Claudia Dellacasa
In my new project, 'Intersectional Eco-Polyphony', I aim to create an ecocritical framework for reading experimental poems and eco-fictions written in English and Italian by writers with Buddhist interests. Situated at the intersection of the environmental humanities and comparative literature and philosophy, this research will make an original intervention to analyse the ability of environmental writing to gesture towards an understanding of the categories of species, cultural, and gender identities in their mutually constitutive relations.
Before working at Glasgow as a Lecturer in Italian, I was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin (School of English, Drama and Film), where I was awarded the Maurice J. Bric Medal of Excellence as the top-ranked postdoctoral scholar in the domain of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Before that, I taught between the Romance Seminar and the International Literatures area at the University of Tübingen (DE), and in the Department of English and American Studies at Augsburg University (DE), with a focus on ecocriticism and post-humanism.
I obtained my PhD at Durham University (UK), with a project on the contact between Italian author Italo Calvino and Japanese culture in the late 1970s, which I read as the epitome of Calvino’s gradual relativisation of Eurocentrism, logocentrism, and anthropocentrism. My thesis was awarded the British-Italian Society Postgraduate Prize in 2021. In the context of this research, in 2019 I was also awarded a 3-month AHRC Training Grant to join the activities of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto.
My MA thesis in Italian Linguistics investigated the linguistic structure of Calvino’s novel Il barone rampante. My previous BA thesis was also a linguistic work, which approached Calvino’s Le città invisibili with the tools of a lexical, syntactical, and structural comment. During both my MA (in Modern Philology) and BA (in Modern Literature), I was based at La Sapienza University of Rome.
I am an Honorary Fellow in the Durham Centre for Culture and Ecology. I represented postgraduate students in the Modern Humanities Research Association between 2018 and 2019, in which context I was editor of the peer-reviewed journal MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities. I am also co-founder of Notes in Italian Studies, an online open-access journal funded by the Society for Italian Studies, and EDI representative for the SIS.
I am always happy to share and discuss my work. If interested, please email me at Claudia.Dellacasa@glasgow.ac.uk
Before working at Glasgow as a Lecturer in Italian, I was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin (School of English, Drama and Film), where I was awarded the Maurice J. Bric Medal of Excellence as the top-ranked postdoctoral scholar in the domain of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Before that, I taught between the Romance Seminar and the International Literatures area at the University of Tübingen (DE), and in the Department of English and American Studies at Augsburg University (DE), with a focus on ecocriticism and post-humanism.
I obtained my PhD at Durham University (UK), with a project on the contact between Italian author Italo Calvino and Japanese culture in the late 1970s, which I read as the epitome of Calvino’s gradual relativisation of Eurocentrism, logocentrism, and anthropocentrism. My thesis was awarded the British-Italian Society Postgraduate Prize in 2021. In the context of this research, in 2019 I was also awarded a 3-month AHRC Training Grant to join the activities of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto.
My MA thesis in Italian Linguistics investigated the linguistic structure of Calvino’s novel Il barone rampante. My previous BA thesis was also a linguistic work, which approached Calvino’s Le città invisibili with the tools of a lexical, syntactical, and structural comment. During both my MA (in Modern Philology) and BA (in Modern Literature), I was based at La Sapienza University of Rome.
I am an Honorary Fellow in the Durham Centre for Culture and Ecology. I represented postgraduate students in the Modern Humanities Research Association between 2018 and 2019, in which context I was editor of the peer-reviewed journal MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities. I am also co-founder of Notes in Italian Studies, an online open-access journal funded by the Society for Italian Studies, and EDI representative for the SIS.
I am always happy to share and discuss my work. If interested, please email me at Claudia.Dellacasa@glasgow.ac.uk
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Books by Claudia Dellacasa
Articles by Claudia Dellacasa
Ecocriticism, indicates the theoretical framework from which we
move — material ecocriticism — and the direction in which we
want to take it — cross-cultural exchanges — starting from an
Italian viewpoint. According to this framework, matter is densely
storied, yet stories are not the same for all human or nonhuman
inhabitants of an ecosystem. The narrative patterns they articulate
depend on the embodiment of the entities participating in the
encounter, the senses and technological apparatuses engaged in
interpreting them, and the cultural, social, and political
positionalities of the participants. Conversely, material stories affect
those who explore them in complex ways contingent upon the
encounter, the body and cultural background of the explorers, and
their position within power relations. This introduction and the
special issue articles expand scholarship developed at the
crossroads of Italian studies and ecocriticism in the last thirty years.
This fourteenth issue of MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities seeks to engage with the multifaceted category of the 'exotic' in European literature, art, and culture, with its ever-changing character, and with its position in past and present discourses. We encouraged contributors to interrogate the established discourse in this field. How might recent developments in world literature, comparative, and postcolonial theory challenge and enhance Said's work? To what extent has exoticism – if not exoticisms – changed over time and in different national contexts, according to mutating historical conditions? In what way have narrative, philosophy, and ideology engaged with the shifting parameters of exoticism? How have different traditions dealt with those moments of 'cultural contact' which bring into focus the alienation of self/other? In light of globalisation, have we outrun the usefulness of exoticism as a cultural concept?
Focusing on the arboreal setting of the novel, this analysis highlights some of the main characteristics of Calvino’s use of language, namely lexical precision, descriptive perspicuity, sensorial accuracy, use of creative similes and analogies, metalinguistic acuity. Making use of textual databases that allow us to scrutinise contemporary works of both poetry and prose, the use of language in the novel reveals a hitherto underestimated proximity to poetical lexical features, with Calvino demonstrating a clear affinity with Montale in particular. Through the examination of lists of words and of rhetoric features alongside broader philological accounts, this paper is aimed to assess the importance of language in creating a narrative that successfully resonates with readers of different ages, and that remains popular beyond its time of release. An Enlightenment concern for broad communication seems to be at the root of the wide accessibility of a language that is simple without being simplistic, imaginative without being shallow, and that preserves stylistic coherence to the same degree as Cosimo remains loyal to his ethical imperative.
Book chapters by Claudia Dellacasa
Reviews by Claudia Dellacasa
Interviews and Conversations by Claudia Dellacasa
Ecocriticism, indicates the theoretical framework from which we
move — material ecocriticism — and the direction in which we
want to take it — cross-cultural exchanges — starting from an
Italian viewpoint. According to this framework, matter is densely
storied, yet stories are not the same for all human or nonhuman
inhabitants of an ecosystem. The narrative patterns they articulate
depend on the embodiment of the entities participating in the
encounter, the senses and technological apparatuses engaged in
interpreting them, and the cultural, social, and political
positionalities of the participants. Conversely, material stories affect
those who explore them in complex ways contingent upon the
encounter, the body and cultural background of the explorers, and
their position within power relations. This introduction and the
special issue articles expand scholarship developed at the
crossroads of Italian studies and ecocriticism in the last thirty years.
This fourteenth issue of MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities seeks to engage with the multifaceted category of the 'exotic' in European literature, art, and culture, with its ever-changing character, and with its position in past and present discourses. We encouraged contributors to interrogate the established discourse in this field. How might recent developments in world literature, comparative, and postcolonial theory challenge and enhance Said's work? To what extent has exoticism – if not exoticisms – changed over time and in different national contexts, according to mutating historical conditions? In what way have narrative, philosophy, and ideology engaged with the shifting parameters of exoticism? How have different traditions dealt with those moments of 'cultural contact' which bring into focus the alienation of self/other? In light of globalisation, have we outrun the usefulness of exoticism as a cultural concept?
Focusing on the arboreal setting of the novel, this analysis highlights some of the main characteristics of Calvino’s use of language, namely lexical precision, descriptive perspicuity, sensorial accuracy, use of creative similes and analogies, metalinguistic acuity. Making use of textual databases that allow us to scrutinise contemporary works of both poetry and prose, the use of language in the novel reveals a hitherto underestimated proximity to poetical lexical features, with Calvino demonstrating a clear affinity with Montale in particular. Through the examination of lists of words and of rhetoric features alongside broader philological accounts, this paper is aimed to assess the importance of language in creating a narrative that successfully resonates with readers of different ages, and that remains popular beyond its time of release. An Enlightenment concern for broad communication seems to be at the root of the wide accessibility of a language that is simple without being simplistic, imaginative without being shallow, and that preserves stylistic coherence to the same degree as Cosimo remains loyal to his ethical imperative.
Integrating previous analyses of Calvino's ecological and anti-anthropocentric sensibility and building upon unseen data regarding the author's readings of Japanese literature and culture, this paper aims to explore how the peculiar reflexivity between natural and cultural principles inherent in Japanese reality may have influenced Calvino's mature production, with a particular focus on Palomar (1983). Whitehead's perspectivism and Berque's mesology will serve as the critical framework for a comparative reading of Mr Palomar's and traditional Japan's 'subjectivation of the environment and environmentalization of the subject'. This analysis promises to shed a fresh light onto the author's progressive integration of atomism and holism, crystal and flame, thus towards a reality that is ontologically one but formally diverse (to use Deleuze's words) from both an ecocritical and a postcolonial standpoint.
This paper aims to investigate how Bianciardi’s antagonistic attitude inspired a relaunch of Italian independent and alternative print in the 2000s. In fact, Stampa alternativa’s “Bianciardini” challenged the print market, combining extremely cheap prices with high-quality works, and offering provocative titles that clearly refer to Bianciardi’s polemic thought – as a focused comparison is going to demonstrate.
A maximum of physical proximity might be represented by Dacia Maraini, who spent six years as a child there, where her father Fosco studied the Ainu people, and has returned intermittently to her experience in poetry, interviews, and by means of her parents’ diaries and letters (La nave per Kobe; Il gioco dell’universo). Shorter but relevant travel experiences were made and then narrated by Calvino (‘La forma del tempo. Giappone’, Collezione di sabbia), Parise (L’eleganza è frigida), and Tabucchi (‘Kyōto. Città della calligrafia’, Viaggi e altri viaggi), while other authors, through editorial commitment, engaged with analyses and publications in Italy of Japanese poetry (Zanzotto’ introduction to Iarocci’s collection Cento haiku), prose (Vittorini’s idea of translating Murasaki’s La storia di Genji; Cassola’s preface to Kawabata’s Koto; Moravia’s introduction to Tanizaki’s L’amore di uno sciocco) and philosophy (Eco’s essay about ‘Zen and the West’ in Opera aperta).
By providing a series of close readings, this paper is designed not only to show how fruitful and largely unexplored so far is this cultural exchange, but also to identify its literary outcomes. It will suggest that some particularly pervasive Japanese aesthetic features at the same time shaped and were mirrored by the mentioned authors’ writings about Japan. Furthermore, it will aim to highlight both direct references and subtler influences over these writers’ subsequent production.
We will then focus on Calvino’s understanding of culture as a porous entity with limited or no boundaries, opening up a debate across disciplines that can be observed in his essays but also in the open and experimental form(s) of his creative work.
Lastly, we will reflect on Calvino’s work with other media, stemming from his youthful passion for the theatre, and on the adaptation and remediation of his narrative texts.
'Minorities Report. Italian Culture, Facing Otherness' aims to address this set of questions in order to complicate and enrich the varied voice(s) of our field of studies. The Colloquium will provide an opportunity for postgraduate students to discuss the extent to which multi-vocality has had an impact on Italian Studies so far, the direction in which our disciplinary field is moving and its role in an ever-changing national and global context.
The day will be dedicated to 20 minutes presentations, divided into panels encouraging dialogue between papers sharing similar research interests. Prof Loredana Polezzi (Cardiff University), an expert in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature, and history of travel and migration, will deliver a keynote lecture in the morning. She will propose an intersectional approach to the concept of minority intermingled with the experience of feminine migration. In the afternoon, Dr Guido Furci (Durham University-Sorbonne Nouvelle), with his strong knowledge of minorities' voices and juridical statuses, will explore forms of 'indirect witnessing' and 'intrusive memory' in the context of Italian contemporary literature.