Anna Chiari is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. She holds a BA in English and French literatures and languages and a Joint Master's Degree in English and American Studies from Ca' Foscari University (Venice). Before moving to The University of Edinburgh, she specialized in Comparative Literature with an MA at UCL.
Holding two MFAs in dramaturgy and screenwriting from IULM University (Milan) and Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rome), she also works as a writer and a freelance journalist. Supervisors: Professor Paul Crosthwaite
The Gothic genre aims to expand the reader or viewer’s consciousness by encouraging them to suspe... more The Gothic genre aims to expand the reader or viewer’s consciousness by encouraging them to suspend their disbelief and by shocking them out of the boundaries of their everyday lives not by confronting them with explicit violence or physical or psychological dissolution, but simply by suggesting the horror through obscurity and leaving its manifest form to the imagination of the readers or viewers. In this way, gothic fiction produces the kind of anxious suspense similar to the kind of psychical and psychological uncertainty and disorientation that Jentsch believed to be how uncanny feelings come about and which, according to Freud, can indeed increase and multiply the effect of the uncanny, especially if reinforced by elements of silence, darkness and solitude. This condition of suspended anxiety is at the core of what Todorov considered to be the fantastic genre, characterized by the suspense, ambiguity and hesitation nature of the uncanny events presented in the narrative, doomed to dissolve at the very end with a final exposition. Few texts are able to maintain the suspense beyond the narrative itself, by centring on an elusive absence, which becomes the real haunting force in the text, increasing the ghostly effect of the narration, as in the case of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), as well as their respective screen adaptations, The Innocents (1961) and Rebecca (1940).
The purpose of this study is to analyse Parade’s End’s innovative modes of
narration, while highl... more The purpose of this study is to analyse Parade’s End’s innovative modes of narration, while highlighting its peculiarities and innovative aspects regarding the old narrative conventions, and, at the same time, the modernist innovations it embodies using Genette’s categories to explore the technical devices and kinds of narration and narrator Ford employs in his work, while focusing on the strict relationship between his narrative style and his content. Moreover, the thesis dwells on the contradictory aspects of Parade’s End’s narration that make it such compelling reading. The great interest of the tetralogy is partly due to its double nature, as Ford opens up to revolutionary innovations while still being bound to some naturalistic conventions. Most of the space here is devoted to the analysis of these contrastive narrative modes.
The interest in childhood memories started around two hundred years ago, encouraged by Romanticis... more The interest in childhood memories started around two hundred years ago, encouraged by Romanticism and propelled a century later by the advent of modern psychology and psychoanalysis. Both Wordsworth and Freud attributed a great importance to childhood. On the one hand, Wordsworth, the Romantic poet author of The Lyrical Ballads (1789), treated his own childhood memories as the best and most important moments of his life, while, on the other, at the turn of the twentieth century, Freud theorized childhood memories as crucial to the formation of the adult. At the end of the eighteenth century, writers had, in fact, insisted that childhood experiences indelibly stamp the adult spirit and offer a privileged opportunity for personal and historical insight. In the early twentieth century, moreover, writers like Marcel Proust and Rainer Maria Rilke described for the first time the involuntary recovery of memories and started re-creating their childhood ones in literary texts that straddle between autobiography and fiction. Thus, from the twentieth century on, literature started offering an impressively large body of evidence on adult memories of childhood
(Martens).
Joshua Pederson in his article Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma T... more Joshua Pederson in his article Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory (Narrative Volume 22, Number 3, October 2014) critiques Caruth's theory of traumatic amnesia, which has dominated the literary concept of trauma for several years. He uses the new scientific basis of the study of trauma to formulate a modern conceptualization of its psychology in literature and illustrates his views using real war memories and literary and cinematographic examples.
After 9/11, writers have been accused of having suffered a ‘failure of the imagination’ (‘Failure... more After 9/11, writers have been accused of having suffered a ‘failure of the imagination’ (‘Failure of the Imagination’ 153), of being unable to offer a new valid form of narrative to express the atrocity of the event and its aftermath. The critic Richard Gray points out that writers failed to move beyond the ‘preliminary stages of trauma’ (Open Doors, Closed Minds 130), by only registering that something terrible, unsusceptible to understanding, had happened (Open Doors, Closed Minds 132). According to Gray, the form of post-9/11 novels does not bear witness to fundamental changes, as writers have only assimilated the unfamiliar into familiar structures (Open Doors, Closed Minds 134), by retreating into the domestic. Both Gray and the Professor Michael Rothberg stress the importance of finding forms of consciousness, and structures of ideology and imagination to assimilate and express new events (Open Door, Closed Minds 133). The encounter with the ‘other’ appears to be at the centre of the new kind of novels which they both hope will be created. Many novels do offer the kind of solution both Gray and Rothberg are looking for: post-9/11 novels present a meaningful encounter with the ‘other’ and blend the domestic and national space to compose meaningful stories.
Sigmund Freud is a founding figure in the conceptualization of trauma, initially exploring it in ... more Sigmund Freud is a founding figure in the conceptualization of trauma, initially exploring it in his studies on hysteria and later in his analysis of war neuroses. It is in consequence of Freud's and subsequent psychoanalysts' work that the meaning of the term trauma (from the Greek term wound) has shifted from signifying a pure physical wound to denoting a psychological one, as in its nowadays dominant signification. Trauma studies constitutes a huge field today, engaging theorists, philosophers, literary scholars, and historians as well as clinicians with a still growing interest in the Holocaust and other collective historical traumas, posttraumatic stress disorder, and sexual abuse. The most important subject of debate concerns the relation of trauma to memory and thus revolves around Freud’s assumptions. Some clinicians such as Judith Herman as well as researchers like Bessel van der Kolk, believe firmly in the theory of dissociation, which is related to the concept of traumatic amnesia, while others, like Elizabeth Loftus and Richard McNally, maintain the ‘anti-repressed memory’ hypothesis. Thus, Freud has been the central focus of the dominating debate of trauma studies and has influenced many theories while provoking others.
The paper aims to analyse the theme of the mask in Dino Risi’s oeuvre, by underlining its deep co... more The paper aims to analyse the theme of the mask in Dino Risi’s oeuvre, by underlining its deep connections with Luigi Pirandello’s main ideas and theories. It focuses on how both Risi and Pirandello have the crisis of the modern individual at the centre of their work and his/her opposition to a paradoxical and chaotic society that forces them to adopt a mask in order to be accepted. In addition, the paper also explains the main differences between Pirandello’s and Risi’s work by stressing the overwhelming desire for acceptance of Risi’s characters and by analysing some examples from Risi’s work. Great attention is given to the way Risi constructs his hypocritical characters and their masks as performed by the iconic actor, Vittorio Gassman, as well as the dialectic relationships between Risi’s characters, by analysing sequences from Gassman’s movies The Easy Life and Il Gaucho. By way of comparison, the work also analyses Alberto Sordi’s character from A Difficult Life to illustrate the bitter Pirandellian humour in Risi’s portrait of the alienated man, and underline the pessimistic nature of his satires.
This paper summarizes and connects the scientific discoveries about the functioning of the human ... more This paper summarizes and connects the scientific discoveries about the functioning of the human brain to literary reflections on the nature of the experience of reading. It outlines the discovery of mirror neurons in Parma by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, which provides a scientific explanation for the most basic human inclination to empathize with and create a simulated cognitive model of the world, and connects it to the work of literary critics like Girard, Caplan and Hogan, who had already studied this behavior from a literary perspective. In fact, literature highly influences our perceptions, our memories, our emotional experiences and expectations, as it appears that we are innately gifted with the ability to empathize with what we see and perceive and are naturally inclined to constantly mirror others' behavior in order to define our lives and ourselves. Not only can literature offer this kind of experience, but it also illustrates it quite well; famous literary examples include Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) or Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (1947). In fact, the process seems very like the one described by Dante to represent his meeting with the divine in the famous verse: “If I/ in-thee’d myself as thou in-me’est thee” (Paradise 9, 107-8).
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is considered to be one of the greatest works of art in ... more Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is considered to be one of the greatest works of art in English language literature and is still widely discussed and analysed, not only in the field of literary studies but also in anthropology for its conveyance of a Eurocentric perception of otherness, particularly of the African Congo under colonial rule in the late 19th century. Recently, this short story has been at the centre of an animated debate in protest to Chinua Achebe’s critique of it as a racist and offensive book due to its depiction of the Congo and its inhabitants, calling into question its value as a piece of literary art. However, in response to Achebe’s attack, a rich corpus of alternative readings and interpretations has arisen, starting a new wave of interest in Conrad’s work. This paper analyses the validity of Achebe's criticism and Heart of Darkness' artistic value.
This paper explores the significance of the moon in Italo Calvino (1923-1985), taking into consid... more This paper explores the significance of the moon in Italo Calvino (1923-1985), taking into consideration works such as Le Cosmicomiche, Palomar and Lezioni Americane. It highlights how Calvino detaches himself from the illustrious tradition of precedent lunar voyage, by emphasising the originality of his position, and, at the same time, the closeness to his greatest model, Ludovico Ariosto. It focuses on how Calvino approached the moon from both a scientific and poetic perspective and how the satellite became in his work a meaningful allegory for a personal quest of knowledge of the world and at the same time of one’s inner self. While trying to do so, the research dwells on the way Calvino deploys the moon in his Le Cosmicomiche to show the inconsistency of an anthropocentric perception of reality, and to underline the strong bond between men and nature. The basis of my discussion relies on Calvino’s holistic perception of reality, according to which the cosmic and the human deeply affect and reflect one another, even transforming and changing each other. The paper explores, thus, how Calvino’s moon becomes a revealing force that shows the inner and truest nature of earthly appearances, while at the same time keeping its poetic significance of lightness and floating enchantment.
The Gothic genre aims to expand the reader or viewer’s consciousness by encouraging them to suspe... more The Gothic genre aims to expand the reader or viewer’s consciousness by encouraging them to suspend their disbelief and by shocking them out of the boundaries of their everyday lives not by confronting them with explicit violence or physical or psychological dissolution, but simply by suggesting the horror through obscurity and leaving its manifest form to the imagination of the readers or viewers. In this way, gothic fiction produces the kind of anxious suspense similar to the kind of psychical and psychological uncertainty and disorientation that Jentsch believed to be how uncanny feelings come about and which, according to Freud, can indeed increase and multiply the effect of the uncanny, especially if reinforced by elements of silence, darkness and solitude. This condition of suspended anxiety is at the core of what Todorov considered to be the fantastic genre, characterized by the suspense, ambiguity and hesitation nature of the uncanny events presented in the narrative, doomed to dissolve at the very end with a final exposition. Few texts are able to maintain the suspense beyond the narrative itself, by centring on an elusive absence, which becomes the real haunting force in the text, increasing the ghostly effect of the narration, as in the case of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), as well as their respective screen adaptations, The Innocents (1961) and Rebecca (1940).
The purpose of this study is to analyse Parade’s End’s innovative modes of
narration, while highl... more The purpose of this study is to analyse Parade’s End’s innovative modes of narration, while highlighting its peculiarities and innovative aspects regarding the old narrative conventions, and, at the same time, the modernist innovations it embodies using Genette’s categories to explore the technical devices and kinds of narration and narrator Ford employs in his work, while focusing on the strict relationship between his narrative style and his content. Moreover, the thesis dwells on the contradictory aspects of Parade’s End’s narration that make it such compelling reading. The great interest of the tetralogy is partly due to its double nature, as Ford opens up to revolutionary innovations while still being bound to some naturalistic conventions. Most of the space here is devoted to the analysis of these contrastive narrative modes.
The interest in childhood memories started around two hundred years ago, encouraged by Romanticis... more The interest in childhood memories started around two hundred years ago, encouraged by Romanticism and propelled a century later by the advent of modern psychology and psychoanalysis. Both Wordsworth and Freud attributed a great importance to childhood. On the one hand, Wordsworth, the Romantic poet author of The Lyrical Ballads (1789), treated his own childhood memories as the best and most important moments of his life, while, on the other, at the turn of the twentieth century, Freud theorized childhood memories as crucial to the formation of the adult. At the end of the eighteenth century, writers had, in fact, insisted that childhood experiences indelibly stamp the adult spirit and offer a privileged opportunity for personal and historical insight. In the early twentieth century, moreover, writers like Marcel Proust and Rainer Maria Rilke described for the first time the involuntary recovery of memories and started re-creating their childhood ones in literary texts that straddle between autobiography and fiction. Thus, from the twentieth century on, literature started offering an impressively large body of evidence on adult memories of childhood
(Martens).
Joshua Pederson in his article Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma T... more Joshua Pederson in his article Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory (Narrative Volume 22, Number 3, October 2014) critiques Caruth's theory of traumatic amnesia, which has dominated the literary concept of trauma for several years. He uses the new scientific basis of the study of trauma to formulate a modern conceptualization of its psychology in literature and illustrates his views using real war memories and literary and cinematographic examples.
After 9/11, writers have been accused of having suffered a ‘failure of the imagination’ (‘Failure... more After 9/11, writers have been accused of having suffered a ‘failure of the imagination’ (‘Failure of the Imagination’ 153), of being unable to offer a new valid form of narrative to express the atrocity of the event and its aftermath. The critic Richard Gray points out that writers failed to move beyond the ‘preliminary stages of trauma’ (Open Doors, Closed Minds 130), by only registering that something terrible, unsusceptible to understanding, had happened (Open Doors, Closed Minds 132). According to Gray, the form of post-9/11 novels does not bear witness to fundamental changes, as writers have only assimilated the unfamiliar into familiar structures (Open Doors, Closed Minds 134), by retreating into the domestic. Both Gray and the Professor Michael Rothberg stress the importance of finding forms of consciousness, and structures of ideology and imagination to assimilate and express new events (Open Door, Closed Minds 133). The encounter with the ‘other’ appears to be at the centre of the new kind of novels which they both hope will be created. Many novels do offer the kind of solution both Gray and Rothberg are looking for: post-9/11 novels present a meaningful encounter with the ‘other’ and blend the domestic and national space to compose meaningful stories.
Sigmund Freud is a founding figure in the conceptualization of trauma, initially exploring it in ... more Sigmund Freud is a founding figure in the conceptualization of trauma, initially exploring it in his studies on hysteria and later in his analysis of war neuroses. It is in consequence of Freud's and subsequent psychoanalysts' work that the meaning of the term trauma (from the Greek term wound) has shifted from signifying a pure physical wound to denoting a psychological one, as in its nowadays dominant signification. Trauma studies constitutes a huge field today, engaging theorists, philosophers, literary scholars, and historians as well as clinicians with a still growing interest in the Holocaust and other collective historical traumas, posttraumatic stress disorder, and sexual abuse. The most important subject of debate concerns the relation of trauma to memory and thus revolves around Freud’s assumptions. Some clinicians such as Judith Herman as well as researchers like Bessel van der Kolk, believe firmly in the theory of dissociation, which is related to the concept of traumatic amnesia, while others, like Elizabeth Loftus and Richard McNally, maintain the ‘anti-repressed memory’ hypothesis. Thus, Freud has been the central focus of the dominating debate of trauma studies and has influenced many theories while provoking others.
The paper aims to analyse the theme of the mask in Dino Risi’s oeuvre, by underlining its deep co... more The paper aims to analyse the theme of the mask in Dino Risi’s oeuvre, by underlining its deep connections with Luigi Pirandello’s main ideas and theories. It focuses on how both Risi and Pirandello have the crisis of the modern individual at the centre of their work and his/her opposition to a paradoxical and chaotic society that forces them to adopt a mask in order to be accepted. In addition, the paper also explains the main differences between Pirandello’s and Risi’s work by stressing the overwhelming desire for acceptance of Risi’s characters and by analysing some examples from Risi’s work. Great attention is given to the way Risi constructs his hypocritical characters and their masks as performed by the iconic actor, Vittorio Gassman, as well as the dialectic relationships between Risi’s characters, by analysing sequences from Gassman’s movies The Easy Life and Il Gaucho. By way of comparison, the work also analyses Alberto Sordi’s character from A Difficult Life to illustrate the bitter Pirandellian humour in Risi’s portrait of the alienated man, and underline the pessimistic nature of his satires.
This paper summarizes and connects the scientific discoveries about the functioning of the human ... more This paper summarizes and connects the scientific discoveries about the functioning of the human brain to literary reflections on the nature of the experience of reading. It outlines the discovery of mirror neurons in Parma by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, which provides a scientific explanation for the most basic human inclination to empathize with and create a simulated cognitive model of the world, and connects it to the work of literary critics like Girard, Caplan and Hogan, who had already studied this behavior from a literary perspective. In fact, literature highly influences our perceptions, our memories, our emotional experiences and expectations, as it appears that we are innately gifted with the ability to empathize with what we see and perceive and are naturally inclined to constantly mirror others' behavior in order to define our lives and ourselves. Not only can literature offer this kind of experience, but it also illustrates it quite well; famous literary examples include Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) or Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (1947). In fact, the process seems very like the one described by Dante to represent his meeting with the divine in the famous verse: “If I/ in-thee’d myself as thou in-me’est thee” (Paradise 9, 107-8).
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is considered to be one of the greatest works of art in ... more Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is considered to be one of the greatest works of art in English language literature and is still widely discussed and analysed, not only in the field of literary studies but also in anthropology for its conveyance of a Eurocentric perception of otherness, particularly of the African Congo under colonial rule in the late 19th century. Recently, this short story has been at the centre of an animated debate in protest to Chinua Achebe’s critique of it as a racist and offensive book due to its depiction of the Congo and its inhabitants, calling into question its value as a piece of literary art. However, in response to Achebe’s attack, a rich corpus of alternative readings and interpretations has arisen, starting a new wave of interest in Conrad’s work. This paper analyses the validity of Achebe's criticism and Heart of Darkness' artistic value.
This paper explores the significance of the moon in Italo Calvino (1923-1985), taking into consid... more This paper explores the significance of the moon in Italo Calvino (1923-1985), taking into consideration works such as Le Cosmicomiche, Palomar and Lezioni Americane. It highlights how Calvino detaches himself from the illustrious tradition of precedent lunar voyage, by emphasising the originality of his position, and, at the same time, the closeness to his greatest model, Ludovico Ariosto. It focuses on how Calvino approached the moon from both a scientific and poetic perspective and how the satellite became in his work a meaningful allegory for a personal quest of knowledge of the world and at the same time of one’s inner self. While trying to do so, the research dwells on the way Calvino deploys the moon in his Le Cosmicomiche to show the inconsistency of an anthropocentric perception of reality, and to underline the strong bond between men and nature. The basis of my discussion relies on Calvino’s holistic perception of reality, according to which the cosmic and the human deeply affect and reflect one another, even transforming and changing each other. The paper explores, thus, how Calvino’s moon becomes a revealing force that shows the inner and truest nature of earthly appearances, while at the same time keeping its poetic significance of lightness and floating enchantment.
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Papers by Anna Chiari
narration, while highlighting its peculiarities and innovative aspects regarding the old narrative conventions, and, at the same time, the modernist innovations it embodies using Genette’s categories to explore the technical devices and kinds of narration and narrator Ford employs in his work, while focusing on the strict relationship between his narrative style and his content. Moreover, the thesis dwells on the contradictory aspects of Parade’s End’s narration that make it such compelling reading. The great interest of the tetralogy is partly due to its double nature, as Ford opens up to revolutionary innovations while still being bound to some
naturalistic conventions. Most of the space here is devoted to the analysis of these contrastive narrative modes.
(Martens).
quest of knowledge of the world and at the same time of one’s inner self. While trying to do so, the research dwells on the way Calvino deploys the moon in his Le Cosmicomiche to show the inconsistency of an anthropocentric perception of reality, and to underline the strong bond between men and nature. The basis of my discussion relies on Calvino’s holistic perception of reality, according to which the cosmic and the human deeply affect and reflect one another, even transforming and changing each other. The paper explores, thus, how Calvino’s moon becomes a revealing force that shows the inner and truest nature of earthly appearances, while at the same time keeping its poetic significance of lightness and floating enchantment.
narration, while highlighting its peculiarities and innovative aspects regarding the old narrative conventions, and, at the same time, the modernist innovations it embodies using Genette’s categories to explore the technical devices and kinds of narration and narrator Ford employs in his work, while focusing on the strict relationship between his narrative style and his content. Moreover, the thesis dwells on the contradictory aspects of Parade’s End’s narration that make it such compelling reading. The great interest of the tetralogy is partly due to its double nature, as Ford opens up to revolutionary innovations while still being bound to some
naturalistic conventions. Most of the space here is devoted to the analysis of these contrastive narrative modes.
(Martens).
quest of knowledge of the world and at the same time of one’s inner self. While trying to do so, the research dwells on the way Calvino deploys the moon in his Le Cosmicomiche to show the inconsistency of an anthropocentric perception of reality, and to underline the strong bond between men and nature. The basis of my discussion relies on Calvino’s holistic perception of reality, according to which the cosmic and the human deeply affect and reflect one another, even transforming and changing each other. The paper explores, thus, how Calvino’s moon becomes a revealing force that shows the inner and truest nature of earthly appearances, while at the same time keeping its poetic significance of lightness and floating enchantment.