Elisa Bolchi | University of Reading (original) (raw)

Books by Elisa Bolchi

The Edinburgh Companion to World Wide Woolf

World Wide Woolf will consider the many steps of cultural mediation that ‘produce’ the varied and... more World Wide Woolf will consider the many steps of cultural mediation that ‘produce’ the varied and varying versions (‘versionings’, Silver) of Woolf that readers and even non-readers encounter in national and transnational contexts. Organised in two axes, this international multi-authored collection will explore the poles of production and reception as part of the complex circuits from which many different Woolf images emerge.

Starting from unpublished editorial letters held at the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore historical Arch... more Starting from unpublished editorial letters held at the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore historical Archive, L’Indimenticabile artista (The Unforgettable Artist) tells the background of the Italian first editions of Virginia Woolf’s works, through which we perceive the difficulties that the publishing market had to face to recover from World War II, and then to reinvent itself during the boom. Together with Virginia’s widower Leonard Woolf, the protagonists of these cards are the publishers Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori, whose relationship is portrayed thanks to contacts with other distinguished intellectuals such as Emilio Cecchi, Anna Banti, Fernanda Pivano, Elio Vittorini.
Thanks to a partial reinterpretation of the Italian reception of the writer in the light of this editorial background, it emerges how what happened at Mondadori during the Second World War contributed to outline the image we have today of Virginia Woolf in our country.

Il volume si propone di far dialogare le carte d’archivio con il loro contesto: autoriale, storic... more Il volume si propone di far dialogare le carte d’archivio con il loro contesto: autoriale, storico, sociale. Interrogare le lettere, i telegrammi, i biglietti autografi come tessere di mosaico e comporre pian piano un’architettura che da quelle tessere potesse dare un quadro più definito degli autori interessati. O, d’altro canto, utilizzare quegli stessi documenti per rileggere con prospettive inedite la ricezione di un autore nel suo secolo. A partire da questa metodologia si è scelto di presentare dei 'casi di studio' in cui verificare gli esiti dell'approccio proposto: dai pareri di lettura su Anna Banti alla traduzione italiana di Virginia Woolf sino alla ricezione della letteratura latinoamericana nel catalogo mondadoriano.

Nonostante si pensi all'Italia fascista come a un paese chiuso e autarchico, in questo volume eme... more Nonostante si pensi all'Italia fascista come a un paese chiuso e autarchico, in questo volume emerge come la critica letteraria dell'epoca abbia saputo cogliere gli elementi di novità e bellezza contenuti nell'opera di Virginia Woolf, straniera e donna.
Attraverso l'analisi della sua ricezione all'interno di un terreno variegato e impregnato di cultura quale erano le riviste letterarie del primo Novecento è possibile osservare la crescita della scrittrice in tempo reale. Dai primi giudizi che ne ammirano lo stile la critica cresce ampliando i propri orizzonti e arrivando a considerare l'autrice quale oggi la conosciamo: una delle maggiori innovatrici del '900 inglese.
A volte, quasi mancassero loro le parole per definire la sua prosa, i critici italiani si appoggiano ad altre arti per descriverla: la musica, la pittura, la poesia. Una scelta che, una volta pubblicati i diari della scrittrice, si rivelerà quantomai calzante.
Il volume è corredato dall'intero corpus di articoli e traduzioni apparsi su rivista dal 1927 al 1945.

Book chapters by Elisa Bolchi

Estremi Confini. Spazi e narrazioni nella letteratura in lingua inglese, 2020

Cape Farewell is an international not-for-profit programme based in the UK which brings creatives... more Cape Farewell is an international not-for-profit programme based in the UK which brings creatives, scientists and informers together to see global warming with their own eyes, with the aim to engage and inspire a sustainable future society and instigate a cultural response to the climate challenge.
This chapter analyses two artistic experiences which stemmed from the Cape Farewell project: the one of the novelist Ian McEwan and the one of the choreographer Siobhan Davies, both members of the 2005 Cape Farewell Expedition to Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard, in the Artic Sea. While Davies’s response to her experience is a work embodying the idea of fragility of the body she had experienced in the Artic, McEwan writes a satirical and allegorical novel about a greedy and selfish Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Davies’s artistic work took the form of a projection titled Endangered Species, in which a ballerina dances inside a museum display case, wearing a costume made of long bending rods, suggesting the dramatic uneasiness of the body in the extreme spaces of the North Pole. The key element of McEwan’s novel, on the contrary, is irony, which is used to make fun of the Cape Farewell Expedition crew, and above all to depict the anti-hero Micheal Beard, who takes part to the Expedition but is actually shocked by the entire experience, insomuch as to imagine, while dreading to die from hypothermia, one of his colleagues proclaiming his obituary on TV by saying “He went to see global warming for himself”.
Both works focus on the vulnerability and unsuitableness of the human body in extreme conditions, aiming at highlighting that it is time for humans to understand they do not belong to such spaces. To do this, both artists use the trope of metaphor: Davies makes use of the metaphor of the ‘endangered animal’ in a cage, out of place, while McEwan uses the metaphor of the boot room, which the crew is unable to keep tidy responsibly, concluding «How were they to save the earth […] when it was so much larger than the boot room?». Thanks to the use McEwan makes of irony, he manages to rise in the reader an awareness towards two great faults of humanity: egoism and incoherence, which are among the main causes of most environmental issues. Both artists present planet Earth as an autonomous ecosystem whose functioning does not depend on humans, but which humans must respect if they are to survive.

The Literary Enciclopedia, 2019

Published in 1929 by Chatto & Windus (UK) and by Covici Friede (USA), Richard Aldington’s first n... more Published in 1929 by Chatto & Windus (UK) and by Covici Friede (USA), Richard Aldington’s first novel Death of a Hero has been called one of the best fictional treatments of the Great War (Copp 2002, 15), and was described by George Orwell as “much the best of the English war books” (1970, 261). The merit of the novel which makes it still worth reading is that it is not a tribute to war, but “evidence of how war reduces one to the barest elementary humanity” (McGreevy 1931, 34). The description of war in the novel is anti-heroic, giving a thorough and solid account of not just the fear and despair, but also the dirt, illness and, above all, boredom and loneliness that soldiers experienced in the trenches, of which Aldington had first-hand experience. The novel has, in fact, an autobiographical basis; it is divided into three parts, with the first two devoted to the protagonist’s coming of age, and only the last part set during World War I. This final part is significant for its disenchanted take on war, stressing not only the physical destruction of the body, but the obliteration of the sense of self and of one’s place in the world. Aldington’s works had been out of print for a few years, but thanks to the renewed critical attention towards World War I literature in concomitance with the commemoration of the centennial of the Great War, Penguin decided to republish Death of a Hero in the Classics series in 2013, thus confirming the canonical status of the novel.

Transatlantic Shell Shock. British and American Literatures of World War I Trauma, 2019

After fighting as a soldier in World War One, the poet, writer and co-founder of imagism Richard ... more After fighting as a soldier in World War One, the poet, writer and co-founder of imagism Richard Aldington was so shattered that he had to wait ten years before he was able to write about his experience at the front. His 1929 novel Death of a Hero, praised by George Orwell as “much the best of the English war books”, tells the story of a young, talkative painter, George Winterbourne, who undergoes a deep change after joining the army and experiencing the horror of war. While home on leave after several months in the trenches, George is amazed to find himself unable to communicate and interact with people, feeling “remote” from everyone and no longer belonging to his “old life”. Focusing on this sense of remoteness and marginalization, This chapter analyses how George Winterbourne is connected to – if not inspired by – Septimus Warren Smith, a character from Mrs Dalloway who is the archetypal shell-shocked veteran. By means of a comparison between George Winterbourne and Septimus Smith, this study examines how Aldington and Woolf depict the impossibility of restoring routine and recovering from the “debilitating emotions” (DeMeester) of war trauma. Back home, both George and Septimus are misunderstood by the people around them, find interaction impossible, annoy their women. In short, they are no longer the men they used to be and become the means “to criticise the social system, & show it at work” (Woolf, Diary).

Borders of Modernism, 2019

Accanto al lavoro come lettrice e traduttrice per noti editori milanesi, Alessandra Scalero si ad... more Accanto al lavoro come lettrice e traduttrice per noti editori milanesi, Alessandra Scalero si adoperò per scoprire e far conoscere in Italia talenti letterari stranieri. Ciò accadde soprattutto nei confronti di autori americani, che ella tradusse per prima, addentrandosi pioneristicamente in una tecnica e in una “strada tutta da costruire”, come scrisse a Mario Praz, e che lei, “traducendo, prima in Italia, Dos Passos”, costruiva. Lo studio dei documenti custoditi presso due archivi, quello delle sorelle Scalero, conservato alla Civica biblioteca di Mazzè (TO), e l’Archivio Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, conservato presso la Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori di Milano, permette di delineare la figura di una donna che, grazie a competenza e intraprendenza, fece del mestiere di traduttrice una professione.

Ian McEwan is well known for the remediation he operated on his own works from literature to cine... more Ian McEwan is well known for the remediation he operated on his own works from literature to cinema (The Cement Garden, The Innocent, Enduring Love, Atonement, just to mention the most popular ones). In my paper, however, I am going to focus on how literature is remediated by television, and media in general, by examining how McEwan, in his novel Saturday, though presenting a work clearly recalling modernist narrative structures, shows the way in which humans, under the influence of several media, are remediated.
Saturday has been described as an allegory of the post-9/11 world (Dirda; Fortin Tournes), and in fact McEwan here mainly concentrates on the impact of the tragedy of 9/11 on culture and society, and uses media, mainly television, to show how they influence the processes of the human mind. The novel has also been widely associated with Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses for its modernist structure (Head; Groes; Wells). I here wish to analyse how McEwan uses television and media to rewrite and transform modernist literary forms in Saturday, in which media are represented as shaping our minds and ways of perceiving the world. What is most interesting is that, in the novel, things only seem real when they appear in the news; thus the protagonist keeps watching the news to make the event he witnessed in the morning (what he calls “his news”) real. But the news always fails to provide him with an answer or an explanation, and the understanding of reality only arrives, at the end of the novel, through a kind of epiphany triggered by poetry.
I will also examine how McEwan uses media (television, internet, mobiles) to characterize and contextualize his characters, who are defined by the use they make of them. I will finally analyse how television, being a recurring element in the narration, sets the rhythm of the protagonist’s ‘stream’ of thoughts; indeed it appears nine times and plays a role similar to that of the Big Ben in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
Ian McEwan writes a novel concerned with the role and influence of media, examining how, penetrating our minds and brains, they become an integral part of them. In an age which keeps asking how new media can affect, influence, inspire, or be detrimental to literature, the British writer manages to represent their influence on our lives without bending his narrative structures to media’s new languages and forms. On the contrary, he absorbs them into the narration and represents them through the remediation they operate on human minds.

Letteratura e archivi editoriali. Nuovi spunti d'autore, Dec 2014

By way of an extensive examination of documents in the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore Archives, preser... more By way of an extensive examination of documents in the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore Archives, preserved by the Fondazione Mondadori in Milan, Virginia Woolf ’s eventful publishing career in Italy is retraced and her presence is reviewed from a privileged perspective: her Italian publisher’s letters and memos. These documents throw light on the editorial and political vicissitudes of post-war Italy until the 1960s, when Alberto Mondadori created his own imprint, il Saggiatore. The intellectuals playing a role in this history are many: Emilio Cecchi, whom Alberto chose as the editor of Woolf’s works, Anna Banti, Fernanda Pivano, Elio Vittorini, and others.Thanks to these documents a new and unexpected reading of Woolf emerges. Her reception and translation chez Mondadori was not influenced, as elsewhere in Europe, by her feminist themes. She was appreciated mainly for her style and for the perfection of her writing.

Letteratura e archivi editoriali. Nuovi spunti d'autore, Dec 2014

Introduzione alla prima parte del volume "Letteratura e archivi editoriali. Nuovi spunti d'autore".

Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, Nov 2010

Even though under Fascism Italy was experiencing a period of harsh and patriarchal dictatorship, ... more Even though under Fascism Italy was experiencing a period of harsh and patriarchal dictatorship, a feminist writer such as Virginia Woolf was reviewed and discussed in the only forum where foreign ideas – and writers – could still be read: literary periodicals. She was actually introduced as a ‘grand lady of literature’ to the Italian reading public, through comments and analysis which, in some cases, were even deeper and more focused than those of British and American reviewers.

Chi stramalediva gli inglesi?, 2007

Il saggio mostra l’attenzione che la critica italiana riservò a Virginia Woolf e Katherine Mansfi... more Il saggio mostra l’attenzione che la critica italiana riservò a Virginia Woolf e Katherine Mansfield durante il Ventennio fascista, dedicando loro oltre cinquanta articoli a firma di personaggi illustri quali Vittorini, Moravia, Cecchi, Bo e Aleramo. Si vuole evidenziare in particolar modo come la critica italiana si stata capace di cogliere – e accogliere – l’opera di queste due scrittrici senza toni polemici ma anzi con una visione critica sorprendentemente moderna.

Papers by Elisa Bolchi

Attraverso le lettere di Alessandra Scalero alla sorella Liliana si ricostruisce la vita personal... more Attraverso le lettere di Alessandra Scalero alla sorella Liliana si ricostruisce la vita personale e professionale della traduttrice che per prima tradusse autori come Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Michael Gold, Jacob Wassermann. Il carteggio delle due sorelle ne descrive la maturazione intellettuale, offrendo al contempo uno sguardo interno al contesto culturale ed editoriale dell\u2019Italia fascista.The private and professional life of the translator Alessandra Scalero is here retraced thanks to her letters to her sister Liliana. Alessandra was the first to translate in Italian authors such as Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Michael Gold or Jacob Wassermann. The correspondence between the two sisters portrays her intellectual growth while offering an inner look on the cultural and editorial context of Fascist Italy

This dataset is part of the outputs of the research project Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers fu... more This dataset is part of the outputs of the research project Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers funded from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no 838658. The ItalianWoolf project studied recent editions of Woolf's works, examining the editorial choices behind these publications. When no archival material was available, as was the case for most contemporary Italian translators and publishers, interviews with publishers, editors-in-chief and translators were a way to acquire information and insights into how Woolf was read and translated. The interviews were filmed and made available on the project website (https://italianwoolf.reading.ac.uk/) and YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBURAFEdj4N9LPBt4EIj2yA). The purpose of these interviews is to understand the editorial strategies behind Woolf's publication in Italy, and the choices made by translators and by series editors or by...

The Edinburgh Companion to World Wide Woolf

Estremi Confini. Spazi e narrazioni nella letteratura in lingua inglese, 2020

The Literary Enciclopedia, 2019

Transatlantic Shell Shock. British and American Literatures of World War I Trauma, 2019

Borders of Modernism, 2019

Letteratura e archivi editoriali. Nuovi spunti d'autore, Dec 2014

Introduzione alla prima parte del volume "Letteratura e archivi editoriali. Nuovi spunti d'autore".

Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, Nov 2010

Chi stramalediva gli inglesi?, 2007

Ian McEwan is well known for the remediation he operated on his own works from literature to cine... more Ian McEwan is well known for the remediation he operated on his own works from literature to cinema (The Cement Garden, The Innocent, Enduring Love, Atonement, just to mention the most popular ones). In my paper, however, I am going to focus on how literature is remediated by television, and media in general, by examining how McEwan, in his novel Saturday, though presenting a work clearly recalling modernist narrative structures, shows the way in which humans, under the influence of several media, are remediated. Saturday has been described as an allegory of the post-9/11 world (Dirda; Fortin Tournes), and in fact McEwan here mainly concentrates on the impact of the tragedy of 9/11 on culture and society, and uses media, mainly television, to show how they influence the processes of the human mind. The novel has also been widely associated with Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses for its modernist structure (Head; Groes; Wells). I here wish to analyse how McEwan uses television and media to rewrite and transform modernist literary forms in Saturday, in which media are represented as shaping our minds and ways of perceiving the world. What is most interesting is that, in the novel, things only seem real when they appear in the news; thus the protagonist keeps watching the news to make the event he witnessed in the morning (what he calls “his news”) real. But the news always fails to provide him with an answer or an explanation, and the understanding of reality only arrives, at the end of the novel, through a kind of epiphany triggered by poetry. I will also examine how McEwan uses media (television, internet, mobiles) to characterize and contextualize his characters, who are defined by the use they make of them. I will finally analyse how television, being a recurring element in the narration, sets the rhythm of the protagonist’s ‘stream’ of thoughts; indeed it appears nine times and plays a role similar to that of the Big Ben in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Ian McEwan writes a novel concerned with the role and influence of media, examining how, penetrating our minds and brains, they become an integral part of them. In an age which keeps asking how new media can affect, influence, inspire, or be detrimental to literature, the British writer manages to represent their influence on our lives without bending his narrative structures to media’s new languages and forms. On the contrary, he absorbs them into the narration and represents them through the remediation they operate on human minds.

Altre Modernità, 2017

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death,The Hogarth Press inaugurated The H... more To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death,The Hogarth Press inaugurated The Hogarth Shakespeare project, which sees Shakespeare's works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today. The first volume of the series to appear was Jeanette Winterson's "The Gap of Time" (2015), a cover version of "The Winter's Tale". Winterson considers it a "talismanic text" for her,in part because it is a play about a foundling, and Winterson is one. But "The Winter's Tale" is also a play about forgiveness, a theme which has always been dear to Winterson, who wrote about it in "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" (2011).The paper aims to underline such aspects in her rewriting of Shakespeare's play, together with the theme of time, fundamental to both Shakespeare and Winterson. Time is indeed among the protagonists of "The Winter's Tale", which can be read as a "meditation on time&...

The three main settings of McEwan's Solar, a novel described as "the first great global-... more The three main settings of McEwan's Solar, a novel described as "the first great global-warming novel" (Walsh 2010) are significant: from London, to the Artic Pole, up to the desert in New Mexico, these places are all described through the interior monologue of the anti-hero Michael Beard, a character allegorical of humanity's greed for selfish over-consumption. As Beard moves in the real environment only through the non-places of supermodernity (Augé), the paper ana¬lyses the descriptions of settings to underline how McEwan uses them to write about climate- change in a new "novelistic" way (McEwan).

A survey of the documents held at Scalero’s Archive and at the Historical Archive of the Arnoldo ... more A survey of the documents held at Scalero’s Archive and at the Historical Archive of the Arnoldo Mondadori Press – the publisher who hastened to buy and ensure the Italian publication rights of Aldington’s works in 1932 – revealed some of Aldington’s views about his poetics and about the Italian translations of his works. The letters that Aldington wrote to his translator Alessandra Scalero, who became almost a confidante of him, and to his Italian publisher confirm the novelist’s commitment to his political ideals. These archives also reveal Aldington’s care over his Italian translations, that he considered “so good and accurate compared with the French and German” ones (even though he was very precise in pointing out any translation mistakes to his publisher), as well as his deep love for Italy. The British artist, who chose France for his self-exile, actually thought that his writing seemed “so much better in Italian than in French” and confessed that “Italy, Italian culture and Italian life have been one of the most important and certainly happiest influences” in his life.

This study underlines the merit of Carlo Linati in introducing the work of Virginia Woolf into It... more This study underlines the merit of Carlo Linati in introducing the work of Virginia Woolf into Italian literary criticism. He published a first article in the «Corriere della sera» and a second one in «La Fiera letteraria», where he presented some passages from Mrs. Dalloway translated into Italian. The article also analyses the Lombard critic reception of the writer’s poetics and themes through the exam of a few sentences from the translation mentioned above, where it is most clear how influenced Linati’s personal interpretation was by the social differences between Italy and Great Britan in 1927.

This article examines Italian publication history of three writers commonly associated to the Blo... more This article examines Italian publication history of three writers commonly associated to the Bloomsbury Group through an investigation of Italian publishers’ and translators’ archives. While the publication of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey rough- ly developed in the same period, E. M. Forster, whose work exhibits a strong cultural tie with Italy, had to wait almost 40 years to see his works translated and published in Italy. This article investigates the reasons for such asymmetry with a two-prongued approach: on one side, it takes into consideration the critical reception of the three writers; and on the other, it highlights the editorial polices driving the Italian translation and publication inferred through the archival documentation of the people involved in the pre-publication stage. Archival documents testify that Mondadori, which first translated and published Woolf and Strachey in Italy, also had an interest in Forster well before 1945, but never managed to obtain the...

STUDI E TESTI DI PALAZZO SERRA, 2014

Introduzione alla prima parte del volume "Letteratura e archivi editoriali. Nuovi spunti d&#... more Introduzione alla prima parte del volume "Letteratura e archivi editoriali. Nuovi spunti d'autore".

Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, 2010

ABSTRACT Even though under Fascism Italy was experiencing a period of harsh and patriarchal dicta... more ABSTRACT Even though under Fascism Italy was experiencing a period of harsh and patriarchal dictatorship, a feminist writer such as Virginia Woolf was reviewed and discussed in the only forum where foreign ideas – and writers – could still be read: literary periodicals. She was actually introduced as a ‘grand lady of literature’ to the Italian reading public, through comments and analysis which, in some cases, were even deeper and more focused than those of British and American reviewers.

"Narrare la storia dell’edizione italiana di Virginia Woolf significa narrare la storia di u... more "Narrare la storia dell’edizione italiana di Virginia Woolf significa narrare la storia di un giovane editore, Alberto Mondadori, desideroso di riscattarsi politicamente e culturalmente dal proprio recente passato. Attraverso un lungo lavoro di consultazione delle carte custodite presso la Fondazione Mondadori si è cercato di ricostruire la non facile avventura editoriale woolfiana e si tenterà di narrare la presenza di Virginia Woolf in Italia da un punto di vista più intimo: quello delle lettere dell’editore, degli appunti, delle note in calce dalle quali traspaiono anche le vicende editoriali e politiche del paese dall’immediato dopoguerra agli anni ’60, quando Alberto Mondadori affronta la nuova avventura del Saggiatore. Sono molti i nomi illustri a far capolino in queste carte: da Emilio Cecchi, che Alberto aveva scelto come curatore dell’Opera Omnia, a Gianna Manzini, Enrico Falqui, Salvatore Rosati, Anna Banti, Aldo Garzanti, fino a una fugace apparizione di Elio Vittori...

This conference aims to explore the way in which Virginia Woolf’s work has been translated, publi... more This conference aims to explore the way in which Virginia Woolf’s work has been translated, published, distributed, reviewed and discussed has influenced how she was read by the ‘common readers’ in Europe. The goal is to delineate the cultural and literary mediation around Woolf’s works in Europe also in order to identify and characterize her European readers through.
To understand how Woolf’s works were – or were not – available in particular marketplaces, text materiality studies (Wilson and Battershill 2018) and the study of censorship can provide relevant lines of investigation which may provide answers to Billiani’s question “to what extent does censorship, when applied to translation, succeed in producing new textual spaces and generating new sites of meaning?” (Billiani 2007)
The main aim of the conference is to foster a critical discussion on the cultural mediation of Woolf in European countries with specific focus on how literary institutions (publishing houses and book series, literary periodicals), literary agents (translators, literary agents, editors), and the composite sociocultural factors driving the selection, production, and publication of Woolf’s works “socially framed” (Long 1992) the reading of her works and shaped her readers through processes of popularization and canonization in the literary systems in Europe. We welcome contributions focussing on microhistories of translations and re-translations, specific trends of scholarly reception, Woolf’s reception in literary periodicals and her role in the intellectual debate of European countries. In addition, we would like to explore the importance of digital humanities, of the web and of social media in creating “communities of practice” (Wenger et al. 2002) around Woolf’s works and thought.

Deadline for proposals: 10 January 2021

The first Italian Literary Festival entirely dedicated to Virginia Woolf. Three days of conferenc... more The first Italian Literary Festival entirely dedicated to Virginia Woolf. Three days of conferences, talks and book presentations and the first Italian representation of the comedy 'Freshwater'.

A partire dalla fine del secolo scorso il pianeta Terra è diventato oggetto di un’attenzione volt... more A partire dalla fine del secolo scorso il pianeta Terra è diventato oggetto di un’attenzione volta a risvegliare la coscienza ambientale. “Essere” non può significare altro, oggi, che “essere in un luogo” e il termine place, contrapposto al più astratto space, è divenuto un concetto indispensabile per ripensare il nostro abitare il pianeta. In questo senso Yi-Fu Tuan afferma che i places sono “centers of felt value”, poiché l’uomo può sviluppare un place-attachment, ovvero un attaccamento al luogo, ma non uno space-attachment, un attaccamento allo spazio, essendo quest’ultimo un’astrazione geometrica o topografica priva di legami affettivi.
Una delle correnti che si è fatta carico di tali questioni è l’ecocritica, che nasce con “l’intento di fare entrare le questioni ambientali nell’ottica della critica letteraria, esattamente come era accaduto per i diritti civili, per le battaglie femministe, per le questioni post-coloniali” (S. Iovino). Partendo da questa concezione è possibile interrogarsi su quali nuovi punti di vista possano scaturire da tale prospettiva, non limitandosi a questioni letterarie, ma aprendosi a un’analisi che prenda in considerazione l’ecodiscorso: come si fa carico la comunicazione del rapporto umanità/natura?
I giovani studiosi del Dipartimento di Scienze Linguistiche e Letterature Straniere sono pertanto invitati a dare il proprio contributo nel loro ambito specifico interrogandosi, da un punto di vista sincronico o diacronico, sulle seguenti questioni:

- Come la questione e la coscienza ecologica modificano la narrazione, sia a livello di discorso che di contenuto?
- Come le diverse tradizioni letterarie si relazionano al concetto di ecocriticism?
- È compatibile l’ecocriticism con la concezione cristiana del creato?
- Quali strategie argomentative vengono utilizzate nel discorso ecocritico e come vengono traslate da un campo culturale all’altro attraverso la traduzione?
- Quali manipolazioni comunicative sono messe in atto rispetto alla nuova e sempre più diffusa sensibilità ecologica?
- Come la crisi ecologica e la moderna coscienza che ne consegue intervengono sul rapporto dell’umanità col luogo in cui essa vive?
Quest’ultima prospettiva ci pare particolarmente interessante da esplorare proprio nell’anno in cui a Milano si svolge l’EXPO 2015 dal titolo Nutrire il Pianeta, Energia per la Vita. In aggiunta, la tematica della sostenibilità, della crescita intelligente e solidale, l’attenzione al pianeta, ai cambiamenti climatici, alle risorse e alle materie prime sono tra i punti focali di Horizon 2020.
Parafrasando il titolo del lavoro di Devall e Sessions, “dobbiamo imparare a vivere come se la natura” – il nostro luogo – “contasse davvero”.

Having focused my studies on the publication of Virginia Woolf’s works in Italy by the leading pu... more Having focused my studies on the publication of Virginia Woolf’s works in Italy by the leading publisher Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, I was particularly interested in observing the response of the Italian marketplace when her rights – which Mondadori considered as “the only true wealth of a publisher” – expired in 2011. Once Woolf’s works were freed from legal and economic ties, three main paths characterized their publication in Italy: the retranslations of her most important novels by prestigious publishers, i.e. Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse published by Einaudi or The Years by Feltrinelli; the translations of works that had never been translated, such as parts of The Diaries; and the appearance of extremely refined editions of her books in the catalogues of small, independent publishers.
By means of some interviews to Woolf’s translators and publishers, I wish to show how the Italians’ fascination for her books and work has not waned after the first wave of re-editions, but is, on the contrary, in constant growth. The competent scholars editing some of these new volumes, who are helping Italian readers to better understand Woolf’s prose, together with the renewed attention to her work, actually ushered what we might call an ‘Italian Woolf Renaissance’, which is leading to a growing interest in Woof both from the critics and the reading public. The chance to measure such interest was the first Italian literary festival dedicated to Virginia Woolf, which I organized last November together with two colleagues and which had a surprisingly wide appeal.

When speaking about literature ‘crossing the borders’, one can refer to the actual journey abroad... more When speaking about literature ‘crossing the borders’, one can refer to the actual journey abroad made by an artist – sometimes ending in a (self)exile, as well as to the reception of an artist in a foreign country.
Richard Aldington is an intriguing figure to be studied under both points of view. He was a poet, co-founder of Imagism with Ezra Pound; a translator from Italian and from French; a biographer and a best-selling novelist who, on the one hand, actually travelled a lot around in Italy with his wife to be Hilda Doolittle and therefore had a first-hand knowledge of the country. He was very fond of it and of its culture, and considered himself ‘a friend of Italy’, as it emerges from his letters, but also from his poems and his novels. Probably as a result of this, he enjoyed a good critical fortune in our country, where most of his works where published by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, and where Carlo Linati, writing about him in the pages of “La Nuova Antologia” in 1931, described his novel Death of a Hero as “uno dei più schietti, arditi e interessanti romanzi che l’Inghilterra vide in questi ultimi tempi”. I thus wish to analyse the presence and the role of Italy in Richard Aldington’s life and work – particularly in his novel All Men Are Enemies – as well as his critical reception in Italy, a country which meant most to him, as he confessed to Alberto Mondadori, because, he wrote, ‘Italy, Italian culture and Italian life have been one of the most important and certainly happiest influences in my life’.

In order to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death the Hogarth Press, the publish... more In order to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death the Hogarth Press, the publishing house founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917 and re-launched in London and New York in 2012, inaugurated The Hogarth Shakespeare project, which ‘sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today.’ The first volume of the series to appear was Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (2015), a cover version of The Winter’s Tale.
It is no surprise that, among all William Shakespeare’s works, Winterson decided to retell The Winter’s Tale, which she considers a ‘talismanic text’ for her, confessing to have ‘worked with The Winter’s Tale in many disguises for many years.’ Among the reasons of her fascination for this text is indeed the fact that it is a play about a foundling, and Winterson is one, as she reminds the readers in the last pages of The Gap of Time. But The Winter’s Tale is also a play about forgiveness, another theme which has always been dear to Winterson, who wrote about it in works such as Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), a sort of sequel of her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). My paper aims to underline such aspects in her rewriting of Shakespeare’s play, together with another theme, fundamental both to Shakespeare and to Winterson: time. Time is indeed among the protagonists of The Winter’s Tale, which can be read as a ‘meditation on time’ (Lombardo 2004), so much so that it is embodied as a speaking character in the Chorus, a device seldom used by Shakespeare but always crucial to interpret his works. ‘Time is reversible,’ declares Winterson in her cover version; time redeems and can be redeemed, seems to suggest Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale, where Time claims that it is in his power ‘To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour / to plant and o’erwhelm custom.’
My analysis will show how The Gap of Time completes, in fact, a retelling of such themes that Winterson started back in 1989 with her novel Sexing the Cherry, where she claimed that ‘every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path taken and the forgotten angle’ because ‘our one existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end.’ This is the leading idea both of The Gap of Time and of The Winter’s Tale, where parallel lives, made of the alternative decisions not taken in the past, go on living so as to create an alternative present.

Archival Uncertainties

The small but fascinating Scalero Archive in Mazzé, a little town near Turin, holds the letters a... more The small but fascinating Scalero Archive in Mazzé, a little town near Turin, holds the letters and documents of one of the most prominent, yet little known, translators of the 1930s in Italy: Alessandra Scalero. She translated into Italian the works of important contemporary authors, including Virginia Woolf, Richard Aldington, John Dos Passos and Willa Cather among others, and was offered a fixed and very convenient monthly salary by the Mondadori Publishing house to work exclusively for them.
Despite the interesting material it preserves, the existence of the Scalero archive, organized and run by voluntaries, is at risk and thus deserves more scholarly attention. The documents kept there actually reveal crucial aspects of cultural mediation, such as Scalero’s relationship with publishers, shedding light on the editorial backstage of the publication of foreign literature in Italy. The correspondence with authors like Richard Aldington, who became almost a friend of Miss Scalero, and sent her the drafts of his latest novels so that she could be the first to translate them, also show a more private aspect of the translator’s work. The correspondence with some influential Italian intellectuals, such as Mario Praz, eventually reveals her struggle to be a pioneer in the translation of the experimental prose of American writers such as John Dos Passos, as well as her complaints about the difficulties she was encountering in a period when translators from English in Italy were few and therefore had to forge ‘a new path’ all by themselves.

According to Lawrence Buell the concept of ‘place’ “gestures in at least three directions at once... more According to Lawrence Buell the concept of ‘place’ “gestures in at least three directions at once – toward environmental materiality, toward social perception or construction, and toward individual affect or bond”. These three directions are well visible in Ian McEwan’s Solar, a novel described as “the first great global-warming novel” (Walsh 2010).
Solar settings are several and significant: from London, to the island of Spitsbergen, Svalbard, up to the desert in New Mexico, all places are described through the interior monologue of the anti-hero Michael Beard, a character clearly allegorical of humanity’s greed for selfish over-consumption.
From the places of the so called ‘supermodernity’, those ‘clinical settings’ (Buell) of the Western world where life takes place in offices, trains, motorways and fully-accessorized houses, Beard moves to the real Environment, the Artic pole and the desert, two extreme representatives of that previously mentioned “environmental materiality”. It is then the contrast between social and individual perception of city life and of life in the wilderness to present another interesting issue. Buell affirms that “for ecocriticism to recognize ‘the city’ as something other than non-place is itself a great and necessary advance”, and McEwan is not new in using the city as a pivotal element in his novels (it would be enough to recall the role played by the city of London in Saturday). I thus wish to analyse McEwan’s description of places in Solar, both private (houses, offices) and public ones (streets, trains, boat), to underline how the way they are described helps to better portray the characters of the novel, especially its protagonist Micheal Beard. Recalling what Maurice Merleau-Ponty affirms, if to be a body means “to be tied to a certain world” then it might actually be interesting to investigate Beard’s overweight, greedy and cumbersome body in relation to the places he lives in.

In 2007 Dan Bloom, a freelance news reporter and author of the novella Polar City Red, coined the... more In 2007 Dan Bloom, a freelance news reporter and author of the novella Polar City Red, coined the term cli-fi – short for ‘climate fiction’ – that is fictional works about climate change and global warming. Since then the term has gone viral in social networks and media as well. As Rodge Glass writes, “whenever a literary term gains traction it is a chance to examine not only what it says about the writers who explore the new ground but also the readers who buy it, read it, discuss it”, especially if it deals with one of the greatest issues of our age: global warming and climate change.
Ian McEwan focuses on these matters in Solar, a novel inspired by the author’s experience at the 2005 Cape Farewell Expedition to Spitsbergen, in the Artic, to watch the results of climate change together with twenty other artists from all over the world. Cape Farewell is a project created in 2001 to instigate a “cultural response to the climate challenge”; a multifaceted program matching several fields of knowledge, from a transcultural and transnational point of view, to obtain new artistic results addressed to the widest possible public. As their website says: “Working internationally, we bring creatives, scientists and informers together to stimulate a cultural narrative that will engage and inspire a sustainable and vibrant future society […] communicating on a human scale the urgency of the global climate challenge”.
I wish to analyse two specific transcultural experiences deriving from this project: those of the novelist McEwan and the choreographer Siobhan Davies, both members of the 2005 Cape Farewell Expedition to Spitsbergen. It is actually interesting to observe and confront the two artistic results deriving from their adventure. While Davies’s response to her experience is a work embodying the idea of fragility of the body she had experienced in the Artic, which took the form of a projection titled Endangered Species, in which a figure dances inside a museum display case, wearing a costume of long bending rods, suggesting uneasiness and dramatic feelings, McEwan writes a comical and allegorical novel about a greedy and selfish Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The focus will then be on how McEwan tells about his Cape Farewell experience in Solar, a novel that ecocritics had been waiting for as the “Future of Ecocriticism” (Garrard), only to create great disappointment for its ironical view on the matter once it was published. Irony is actually a key element in the novel, which McEwan uses also to make fun of the Cape Farewell Expedition by turning the British choreographer Siobhan Davies into a French dancer who makes “a geometric dance she had planned to take place on ice”, while another artist and member of the crew, Antony Gormley, is depicted as the Spanish artist Jesus who makes sculptures of penguins. Irony is however mainly displayed through the anti-hero Micheal Beard, who takes part to the Expedition but is actually shocked by the entire experience, insomuch as to imagine, while dreading to die from hypothermia, one of his colleagues proclaiming his obituary on TV by saying “He went to see global warming for himself”.
My analysis wishes to investigate the possible transcultural uses of fundamental global issues, such as global warming, to see how art, literature and critics try to deal with it.

Virginia Woolf’s work first appears translated in Italian in the pages of «La fiera letteraria», ... more Virginia Woolf’s work first appears translated in Italian in the pages of «La fiera letteraria», a well known and quite widespread literary journal. It is Carlo Linati, friend and translator of James Joyce, to translate her work, choosing some extracts from Mrs Dalloway. But even though that was the first novel to be partially translated into Italian, it was Orlando to be first published in Italy, curiously followed by Flush, usually counted among Woolf’s minor works. The Italian edition of Mrs Dalloway was published by Mondadori in 1946, as the first book of Alberto Mondadori’s wide project to publish Virginia Woolf’s Opera Omnia after having bought her translation rights from her husband in 1945.
I will introduce the first translation attempts by Carlo Linati appeared in literary periodicals, comparing them to the first Italian edition of Mrs Dalloway and to more recent translations by Nadia Fusini. Eventually, I will present an unpublished translation of The Years by Alessandra Scalero, comparing it to that published by Mondadori in 1955 and to the one published this year, translated by Antonio Bibbò. From these comparisons it emerges how the writer’s style was in a first moment made more understandable for the Italian reading public, thus resulting less experimental and less innovative, and how it was faithfully rendered only in most recent translations.
The story of the first Italian translations of Woolf’s works will be retraced also through the documents held at the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore Historical Archive and at the Alessandra and Liliana Scalero Archive, which show the obstacles the Italian publishers had to overcome to have the writer’s works put into Italian. The analysis of such background information shows how complex the transposition of Woolf’s experimental work from her cultural field to the Italian one has been.

"Narrare la storia dell’edizione italiana di Virginia Woolf significa narrare la storia di un gio... more "Narrare la storia dell’edizione italiana di Virginia Woolf significa narrare la storia di un giovane editore, Alberto Mondadori, desideroso di riscattarsi politicamente e culturalmente dal proprio recente passato.
Attraverso un lungo lavoro di consultazione delle carte custodite presso la Fondazione Mondadori si è cercato di ricostruire la non facile avventura editoriale woolfiana e si tenterà di narrare la presenza di Virginia Woolf in Italia da un punto di vista più intimo: quello delle lettere dell’editore, degli appunti, delle note in calce dalle quali traspaiono anche le vicende editoriali e politiche del paese dall’immediato dopoguerra agli anni ’60, quando Alberto Mondadori affronta la nuova avventura del Saggiatore.
Sono molti i nomi illustri a far capolino in queste carte: da Emilio Cecchi, che Alberto aveva scelto come curatore dell’Opera Omnia, a Gianna Manzini, Enrico Falqui, Salvatore Rosati, Anna Banti, Aldo Garzanti, fino a una fugace apparizione di Elio Vittorini. Più volte, nelle sue lettere a Leonard Woolf e agli altri intellettuali coinvolti nel progetto, Alberto ribadisce il proprio desiderio di tradurre e pubblicare tutte le opere di questa “indimenticabile artista”, ma la macchina editoriale di Casa Mondadori spegnerà via via l’iniziale entusiasmo lasciando il progetto incompiuto.
"

When The Stone Gods begins, an escape seems the only possibility to survive a planet, incredibly ... more When The Stone Gods begins, an escape seems the only possibility to survive a planet, incredibly similar to ours, that is going to die. But this escape will be useless, because the new arrival, the new hope, will reveal to be our present, Planet Earth, that at the end of the novel is in such a bad condition to offer, once again, escape as the only alternative.
In Winterson’s novel escape is a concept widely analysed in different ways: escape from society, escape from the socially accepted ‘normality’, from cultural cages and, last but not least, escape from a dying out planet.

"Leggere Virginia" è stato un incontro organizzato nell'ambito dei festeggiamenti della Città di ... more "Leggere Virginia" è stato un incontro organizzato nell'ambito dei festeggiamenti della Città di Sesto San Giovanni per la "Giornata Internazionale della donna". Si è rivolto alla cittadinanza sestese affinché potesse scoprire, conoscere o riscoprire la vita e le opere di quella che Sibilla Aleramo definì una “gran signora della letteratura” attraverso la sua voce e le sue parole.

L'indice dei libri del mese, May 2005

Noto al pubblico quasi esclusivamente per il suo capolavoro Dracula Bram Stoker fu invece uno scr... more Noto al pubblico quasi esclusivamente per il suo capolavoro Dracula Bram Stoker fu invece uno scrittore decisamente prolifico, con all’attivo diciotto libri, oltre a numerosi articoli e racconti. Il suo primo romanzo, La via del vizio (titolo originale: The Primrose Path), apparve a puntate nella rivista dublinese “The Shamrock” nel 1875, quando Stoker aveva solo 26 anni.
Protagonisti di questa opera giovanile, sono Jerry e Katey O’Sullivan, una felice coppia dublinese cui è da poco nato il terzo figlio. Jerry è un lavoratore onesto e capace, eppure l’ambizione lo porta ad accettare, contro il volere della famiglia, un’offerta di lavoro come carpentiere teatrale a Londra, ma quella che egli credeva una grande opportunità di carriera riserverà conseguenze inaspettate e spaventose, in un crescendo di miseria, malattia, abiezione morale e violenza ingiustificata. Un tragico passaggio che porterà l’uomo, divorato dalla depressione e accecato dalla rabbia, a precipitare nel baratro dell’alcolismo e trasformerà gli squallidi ambienti familiari in autentici luoghi dell’orrore. Toccando temi ancora oggi di strettissima attualità, come l’infortunio sul luogo di lavoro, la violenza domestica o il degrado sociale e umano causato dalla perdita dell’impiego, in La via del vizio Bram Stoker narra una storia di realismo gotico caratterizzata da tinte tetre e drammatiche, dove il mostruoso per cui lo scrittore è noto entra nel quotidiano e lo avvelena irrimediabilmente.

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Quaderni proustiani , 2020

Appel à Contribution pour le numéro 14 de la revue "Quaderni proustiani" DEADLINE pour l'envoi d... more Appel à Contribution pour le numéro 14 de la revue "Quaderni proustiani"
DEADLINE pour l'envoi des contributions: le 30 avril 2020