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- Scienze della comunicazione, History, Literature, Gender Studies, Comparative Literature, Italian Studies, and 15 moreItalian Cultural Studies, Translation Studies, Imagology, Creative Writing, Italiani DOC? Passing and Posing from Giovanni Finati to Amara Lakhous, Philip Roth, Call for Papers, Cultural Studies, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Contemporary Italian Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Migration Studies, Migrant Literature, 20th Century Italian Literature, Travel Writing, and Letteratura della migrazione italiana; Bilinguismo e Translinguismo letterarioedit
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Cultural conflicts, perduring racism and the lack of a broader acceptance of plural identities, in Europe have been thematised in recent years by several “Afropolitan writers”. In their case, collective emotions like fear, disease and... more
Cultural conflicts, perduring racism and the lack of a broader
acceptance of plural identities, in Europe have been thematised in
recent years by several “Afropolitan writers”. In their case, collective
emotions like fear, disease and cultural-based misunderstandings
are shaped by literary presentations which may open new identity
discourses, and which very often are focussed on gender-specific
narrations of the body and of the individual affectivities. This paper
aims to discuss the (often unsolved) dialectic between the fear of
and the effort for cultural belonging, by analysing the narrative
texts of the Black British-Ghanaian writer and activist Sharon
Dodua Otoo, author of two novellas written in English and both
translated and published in Germany (The things I am thinking
while smiling politely, 2012; Synchronicity, 2014), where she has been
living and working since 2006. In 2016 Dodua Otoo was awarded
with the prestigious Bachmann-Preis, for her yet-to-be published
short story Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin, dealing with reincarnation
and with the German Nazi-past. By passing from a realistic style
in The things I am…, a novella in which the story of a heartbreak
seems to be the pretext for a delicate but candid discourse about
racism and xenophobia in present-day Germany, to a sort of magical
realism in the fragmented Syncronicity, Sharon Dodua Otoo shows
the importance of the point of view of blackness in order to deal
with imagery of fear and disease in European society. The ways
to overcome this cultural anxiety the writer experiences are very
personal, and full of literary reshaped “poly-colours”.
acceptance of plural identities, in Europe have been thematised in
recent years by several “Afropolitan writers”. In their case, collective
emotions like fear, disease and cultural-based misunderstandings
are shaped by literary presentations which may open new identity
discourses, and which very often are focussed on gender-specific
narrations of the body and of the individual affectivities. This paper
aims to discuss the (often unsolved) dialectic between the fear of
and the effort for cultural belonging, by analysing the narrative
texts of the Black British-Ghanaian writer and activist Sharon
Dodua Otoo, author of two novellas written in English and both
translated and published in Germany (The things I am thinking
while smiling politely, 2012; Synchronicity, 2014), where she has been
living and working since 2006. In 2016 Dodua Otoo was awarded
with the prestigious Bachmann-Preis, for her yet-to-be published
short story Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin, dealing with reincarnation
and with the German Nazi-past. By passing from a realistic style
in The things I am…, a novella in which the story of a heartbreak
seems to be the pretext for a delicate but candid discourse about
racism and xenophobia in present-day Germany, to a sort of magical
realism in the fragmented Syncronicity, Sharon Dodua Otoo shows
the importance of the point of view of blackness in order to deal
with imagery of fear and disease in European society. The ways
to overcome this cultural anxiety the writer experiences are very
personal, and full of literary reshaped “poly-colours”.
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La produzione bilingue della poetessa austriaco-italiana Barbara Pumhösel, nota anche come autrice di letteratura per l‘infanzia, può essere intesa come spazio policentrico, all’interno del quale la lingua tedesca e quella italiana si... more
La produzione bilingue della poetessa austriaco-italiana Barbara Pumhösel, nota anche come autrice di letteratura per l‘infanzia, può essere intesa come spazio policentrico, all’interno del quale la lingua tedesca e quella italiana si alternano e potenziano reciprocamente. Più che ad una ibridizzazione linguistica oppure ad un plurilinguismo intratestuale, l’autrice nata nel 1959 a Neustift presso Scheibbs, in Austria, è interessata all’elaborazione di forme espressive che rendano a livello simbolico e metaforico l’esperienza della trasmigrazione linguistica e culturale, in un lavorio linguistico accompagnato inoltre, passo per passo, da riflessioni metapoetiche. Il processo del “guadare” attraverso fiumi linguistici, le cui implicazioni rispetto all’autodefinizione identitaria vengono analizzate in particolare nella produzione italiana della poetessa, è quindi parte di un progetto creativo nel quale il fare poetico in sé è al centro di continue riflessioni. Dietro il “Widerspruch in Weiß” (la “contraddizione in bianco”) delle pagine si manifesta dunque “das Staunen neuer Wörter”: si tratta di epifanie del quotidiano che spostano in maniera quasi ludica dei confini linguistici, muovendosi non solo tra il tedesco – lingua della cultura e della socializzazione che subentra al dialetto lingua della piccola patria e della famiglia – e l’italiano, bensì anche in direzione di un uso straniante di linguaggi specialistici (specie della botanica e della zoologia), i cui termini illuminano improvvisamente la pagina poetica di Barbara Pumhösel. Tale lavoro transculturale e translinguistico le permette, inoltre, di interrogare criticamente le espressioni stereotipate contenute nelle lingue convenzionali, da lei abitate, nelle loro varianti letterarie e standard, operando uno sforzo di superamento metaforico di termini abusati e di luoghi comuni della poesia. Partendo dal delineamento del più ampio contesto culturale e letterario in cui essa va inserita, il presente contributo si propone di mettere in luce, sotto l’aspetto delle specificità sia linguistiche che metapoetiche, la produzione lirica di una scrittrice europea con background migratorio. Sempre sul piano della riflessione circa lo stesso fare poesia tra due o più lingue, si cercherà inoltre di intrecciare dei confronti con autori più o meno inseriti nel grande canone della poesia italiana ed europea, al fine di circoscrivere al meglio le specificità della produzione creativa della autrice in questione.
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L'imagologia è un campo di ricerca della comparatistica letteraria incentrato sullo studio delle immagini del così detto "altro" o "straniero", attraverso le quali è possibile risalire alle strutture mentali individuali e collettive atte... more
L'imagologia è un campo di ricerca della comparatistica letteraria incentrato sullo studio delle immagini del così detto "altro" o "straniero", attraverso le quali è possibile risalire alle strutture mentali individuali e collettive atte a formulare definizioni e giudizi più o meno costanti su chi è estraneo rispetto alla nazione, alla cultura o al gruppo et-nico d'appartenenza. È dunque uno studio del discorso sull'"altro", nell'opera di un singolo scrittore, all'interno di una singola letteratura, nell'insieme delle letterature di un Kulturkreis. Affianco ma anche attraverso l'analisi critica delle immagini letterarie e culturali dell'altro, gli studi ima-gologici vertono inoltre sulle forme di rappresentazione, letteraria ma in misura crescente anche artistica e mediale, della propria nazione o civiltà. La costruzione discorsiva e i dispositivi retorici sull'altro, difatti, si intrecciano fitta-mente con la narrazione e con la mitizzazione della propria identità collettiva.
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In many Italian and European novels of the new millennium, television is not only a motive, a stage element or an instrument for conveying the "background noises" of society; on the contrary, it is a remarkable thematic presence. Yet when... more
In many Italian and European novels of the new millennium, television is not only a motive, a stage element or an instrument for conveying the "background noises" of society; on the contrary, it is a remarkable thematic presence. Yet when compared with its use in 20th century novels – and even more so when compared with its dystopic variants – this mass medium seems to have lost its role of the "great accused" (Menduni 2012). In fact, in the narratives of the new millennium it is possible to observe a new metamorphosis of the television theme, driven by the criticism of Western culture and civilization, which entails a relinquishment of the more traditional representation of the conflict between emblematic humanist characters and this medium, once a symbol of totalitarian powers and hetero-directed societies. Through the thematic isotopies that express an idea of the West in terms of the dissolution of its founding values, in the novels in question we note a symbiosis between the characters and this mass medium: characters whose ethos and whose self-image are now built through their being spectators and TV viewers.
Therefore, the Kulturkritik these texts zero-in on also serves as an identity critique which does not spare the protagonists, often presented as alter-egos or auto-fictional doubles of their authors. The comparative, thematic and hermeneutic analysis of three novels by Antonio Scurati, Walter Siti and Michel Houellebecq will thus unveil the inconsistencies and paradoxes of the so-called “literature of inexperience" (Scurati 2006), whose symbiosis with the language of television (and of other mass media) eventually raises several questions.
Therefore, the Kulturkritik these texts zero-in on also serves as an identity critique which does not spare the protagonists, often presented as alter-egos or auto-fictional doubles of their authors. The comparative, thematic and hermeneutic analysis of three novels by Antonio Scurati, Walter Siti and Michel Houellebecq will thus unveil the inconsistencies and paradoxes of the so-called “literature of inexperience" (Scurati 2006), whose symbiosis with the language of television (and of other mass media) eventually raises several questions.
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La costruzione culturale dell’identità nazionale e la sua rappresentazione letteraria costituiscono l’oggetto di studio di questo volume, che offre un quadro introduttivo della prospettiva teorica e critica imagologica e interculturale... more
La costruzione culturale dell’identità nazionale e la sua rappresentazione
letteraria costituiscono l’oggetto di studio di questo
volume, che offre un quadro introduttivo della prospettiva teorica
e critica imagologica e interculturale sviluppatasi nell’ambito
della comparatistica letteraria novecentesca. Origini storiche e
sviluppi recenti di quest’area di studi sono presentati nelle due
sezioni che strutturano il volume, con contributi relativi alle principali
teorie imagologiche elaborate a partire dal secondo Novecento
e alla interpretazione critica delle rappresentazioni della diversità in letteratura.
letteraria costituiscono l’oggetto di studio di questo
volume, che offre un quadro introduttivo della prospettiva teorica
e critica imagologica e interculturale sviluppatasi nell’ambito
della comparatistica letteraria novecentesca. Origini storiche e
sviluppi recenti di quest’area di studi sono presentati nelle due
sezioni che strutturano il volume, con contributi relativi alle principali
teorie imagologiche elaborate a partire dal secondo Novecento
e alla interpretazione critica delle rappresentazioni della diversità in letteratura.
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From the landing of thousands of Albanese people on the Apulian coast in 1991 to the daily arrival of refugees on the Calabrian and Sicilian coasts since 2000, immigration by sea and the lifestories of the countless victims of this... more
From the landing of thousands of Albanese people on the Apulian coast in 1991 to the daily arrival of refugees on the Calabrian and Sicilian coasts since 2000, immigration by sea and the lifestories of the countless victims of this situation have become part of the 'public awareness' in Italy. To narrate the tragedies we are witnessing day by day, different communicational strategies have been adopted, depending on the respective media and on the political objectives pursued by individual 'speakers'. The attention writers, film directors, and artists have payed to the recent migration movements towards Italy has gradually given a more profoundly human dimension to the phenomenon and has brought the public closer to the individual tragedy. Italian popular music in particular has actively contributed to establishing an artistic counter-discourse, which will be discussed in the present article. Examples of different musical genres will be analysed, covering the time frame in question, whereas the methodology pursued will be that of Imagology and that of Cultural Studies.
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The city of Rome is the main urban scenario of Cristina Ali Farah's two novels Madre piccola (2007) and Il comandante del fiume (2014), being constructed narratively from new perspectives and using significant narrative strategies. In... more
The city of Rome is the main urban scenario of Cristina Ali Farah's two novels Madre piccola (2007) and Il comandante del fiume (2014), being constructed narratively from new perspectives and using significant narrative strategies. In both fictional texts, the Italian author of Somali and Italian origin depicts external and internal geographies of the Italian Capital, which are connected with identitary dynamics expressed by themes frequently used by contemporary diasporic writers: the dialectics between the presence and the absence (of people and places), the precariousness and instability of the new abode, the conflict between a traumatic memory and the necessity of establishing roots in the spacial and existential present, and at last the re-reading of urban spaces from a postcolonial point of view. Starting from this kind of thematic matrix, Ali Farah's narrative carries new symbologies and methaphors, which refer to her poetics and her personal imaginary. The critical reading of the above mentioned texts will also consider the generational aspects of the main characters; it will point out that life in the destination country and it's urban spaces gets a different aspect, whether the fictional biographies are marked by diaspora and escape, or viceversa are referred to "second generation" migrants, and their different relationship with it.
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In Twentieth Century’s Literature, the various declinations and rewritings of the Odysseus’ theme were conducted both in the tragic and the anti-tragic mode: the latter involving often, but not necessarily, the use of narrative strategies... more
In Twentieth Century’s Literature, the various declinations and rewritings of the Odysseus’ theme were conducted both in the tragic and the anti-tragic mode: the latter involving often, but not necessarily, the use of narrative strategies of parody. Referring to Hans Blumenberg (1979), we can speak of a constant “work on myth” that goes hand in hand with the development of postmodern poetics and elaboration of history, characterized by different narrative styles and strategies depending on the literary and cultural context in which they are inserted. Starting from one of the main theories about literary rewriting, as well as about mythopoetic and mythocritical discourse in twentieth century, this article aims to examine in a comparative perspective two novels, conceived almost at the same time in the Fifties, even if published separated by a distance of years. This is the "Mediterranean" novel Hocynus Orca (1975), by the Sicilian Stefano D'Arrigo, and Das Testament des Odysseus (1957), by the German writer Walter Jens, who is also known for his theoretical work on Greek mythology and tragedy. In these novels both authors choose the odyssean hypotext for liaising with the difficult legacy of World War II, but also to express its positioning in the contemporary world. The need to "complete" (Blumenberg) the myth of Ulysses thus produces in D'Arrigo a reinterpretation of the novel in the epic and tragic way, while Jens escapes to the anti-tragic modus offering to its anti-hero a secondary way out from his own myth.
This article focuses on the work of the Italian Cantautore Gianmaria Testa, who died prematurely this year. In particular, it analyses his concept album Da quest parte del mare (2006), which deals with the issue of migration. In the... more
This article focuses on the work of the Italian Cantautore Gianmaria Testa, who died prematurely this year. In particular, it analyses his concept album Da quest parte del mare (2006), which deals with the issue of migration. In the eleven songs of this album, Testa establishes a link between the migrations of the past and the present, in order to show that human feelings and behaviour do not change in 'times of crises'. As the article tries to point out, Testa's musical style and lyrics are the result of an intense aesthetic work. It is based on ethical principles and empathy, it creates intertextual relations with contemporary literary texts and with the Italian tradition of songwriters and reaches a remarkable expressiveness.
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The article focusses on the narrative work of Amara Lakhous, an Algerian writer using Italian as language of literary expression, and well known to a wider readership in Italy and abroad especially for his novel "Scontro di civiltà per un... more
The article focusses on the narrative work of Amara Lakhous, an Algerian writer using Italian as language of literary expression, and well known to a wider readership in Italy and abroad especially for his novel "Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio" (Roma, e/o: 2006). Starting from the very first presentation of this novel by the Roman pubblishing house, the study tries to see if this novel could be defined a re-writing of Gadda's novel "Quer pasticciaccio brutto de' Via Merulana". Furthermore, other aspects of intertextuality are examined, first of all the structural and thematic similarities with Italian comedy movies from the 1950s to the 1970s: an aspect which until now has not been sufficiently examined, and which seems to offer the main access to Lakhous' narrative style.
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Actually, migration literature can be defined as a planetary phenomenon for at least two reasons: on the one hand its literary discourse accompanies the migration stream directed to Europe and Northern America, on the other it exercises... more
Actually, migration literature can be defined as a planetary phenomenon for at least two reasons: on the one hand its literary discourse accompanies the migration stream directed to Europe and Northern America, on the other it exercises an important impulse on European national literatures opening them to the world. In fact, before absorbing the concept of national literature in European literature, which is still more problematic, it should be used to highlight the development, the themes and the different questions characterizing the coming out of translingual and transcultural writers in Europe, as one of the effects of its national, colonial and imperial past. This paper focuses on the migrant literature Italy, comparing it then with the same phenomenon in France, in England and in Germany. The importance of such a comparison is given by basic themes like the critical and literary evaluation of the postcolonial question, which is very much discussed in France and in England but removed by the collectivity and worked out only recently on the creative plain in Italy. This situation enables us to see some point of contact between the Italian letteratura migrante and the German Migrantenliteratur, which has less recent origins but is also struggling for getting access into national histories of literature. The comparison between different national patterns is therefore used to point out some common questions such as some differences, in order to give a contribution to the right evaluation of an authentically European phenomenon in a worldwide context.
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Nella cultura italiana degli ultimi venticinque anni si sono moltiplicate le correnti transculturali, di difficile categorizzazione ed aperte a fenomeni equivalenti che da più tempo caratterizzano lo scenario europeo e mondiale. Sul... more
Nella cultura italiana degli ultimi venticinque anni si sono moltiplicate le correnti transculturali, di difficile categorizzazione ed aperte a fenomeni equivalenti che da più tempo caratterizzano lo scenario europeo e mondiale. Sul versante letterario, si tratta di testi di autori translingui e dal background migratorio, di espressioni poetiche dall’impronta plurilinguistica, ma anche di fenomeni artistici ascrivibili a voci della diaspora provenienti dalle ex-colonie italiane. Prendendo le mosse dal recente panorama sempre più dinamico delle lettere italiane, l’autrice effettua una lettura “contropelo” di un ampio spazio temporale, che va dagli inizi del Novecento e arriva ai giorni nostri, interpretando il suo vasto campione sotto una prospettiva nuova. L’obiettivo è quello di individuare in autori canonici o meno conosciuti le varie declinazioni che il fenomeno della inter- e transculturalità ha assunto in fasi storiche diverse, sulla spinta non solo del fenomeno migratorio, ma anche in seguito alla pratica del viaggio, della traduzione, in una parola della mediazione tra immaginari culturali diversi e spesso distanti. Sarà così messo in evidenza come lo scrivere tra le lingue e tra le culture assuma delle caratteristiche che tendono in alcuni casi a convergere rispetto a generi e stili già consolidati per “riscrivere” l’Italia sotto angolazioni nuove, e che in altri svolgono un lavoro di sperimentazione all’insegna dell’ibridazione, tutta volta ad una innovativa quanto necessaria “poetica del dialogo”.
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Il tema della letteratura mondiale, posto da Goethe nei primi decenni del XIX secolo e da lui sintetizzato nel nome di Weltliteratur, ripreso da Marx ed Engels nel Manifesto del Partito comunista del 1848 e quindi entrato nella... more
Il tema della letteratura mondiale, posto da Goethe nei primi decenni del XIX secolo e da lui sintetizzato nel nome di Weltliteratur, ripreso da Marx ed Engels nel Manifesto del Partito comunista del 1848 e quindi entrato nella riflessione letteraria fino a diventare un cliché, è qui affrontato per la prima volta con l’intento non di definirlo, ma di ricostruirne e di illustrarne la storia. Le poetiche e gli studi della decolonizzazione, il fenomeno planetario della letteratura delle diaspore, dell’esilio e della Grande Migrazione contemporanea, la massa ingente di traduzioni letterarie da tante lingue verso tante lingue sono le vie che, nella prospettiva degli autori, bisogna considerare per capire il senso del nostro tempo e della mondialità che in esso finalmente si compie, anche se tra imprevedibili contraddizioni.