research and ethnosemiotics, the study investigated how a panel of sixty Italian Netflix viewers perceived the platform’s recommender system and its impact on their autonomy of taste and
-
Sins of the Parents: Alba de Céspedes’ and Agostino degli Espinosa’s Gli affetti di famiglia The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-12-13 Daniela Cavallaro
ABSTRACT Drawing on archival material found at the Fondazione Mondadori in Milan, the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, and the Museo Biblioteca dell’Attore in Genoa, this article recovers and discusses the 1952 play Gli affetti di famiglia, written by Alba de Céspedes and Agostino degli Espinosa. The article focuses on the contribution of degli Espinosa; the several drafts of the play; its themes
-
The Debate on Language and Gender in Italy, from the Visibility of Women to Inclusive Language (1980s–2020s) The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-12-13 Gigliola Sulis, Vera Gheno
ABSTRACT This conversation focuses on issues of language and gender and on the debates they have generated in Italy over the past forty years: from linguistic sexism to the role and visibility of women, and then to the representation of non-binary identities. After introducing the differences in expressing gender in Italian and in other European languages, it discusses the proposals made regarding
-
The Three Layers of Elia Moutamid’s Cinema The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Linde Luijnenburg
ABSTRACT In this article, the author proposes three layers of film analysis and spectatorship in order to discuss film director Elia Moutamid's oeuvre. The first layer refers to the filmic texts (plots and aesthetics), the second situates the films in their socio-historical and cinematographic contexts, and the third layer relates the films to Plato's simile of the cave, establishing their philosophical
-
The Intersectional Counter-Gaze of Geneviève Makaping in Traiettorie di sguardi The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Caterina Romeo
ABSTRACT Traiettorie di sguardi is a hybrid text – partly memoir, partly anthropological essay – in which for the first time in Italian literature the author as a Black woman reverses the colonial gaze and records the racist attitude of the Italian population toward Black people. Makaping thus rewrites a long ethnographic tradition in which Africans have constituted the object of observation rather
-
Introduction: Literary Exchanges between the Italian and Anglo-American Publishing Markets: Readers, Translators, Mediators (1945–1970) The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Daniela La Penna, Sara Sullam
Published in The Italianist (Vol. 41, No. 3, 2021)
-
Realismi di un ‘mondo impreveduto’ The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Bruno Falcetto
SOMMARIO Il saggio riflette sull’esperienza letteraria neorealista a partire dal rapporto vitale e contrastato con i lettori, comuni e specializzati, richiamando il ruolo propulsivo del possibile colloquio con un’utenza rinnovata e indicando la funzione di freno costituita, in vario modo, dagli orientamenti dominanti nell’opinione critica. Muovendo da qui si propone, per una buona manutenzione del
-
‘The Pasolini Translation Problem’: From Una vita violenta to A Violent Life The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Daniela La Penna
ABSTRACT This article provides a microhistorical analysis of the English translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Una vita violenta, penned by William Weaver and published by British publisher Jonathan Cape in 1968. By evaluating the archival evidence surrounding this ‘translation event’, this study reconstructs the transatlantic alliances that the firm tried to forge with American firms between 1959 and
-
Putting the Blame Where It Belongs: Baby as a Turning Point for Representations of Active Female Sexuality The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Daniel Paul
ABSTRACT Recent studies on female sexuality evidence the ways in which the term ‘slut’ is gendered and used primarily to police sexually active women, by men and, surprisingly, women. The commedia all’italiana Sedotta e abbandonata (Pietro Germi, 1964) and the US-based Netflix series 13 Reasons Why (Brian Yorkey, 2017–2020) depict slut shaming and show how the consequent lack of solidarity between
-
The Horrid Beginning: Boccaccio’s Decameron as Secular Archetype of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Alberto Iozzia
ABSTRACT Dennis Perry defines the apocalypse as the breaking up of the predictable universe: the world as we know it starts collapsing, and so does the scale of values everyone relies on. Apocalypse is therefore a massive change of customs, of parameters, of language. These are the very same changes Boccaccio depicted in his collection of novellas: those of a world that was dealing with a plague pandemic
-
Umanesimo, Rinascimento e rinascita nazionale in Gabriele d’Annunzio* The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Guylian Nemegeer
SOMMARIO Il saggio analizza il ruolo della cultura umanistico-rinascimentale nella riflessione sulla rinascita nazionale sviluppata da Gabriele d’Annunzio. Dopo un’iniziale esplorazione dei dibattiti sulla decadenza e sulla rinascita nazionale da una parte, e sulla condanna del Rinascimento nella cultura europea e nell’Italia post-unitaria dall’altra, il saggio si sofferma sulla posizione di d'Annunzio
-
‘In Between’ Ethnic Heritage and Italian Identity: The Global Hip-Hop of Mahmood and Ghali The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Lisa Dolasinski
ABSTRACT This article contributes to broader debates about transcultural practices of social acceptance in contemporary Italy. Second-generation musicians Mahmood and Ghali utilise elements of global hip-hop to construct ‘in between’ identities that are representative of Italy’s increasingly diverse youth generation. Both young men hail from immigrant parents, absentee fathers, and urban poverty. Rather
-
Immagini e criminalità nell’Italia di fine secolo tra stampa, letteratura e scienza The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-09-26 Stefano Serafini
ABSTRACT This article investigates the dissemination of the criminal image in fin-de-siècle Italy within three different discursive areas – crime news, the popular novel, and criminological science – with a view to unveiling the complex, and often contradictory, role played by visual culture in the re-elaboration and popularisation of ideas, concepts and perceptions concerned with crime and its ambiguous
-
La competenza dialettale fra diacronia e sincronia: Un’esperienza didattica sulla comprensione odierna del lessico del napoletano seicentesco de Lo cunto de li cunti di Giovan Battista Basile The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-08-31 Luca Marano
SOMMARIO Questo lavoro è il risultato di un laboratorio tenuto in una classe liceale di Pozzuoli in provincia di Napoli, con lo scopo di escutere quanto dei soggetti giovani che si auto-percepiscono come parlanti napoletano riuscissero a comprendere di un testo dialettale del Seicento – la novella ‘La gatta Cenerentola’ tratta da Lo cunto de li cunti di Giovan Battista Basile – e di capire quali parole
-
Producing Maka: Hybridisation and Dialogue in Academic Filmmaking The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Rachel Johnson
ABSTRACT Academic filmmaking has become a rich area of practice and inquiry, driving debates about academic rigour, affect, social impact, and knowledge production. While scholars have increasingly sought to expand their practice beyond strict, ‘academic' modes of filmmaking, little attention has been paid to the ways diverse approaches to film production may also offer opportunities for creative practice
-
Interrogating the Esso Insignia: Feminised Labour Depictions and the Economic Boom The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-07-15 Lora Jury
ABSTRACT This essay analyses the correlation between the infiltration of global capitalism and the representation of feminised labour in the Italian cinema of the economic boom. Specifically, it focuses on the presence of Esso oil company branding, frequently featured in Italian films from the 1950s and 1960s that centre depictions of feminised labour, including but not limited to the sale of sex.
-
Tradizione e sperimentalismo: le due vie di Feltrinelli alla letteratura in lingua inglese (1955–1965) The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-06-24 Roberta Cesana
SOMMARIO Questo articolo analizza il processo di selezione di Feltrinelli e le politiche di traduzione messe in campo dalla casa editrice per la pubblicazione di romanzi tradotti dall’inglese, nei primi dieci anni di attività (1955–1965). La mia tesi è che questi esempi possano essere visti come una cartina di tornasole per due distinti indirizzi che la casa ha assunto nel periodo. Da un lato, la ‘Biblioteca
-
Levi’s Limbo: Dante in Primo Levi’s Vizio di forma The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Akash Kumar, Francesco Samarini
ABSTRACT In this article, we draw attention to the expansive and crucial presence of Dante in two particular stories of Primo Levi’s Vizio di forma, the linked tales ‘Lavoro Creativo’ and ‘Nel Parco’. These stories imagine an idyllic afterlife realm for famous literary characters, and so are of course ripe for reading through the lens of Dante’s Limbo. But we argue that there is still more to be found
-
Narrating the Transnational Trajectories and Transgender Performances of the Sworn Virgin The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Áine O’Healy, Caterina Romeo
ABSTRACT This article explores how two recent configurations of the Albanian sworn virgin prompt a reflection on the intersection of transgender discourses with questions of transnational mobility. Elvira Dones’s novel Vergine giurata and its eponymous cinematic adaptation (directed by Laura Bispuri) imagine in diverging ways the material and symbolic disruptions that occur when this tribally sanctioned
-
The Ultimate Freedom? Suicide as ‘Exit Strategy’ in Marco Bellocchio’s Il regista di matrimoni (2006) and Sorelle Mai (2010) The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Silvia Angeli
ABSTRACT This article examines the portrayal of suicide in two films by Marco Bellocchio, Il regista di matrimoni (2006) and Sorelle Mai (2010). I first suggest that voluntary death represents in Bellocchio's work an ‘exit strategy' that allows his characters to overcome an existential and ideological deadlock. I then turn to the implications of such a radical gesture, situating it within the millennia-old
-
Reading for Translation: Assessing Italian Fiction for British Publishers (1945–1968) The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-04-24 Sara Sullam
ABSTRACT Based on extensive archival research, this article focuses on the key role that the professional reading of foreign fiction had in the cultural mediation that takes place within publishing houses, arguing that readers’ reports should be regarded as a form of specialised discourse on literature. It provides the first historical account of the cultural agency of the most important readers of
-
L’Urlo di Fernanda Pivano: The History of the Publication of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ in Italy The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-03-14 Andrea Romanzi
ABSTRACT This article investigates the controversial history of Fernanda Pivano’s Italian translation of ‘Howl’, Allen Ginsberg’s manifesto of the Beat Generation. It examines the translation in the context of the existing publishing correspondence surrounding the poem in order to reveal the complex power negotiations that involved Pivano, Ginsberg, and Mondadori, particularly regarding problems of
-
Faulkner Vincit Omnia: The Doing and Undoing of the Mondadori Edition of William Faulkner’s Collected Works The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Cinzia Scarpino
ABSTRACT This article focuses on an under-researched aspect of William Faulkner’s Italian publishing history, the publication of his collected works – the Opera Omnia – conceived by the author himself and Fernanda Pivano, his Italian editor at Mondadori, in 1955. By 1966, after a decade of intense editorial efforts, only four of the ten planned volumes had been published, and the project was abandoned
-
Natalia Ginzburg e Adriana Motti: due traduttrici per i romanzi di Ivy Compton-Burnett The Italianist Pub Date : 2022-02-03 Teresa Franco
ABSTRACT This article analyses the role played by Natalia Ginzburg and Adriana Motti in the Italian reception of the English writer Ivy Compton-Burnett during the 1960s. Drawing on archival documents held at the Fondazione Einaudi in Turin and on theories of translation that assimilate this literary practice to reading (Spivak, Calvino), my contribution aims to demonstrate how both Ginzburg and Motti