SECRET OF THE MUSES RETOLD: Classical Influences on Italian Authors of the Twentieth Century. Chapter 2: The World as Text: Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose as Semiotic Fiction (original) (raw)
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Continuity and rupture in the Italian literary field 1926-1960
2018
This special issue gathers together articles which explicitly engage with the journal’s action in local, national, and international cultural networks, from Solaria’s inception in 1926 to the demise of Botteghe Oscure in 1960. The chronological spectrum of this guest-edited issue ensures that, for instance, we can identify the main phases of the development of a disinterested, and seemingly apolitical, approach to the role of the arts, cutting across Solaria, Letteratura, and Botteghe Oscure, linking together Florence, Rome and the various foreign republics of letters with which these journals dialogued over the years
2009
The talent of improvising, which may be called indigenous to [Italy], gave celebrity to two or three female poets.. .. But women of such celebrity are rare in Italy and are looked upon not so much with respect as with wonder, as monsters of talent.-Ugo Foscolo, "The Women of Italy" Although one can trace the history of Italian improvising, in all literary genres and in all milieus, back to the thirteenth century, the golden age of improvising, as several authors including Giulio Natali have noted, was the eighteenth century. Foreign travelers remarked on Italians' ability and excellence at improvising throughout the century, and it became a point of national pride. From Charles de Brosses and Joseph de Lalande, to Madame de Stael and Karl Fernow, foreign visitors and intellectuals marveled at the I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their patience and their help. A special thanks to Catherine Sama for her thorough reading of the first draft of my paper. I also owe a debt of gratitude to all participants in the 2002 Clark workshop that inspired much of my research, and especially to Paula Findlen, Wendy Roworth, and Rebecca Messbarger. I am deeply thankful for the assistance of all the librarians of the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome, who let me consult their archives even on days when the library was closed to the public. A special thanks to Drs. Fano, Muratore, Scialanga, and Sciarra. Incredibly gracious and helpful were Mr. Savi and Dr. Dolfi of the Biblioteca Forteguerriana in Pistoia, as well as Dr. Pensauti of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. I would be amiss if I did not mention my "assistant" in Rome, Mrs. Caterina Bruzzone (my dear mother), and my very patient husband, Christopher Smith. Last but not least, this paper was also made possible by a Summer Grant from Saint Joseph's University: to all my colleagues I owe my deepest thanks for their continuing support.
History or pre-history? Recent revisions in the eighteenth-century novel in Italy
Journal of Romance Studies, 2001
Rewriting literary history After a century of almost total critical neglect, a recent revival of interest in Italy in the indigenous eighteenth-century novel breaks with a long-standing tradition which identifies the origins of the modern Italian novel with Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1825-7). For the Romantics, Manzoni's intention to educate his readership in the civic and religious values of the Risorgimento lent respectability to a genre that had been otherwise widely condemned, and his novel has since come to be seen as a cornerstone in the foundation of a national culture and language. In this review article I shall attempt to trace the ways in which recent developments in approaches to the novel and its readers have begun over the past quarter century to impact on the established history of the novel in Italy and are contributing to a rethinking of eighteenth-century narrative, of what makes a narrative a novel, and of the different reading practices it produces. But before turning to the question of critical reception, I shall begin with a brief outline of the development of the pre-nineteenth-century novel in Italy. Thanks to the recent work of critics such as Folco Portinari, Alberto Asor Rosa and Carlo Madrignani among others, we have been reminded of the existence of an autonomous seventeenth-and eighteenth-century narrative tradition which is the novel in all but name. What is curious about this history is that, from the point of view of authorship, the Italian novel appears to have had not one beginning but two. A rapid historical sketch conducted today would date the inception of the modern Italian novel as an autonomous genre in prose at about 1625. This is followed by a long period between roughly 1670 and 1740 during which Italian authors turned away from the novel but Italian readers continued to demand it. Seventeenth-century theorists, however, still had considerable difficulty in placing the romanzo [novel], as Attilio Motta's interesting study of the evolution of the word romanzo through dictionary and encyclopedia entries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows (Motta 1997: 65-78). He notes that the first edition of the authoritative (and conservative) Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca of 1612 offers the succinct definition Poema eroico [Heroic poem], later modified in 1691 with Sorta di [A kind of ] inserted in front of poema, so allocating it, as the entry notes, among the sottogeneri [subgenres] of poetic narration. To find a definition which takes into account recent developments in the genre at home as well as abroad, one has to wait until the fourth
2009
The talent of improvising, which may be called indigenous to [Italy], gave celebrity to two or three female poets.. .. But women of such celebrity are rare in Italy and are looked upon not so much with respect as with wonder, as monsters of talent.-Ugo Foscolo, "The Women of Italy" Although one can trace the history of Italian improvising, in all literary genres and in all milieus, back to the thirteenth century, the golden age of improvising, as several authors including Giulio Natali have noted, was the eighteenth century. Foreign travelers remarked on Italians' ability and excellence at improvising throughout the century, and it became a point of national pride. From Charles de Brosses and Joseph de Lalande, to Madame de Stael and Karl Fernow, foreign visitors and intellectuals marveled at the I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their patience and their help. A special thanks to Catherine Sama for her thorough reading of the first draft of my paper. I also owe a debt of gratitude to all participants in the 2002 Clark workshop that inspired much of my research, and especially to Paula Findlen, Wendy Roworth, and Rebecca Messbarger. I am deeply thankful for the assistance of all the librarians of the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome, who let me consult their archives even on days when the library was closed to the public. A special thanks to Drs. Fano, Muratore, Scialanga, and Sciarra. Incredibly gracious and helpful were Mr. Savi and Dr. Dolfi of the Biblioteca Forteguerriana in Pistoia, as well as Dr. Pensauti of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. I would be amiss if I did not mention my "assistant" in Rome, Mrs. Caterina Bruzzone (my dear mother), and my very patient husband, Christopher Smith. Last but not least, this paper was also made possible by a Summer Grant from Saint Joseph's University: to all my colleagues I owe my deepest thanks for their continuing support.
The Cambridge History of Italian Literature
1999
Italy possesses one of the richest and most influential literatures of Europe, stretching back to the thirteenth century. This first substantial history of Italian literature to appear in the English language for forty years provides a comprehensive survey of Italian writing from its ...
AN INTRODUCTION TO ITALIAN LITERATURE
Orario ricevimento: BH 625, Tuesday and Thursday 12.10 -1.10 pm. Aula e orario: BH 142 ; daily 10.10 am -11.00 am TEXTBOOKS: 1) Letteratura italiana per stranieri. 2009. Guerra Edizioni. 2) Grammatica avanzata di italiano per stranieri. 2006. Alma Edizioni. DIZIONARIO: either Langensheidt, Oxford, Cassells (Italian-English), or acceptable alternative. COURSE MATERIALS posted on OnCourse: excerpts from Italian textbooks --Crescendo!, L'Italia dal Fascismo ad oggi (Daniela Bartalesi-Graf) and Sapori D'italia; articles from Italian Newspapers --La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, Il Fatto Quotidiano, from weekly magazines --La Repubblica delle Donne, and Il Venerdì di Repubblica. Course materials on Close-Reserve at the Wells Library: Italian Films: -Decameron (Pasolini), Il Mestiere delle Armi (Olmi).
California Italian Studies, 2011
The 1998 publication of Carla Benedetti’s Pasolini contro Calvino: Per una letteratura impura [Pasolini vs. Calvino: For An 'Impure' Literature] provoked a series of attacks in the Italian press, mostly aimed at its polemical contraposition between authors and author-functions: One the one hand, Pasolini the activist, who took on personal risk to speak truth to power through the medium of his art; and on the other hand Calvino the aesthete, darling of the international postmodern literary establishment. Debates in Italy today about the cultural legacy of the twentieth century, the state of postmodernism, and the future of Italian literary culture are still haunted by the opposition of these two figures. The debates are often compounded by a perceived opposition in the field of criticism between Benedetti’s radical supporters and conservative critics. My essay compares Benedetti’s provocative call for an impure literature alla Pasolini with one of the foundational histories of Italian literature, that of Francesco De Sanctis, where in particular the sixteenth-century figures of Machiavelli and Ariosto are opposed and the former championed. Through this double comparison, I argue that Benedetti and De Sanctis are “Machiavellian” literary critics whose future-oriented strategies of expression represent one of multiple ways that the unprecedented challenges Italian culture faces today are being confronted with tools from its past.