Guadalupe Adámez Castro, Gritos de papel: las cartas de súplica del exilio español (1939–1945), Fabien Deshayes and Axel Pohn-Weidinger, L’Amour en Guerre: Sur les traces d’une correspondance Paris-Algérie, 1960–1962 (original) (raw)
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Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into women's lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie orpiccola borghesiaand one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish thei...
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Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies, 2012
This investigation of the ways in which Italian poet soldiers represented mothers and motherhood seeks to shed light on the relationship between gender and war in early-twentieth-century Italy by exploring the intersections and divergences between the official discourses on motherhood and the Madre-patria, represented here by D'Annuzio's “Il rinato,” and the counter-discourses offered in the poetry of Ugo Betti and Corrado Alvaro. In order to illustrate a fundamental difference in the way D'Annunzio, on the one hand, and Betti and Alvaro, on the other, portray mothers, I will focus on their various depictions of maternal grief. I argue that Betti's and Alvaro's representations of melancholic mothers constitute an ethical choice that runs counter to the nationalist narrative of sacrifice and regeneration, but in the end I also question whether their melancholic mothers can be viewed as a new kind of model of womanhood or if she is just another iteration of the mat...
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Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women's Writing (edited by Tiziana de Rogatis and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi), 2022
History. A novel (1974) and The Unwomanly Face of War (U vojny ne ženskoe lico 1985) are two distinctive historical and emotional narratives that develop around certain traumatic cores directly and indirectly related to the Second World War, as well as articulating themselves through a female universe and its pathos. Elsa Morante places at the centre of her novel History the years between 1941 and 1947. The text is divided into eight parts, preceded by a historical focus and a final addition, both of them endowing the novel with a paratextual structure organically connected to the main narrative (JOSI: 2020). The polyphonic plot of the novel develops in a fictional fashion some crucial historical nuclei of the war that are specifically related to the city of Rome, a topic on which Morante had carefully researched (LUCAMANTE: 2014, ZANARDO: 2015). At the heart of the plot stands out the story of elementary school teacher Ida Ramundo and her family, particularly her son Useppe. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich was published in the Soviet Union in 1985 – the same year of Morante’s death, and eleven years after the publication of History. It this literary reportage, Belo-Russian novelist Alexievich – who would eventually win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 – selects the oral testimonies of 500 women among former partisans and, in most part, Soviet veterans who enlisted in the armed forces as volunteers between 1941 and 1945. Thematically structured in 16 chapters, the testimonies benefit from an extremely well pondered montage, that is constantly accompanied by a narrating voice. In this essay I will adopt Derridean categories such as «spectrality», «archive fever» and «archives du mal» (cfr. Introduction, I.1.3-I.1.5); my goal is to show that, despite belonging to different genres, the works by these two writers feature a similar traumatic philosophy of history, and implement comparable ethical and aesthetic choices aimed at formulating experimental and up-to-date forms of narrative realism. This contribution consists of this foreword, three paragraphs and a conclusion. In the first paragraph, I shall delineate some affinities and converging aspects of both texts. The second and third paragraphs focus on History and The Unwomanly Face of War respectively, by closely examining their formal nuclei, poetics and epitomization of a traumatic philosophy of history, all of which are succinctly envisaged in the first paragraph. In the second paragraph (distributed in two subparagraphs), I relate the central metaphor of History with a title, The Great Evil (Il Grande Male), which was initially considered by Morante for her novel. The metaphorical ramifications of this title display a relationship between epilepsy and racial stigma, as well as suggesting an intersection of epilepsy, racial persecution and rape. The third paragraph is divided into three sub-sections. In the first two, I shall analyse the dynamics of a female uncanny projected and introjected by Soviet women volunteers during the Second World War and over the following forty years, up to the publication of Alexievich’s literary reportage. In the third sub-paragraph I investigate the uncanny quality of the feminine traumatic memory epitomized by the writer. The conclusions will reintroduce some of the categories from the first paragraph, verify them and rework their features on the basis of the findings featured in the two central paragraphs.