Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies – serie

This book focuses on the autobiographical poetry of early twentieth century author Antonia Pozzi and her lifelong friend and fellow poet, Vittorio Sereni. Antonia Pozzi, an author whose popularity in Italy has increased dramatically in the past few years, was a young girl during the First World War. She was born into a wealthy and influential family, and, after the rise of Fascism, her father was a prominent state official. In 1938 Pozzi committed suicide at the age of twenty-six. Her major collection of poems, Parole, was published posthumously. Pozzi’s best friend, "brother" and most devoted confidant, Vittorio Sereni, is a more recognizable figure in Italian literary history. Born in 1913, a year after Pozzi, he served in the Italian Army during World War II, and was held in an allied prison camp in Algeria during the last years of the war. While Sereni is by far the better-known author, his response to the war experience and, particularly, to imprisonment recalls Pozzi’s work on a number of levels. In the “diaries” of both authors, autobiography functions as a means of constantly reasserting the self as a unique and separate individual against the totalizing forces of Fascist propaganda.

New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies. Volume 1: Definitions, Theory, and Accented Practices is a collection of essays that identifies a number of different approaches in cultural studies and in Italian cultural studies in particular. It highlights that history of cultural studies and new developments in the field as well focuses on practicing cultural studies with essays devoted to Italian hip hop culture, postcolonial Italy and queer diaspora, Occidentalism in Japan, Italian racism and colonialism.

Body of State offers a translation of Marco Baliani’s acclaimed dramatic monologue, Corpo di stato, concerning the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the terrorist Red Brigades. Corpo di stato was commissioned by Italian state television in 1998 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the “Moro Affair.” Baliani’s monologue, refracted through the prism of the intervening twenty years, consists of a merciless self-examination, alternately anguished and affectionate, in an effort to confront his generation's complicity in the dissolution of Italian politics in the wake of the national trauma of Moro's murder. Through over a hundred performances since its 1998 debut, the piece has evolved in response to the forceful reactions of Italian audiences. The first draft of this English translation offered the supertitles for performances in Baliani's 2009 U.S. tour, and was subsequently expanded to reflect the most recent version of the text.This unique volume features a translation of the dramatic monologue, embedding it in a context that richly documents the events. The volume includes a preface by translator and performance studies scholar Ron Jenkins, a critical introduction, Baliani’s thoughts about the 1998 production for Italian television, an interview with Baliani and his artistic collaborator, Maria Maglietta, and the afterword they wrote in light of the 2009 tour. In addition, Body of State provides precious documentation in the form of reviews, contributed by scholars, students, and spectators, of Baliani’s 2009 North American tour.A celebrated author and performer, Marco Baliani is well known as one of the originators of the “theater of narration.” Starting in 1978, his first performances grew directly from his engagement in radical politics. In 1989 he adapted Heinrich von Kleist’s novella, Kohlhaas (1989), into a riveting monologue which he performed on a bare stage, sitting on a chair for ninety minutes. Kohlhaas marked his passage to a “pure” theater of narration and is today a classic of the genre. Since Kohlhaas, Baliani has shown interest in social, political, and literary themes. Recurring in his work are the psychological and ethical tensions that arise when the search for justice clashes with power or social injustice.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics explores the politics of the leader of the Futurist art movement. Emerging in Italy in 1909, Futurism sought to propel Italy into the modern world, and is famously known for outlandish claims to want to destroy museums and libraries in order to speed this transition. Futurism, however, also had a much darker political side. It glorified war as the solution to many of Italy’s ills, and was closely tied to the Fascist Regime. In this book, Ialongo focuses on Marinetti as the chief determinant of Futurist politics and explores how a seemingly revolutionary art movement, at one point having some support among revolutionary left-wing movements in Italy, could eventually become so intimately tied to the repressive Fascist regime. Ialongo traces Marinetti’s politics from before the foundation of Futurism, through the Great War, and then throughout the twenty-year Fascist dictatorship, using a wide range of published and unpublished sources. Futurist politics are presented within the wider context of developments in Italy and Europe, and Ialongo further highlights how Marinetti’s political choices influenced the art of his movement.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics explores the politics of the leader of the Futurist art movement. Emerging in Italy in 1909, Futurism sought to propel Italy into the modern world, and is famously known for outlandish claims to want to destroy museums and libraries in order to speed this transition. Futurism, however, also had a much darker political side. It glorified war as the solution to many of Italy’s ills, and was closely tied to the Fascist Regime. In this book, Ialongo focuses on Marinetti as the chief determinant of Futurist politics and explores how a seemingly revolutionary art movement, at one point having some support among revolutionary left-wing movements in Italy, could eventually become so intimately tied to the repressive Fascist regime. Ialongo traces Marinetti’s politics from before the foundation of Futurism, through the Great War, and then throughout the twenty-year Fascist dictatorship, using a wide range of published and unpublished sources. Futurist politics are presented within the wider context of developments in Italy and Europe, and Ialongo further highlights how Marinetti’s political choices influenced the art of his movement.

Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.

Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.

In this monograph, Gregory M. Pell provides a full-length study on the poetry of Davide Rondoni, one of Italy’s most active contemporary writers and thinkers. This book includes comparative studies of Jorie Graham, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, Patrizia Fazzi, and Mario Luzi. As the first book in English on Davide Rondoni’s poetry, this study explores how the Italian poet deals with art, and the places of art, in a way that transcends the notion of ekphrasis (or, verbal representation of pictorial art) to see poetry as the transcription of an experience with art, thus becoming a sort of anti-ekphrasis, or an atmospheric ekphrasis. The social and religious aspects of art take precedence over aesthetic concerns, without discounting them, in Rondoni’s unsentimental poetry, which takes the form of recitative theatrical monologues. Thus, art becomes more than simple visual representation or the subject of an art history catalogue. Instead, in certain poets, such as Rondoni, we experience life through art’s complete process: from the artist’s originary idea to the work’s execution to our interaction with it in the here and now.

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed focuses on Dacia Maraini’s narrative from about 1984 to 2004 and makes substantive use of her interviews and essays. While acknowledging the importance and ongoing validity of feminist scholarship of Maraini’s work, this book seeks to take scholarship on Maraini beyond feminist readings by identifying a critical framework that cuts across gender and genre and thereby invites alternative readings. Using a method of close textual analysis, the author includes studies of men, children, animals, and imaginary characters in Maraini’s narrative, analyzes language, character, motifs, and symbols, and considers some of Maraini’s work in light of declining postmodern and emerging posthuman critical social theory. This critical framework identifies the paradigm of reconstruction as narrative center, both strategy and theme, of many of Maraini’s works from this twenty-year-period and beyond. Reconstruction here signifies the strategies by which Maraini’s deep investment in survival, which has its roots in the life threatening conditions she experienced as a small child in a WWII Japanese concentration camp, is enacted in a narrative re-building and re-constructing of personal memory, of various personal, social and political histories, of motherhood and maternal discourses, of crime stories, of postmodern fragmentation, and even of the process of erasure itself. Maraini’s narrative is deeply attentive to the mechanisms that threaten survival of the body (and not just the woman’s body); psychological and aesthetic survival; the survival in the Italian canon of a woman author’s work, memory and legacy after her death; the survival of a drug-addicted and self-destructive younger generation; and by extension, collective and ecological survival. Never marked by nihilism or despair, Maraini’s narratives offer the ethos of reconstruction as a variation on the “begin again” that marks the end of many of her novels and, as we can see in Colomba, her own aesthetic process of renewal and regeneration. This book focuses primarily on Il treno per Helsinki (1984), Isolina (1985), some of her short stories for children, La nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre (2001), Buio (Strega Literary Prize, 1999), and Colomba (2004).

Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I dialogues with the variety of texts recently published to commemorate the Great War. It explores Italian socialist pacifism, the role of women during the conflict and a dominant cultural movement, Futurism, whose leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, glorified war and enlisted in the fight. Other soldiers created documents about the war that differ from the heroic and virile endeavor that Marinetti placed at the center of his works on war. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I pays attention to the representations of the soldiers through an analysis of their letters, dominated by descriptions of the terrible hunger they suffered. In contrast, popular film absorbed the cultural lessons in Marinetti's writings and represented soldiers as modernist heroes in comedies and dramas. However, film did not shy away from representing cowards who could only be baffoons and fools in propaganda films. In another medium, the concern was to publish texts that would serve the fighting soldier and inform readers about ideological and historical motivations for the conflict. The publishing industry supported national propaganda efforts. Only socialism could endanger anti-war publication, but after its initial opposition to the conflict, socialists occupied a neutral position. Italian socialism still remained the only European socialist party that did not renege its pacifism in order to embrace nationalism and the war, but it was also not in favor of actions that would sabotage in the Italian war industry. ltalian socialism is only one feature of Italian culture that was dramatically changed during the war. WWI impacted every aspect of Italian and of European cultures. For instance, as an essay in Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I explores, the war industry needed workers. The solution was to bring Chinese men France to contribute in the war effort. After the war, they moved to other countries and in Milan, Italy, they founded one of the oldest Chinatowns in Europe, dramatically changing the human landscape of Italy as they later moved to other Italian cities. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I supplies essential research articles to the construction of an inclusive portrayal of WWI and Italian culture by deepening our understanding of the transformative role it played in 20th century Italy and Europe.

Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I dialogues with the variety of texts recently published to commemorate the Great War. It explores Italian socialist pacifism, the role of women during the conflict and a dominant cultural movement, Futurism, whose leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, glorified war and enlisted in the fight. Other soldiers created documents about the war that differ from the heroic and virile endeavor that Marinetti placed at the center of his works on war. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I pays attention to the representations of the soldiers through an analysis of their letters, dominated by descriptions of the terrible hunger they suffered. In contrast, popular film absorbed the cultural lessons in Marinetti's writings and represented soldiers as modernist heroes in comedies and dramas. However, film did not shy away from representing cowards who could only be baffoons and fools in propaganda films. In another medium, the concern was to publish texts that would serve the fighting soldier and inform readers about ideological and historical motivations for the conflict. The publishing industry supported national propaganda efforts. Only socialism could endanger anti-war publication, but after its initial opposition to the conflict, socialists occupied a neutral position. Italian socialism still remained the only European socialist party that did not renege its pacifism in order to embrace nationalism and the war, but it was also not in favor of actions that would sabotage in the Italian war industry. ltalian socialism is only one feature of Italian culture that was dramatically changed during the war. WWI impacted every aspect of Italian and of European cultures. For instance, as an essay in Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I explores, the war industry needed workers. The solution was to bring Chinese men France to contribute in the war effort. After the war, they moved to other countries and in Milan, Italy, they founded one of the oldest Chinatowns in Europe, dramatically changing the human landscape of Italy as they later moved to other Italian cities. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I supplies essential research articles to the construction of an inclusive portrayal of WWI and Italian culture by deepening our understanding of the transformative role it played in 20th century Italy and Europe.

John Fante's work has consistently delved into profound themes, including the elusive American Dream, the delicate psychology of immigrants, and the intricate dynamics of Italian American families. This study reveals the ingenious manner in which Fante employs humor and satire as powerful rhetorical devices to breathe life into his Italian, Italian American, and American characters. Drawing inspiration from literary giants such as Luigi Pirandello and René Girard, the author embarks on a fascinating journey into Fante's rich literary landscape.When We Were Bandini also offers an engaging comparison between Fante's works and those of other authors like Cervantes, Hamsun, Bukowski, and even his own son, Dan Fante. This comparative analysis sheds light on the possible reasons behind Fante's unique status: he is a cult writer in Europe, relatively underappreciated in his home country, the United States.Challenging the conventional notions of Fante as a strictly autobiographical and confessional writer, the author urges readers to look beyond the surface and unravel the layers of his literary genius.

Who created the most famous Southeast Asian hero during the heyday of imperialism and colonialism? Who inaugurated with The Mysteries of the Black Jungle over a century long link uniting the Italian imaginary to the Indian one? Who envisioned the most celebrated interracial love stories of world literature, those between Sandokan, leader of the Tigers of Mompracem, and Marianna, the Pearl of Labuan, between Tremal-Naik, the Bengali snake catcher, and Ada, the Virgin of Kali’s temple at the time of the British Raj? Who defined the Caribbean as a symbolic trope of plunder and rebellion through the melancholic viewpoint of the Black Corsair and the forsaken love for his enemy’s daughter? Who created Yanez de Gomera, a most famous Portuguese hero, and the imperfect voice of white anti-colonialism?It was Italy’s great adventure novelist, Emilio Salgari (Verona, 1862 – Turin, 1911). From the Mahdi’s revolt in Sudan to the African slave trade, from the Philippine insurgency to the Mediterranean at war between Turks and Christians, and to ancient Egypt, Salgari’s breath-taking plots, together with his indigenous heroes and heroines in Vietnam, Thailand, Venezuela, Arctic Canada, the American Far West, the Chinese diaspora, deeply challenge canonical colonialist representations by contemporary Victorian authors like Conrad, Kipling, and Forster.

Starting in the early 1900s, male and female elementary schoolteachers in Italy gained increasing awareness of the role of social workers in the fight against illiteracy and in creating civic consciousness based on widespread, qualified education. In 1900, the Unione Magistrale (the Teachers Association) was founded; in 1919, the Sindacato Magistrale (the Italian Teachers Union, a member of the General Confederation of Labor) was created.Inevitably, some of these teachers, firmly convinced of their duty, opposed fascism which, from the moment it originated, aimed at creating obedient boys who were loyal to fascist doctrine and trained in warfare, and girls ready to become the mothers and wives of soldiers. These teachers resisted in the most diverse ways. Some were forced to abandon teaching, a number of them were killed by fascist violence, but others were able to navigate the restrictions imposed on them by the regime.In Teaching Freedom, the author reconstructs twelve biographies of these teachers, based on unpublished material and archive documents, in a form of research suspended between history and pedagogy. The chronological order of the stories retraces the way fascism progressively seized power, suffocating all forms of freedom of expression. Moreover, the study of newly-found documents and various testimonies show the teachers' ceaseless invention of alternative teaching strategies.

This volume examines the significance of place in contemporary Italian American literature from an ecocritical perspective. It fills a gap in the theoretical discourse on Italian American culture, whose concerns about environmental justice have been mostly overlooked. From mid-twentieth-century poets such as John Ciardi and Diane di Prima to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction writers such as Carole Maso and Salvatore Scibona, the study combines Italian American literary criticism with the spatial turn that, over the last decades, has asserted the interpretive significance of place and the environment in literary texts. Questioning the prejudice that sees Italian American culture as detached from ecological issues, these works show that such diasporic heritage has helped forge different modes of relationship and new forms of expression in contact with the “American” land. Their relevance lies not so much in defining or redefining Italian American ethnicity but in forging ideas and futures beyond their immediate framework and subject matter. By focusing on the intersection of gender and ethnicity with local and transnational spaces and aesthetic practices, Italian American Poetics of Place contributes to the growing field of inquiry that explores the resources of the literary in laying the basis for more dialogic and inclusive forms of awareness and community with both the human and other-than-human.

Drawing on novel archival evidence that sheds light on Anglo-Italian diplomatic relations and the French-Italian contest for power in the Adriatic, this book recounts the story of decadent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume. Determining the fate of this Italian enclave in coastal Croatia had proved impossible at the Paris Peace Conference. In September 1919, D’Annunzio and his ‘legionnaires’ installed themselves in Fiume in a bid to embarrass Italy into declaring its annexation. In the months that followed, the poet did his best to fashion Fiume into his ideal political community, culminating in the proclamation of a Constitution known as the Carnaro Charter. The Charter was as visionary as it was short-lived: having reached an agreement with Yugoslavia on the status of Fiume, Italy put an end to the poet’s socio-political experiment in December 1920. In addition to offering the most comprehensive and detailed analysis to date of the Carnaro Charter, the book shows what has eluded all historians of D’Annunzio’s Fiume: that the sublimation and discursive circulation of same-sex desire was integral to shaping and sustaining the political and legal order of the occupation, and that D’Annunzio’s love-lore in Fiume was continuous with broader homoerotic preoccupations in his oeuvre.

Central to Grazia Deledda’s narrative worlds are the relationships between her characters and the vast landscapes in which they move and act. The writer translates and represents her characters, her characters’ emotions, and her natural and urban landscapes with a vocabulary that is often related to the visual arts. However, although her descriptions contain the gradations of Modernist painting, beginning with Impressionism, no book-length study, and with diverse perspectives, has thus far investigated Deledda’s relationship with the visual arts and the resulting painterly aesthetic of her multicolored narratives. In this sense, Grazia Deledda’s Painterly Aesthetic provides an articulated literary panorama of Deledda’s novels and short stories through a discourse that is situated between literature and pictorial art. Inspired by these two cardinal points, the analyses are undertaken by contributors who have a profound awareness of an epochal change and work in different disciplines. One year from the centenary of her receipt of the Nobel Prize, the contributors investigate the connections, consonances, and differences between Grazia Deledda’s oeuvre and other works inside this panorama to verify a possible unity of purpose. At the same time, they seek to ascertain whether these connections can corroborate and exalt the choices that the Sardinian writer made to free herself from the constraints of a hostile environment.

Using the works of prominent Italian authors of both fiction and nonfiction, this book challenges the established critical accounts of hybrid narratives and examines the shared influence in terms of style, content, and ambition.Focused on recent (1980s-present) historical novels by Umberto Eco and Wu Ming (a collective of Italian writers), as well as on the historiographic essays by Carlo Ginzburg, the book covers three globally influential cases that prove to be seminal for the transdisciplinary understanding of key words such as ‘fiction’, ‘history’, and ‘narrative’. However differently, these authors write extensively about history, and the methods of tracking and transcribing that history. Be it fiction or non-fiction, their works share a formal tendency to challenge the established boundaries of the genres they belong to, as well as influence fields and writings across borders. The main argument is that blurring the boundaries between fictional and historical writing raises problematic ethical and political questions, especially in a world where facts and reality are constantly manipulated. Amongst other topics, the book analyses how Eco’s novels provide an oblique commentary on his own theory, how Eco and Ginzburg’s works can be compared, how Ginzburg’s essays influence contemporary literature and fiction on a transnational scale, and how Wu Ming inherit their legacy while devising their own, deeply politicized way of writing about history.

A landmark and critical edition presenting the English translations of Cesare Pavese’s film treatments for the first time along with complete correspondences with Hollywood actresses the Dowling Sisters and unearthed interviews.Offering a comprehensive collection of Cesare Pavese’s film treatments, this volume includes the previously unpublished English translation of The Serpent and the Dove, translated by Pavese himself in collaboration with Doris Dowling. The full correspondence provides insight into the Italian writer’s creative development in the cinematic medium, his personal conflicts, and his relationships with both sisters.Two rare interviews enrich the volume, illuminating Pavese as both a cultural figure and private individual, while deepening our understanding of Doris Dowling’s creative partnership and friendship with him. With detailed editorial notes and appendices – including the original Italian film treatments by Pavese for the two sisters – this volume is an indispensable resource for scholars of Pavese, translation studies, post-World War II Italian cinema, and cross-cultural dialogue. Additionally, it captures a moment in Pavese’s linguistic development, showcasing one of his final creative engagements with the English language.

In the first section of this volume, the core issues involved in talking about concepts of sexual difference, especially within Italian feminism, are presented. These issues are tied to theories and practices that can be found in French feminism, but they are shaped by the specific Italian and sociohistorical context. The essays in the second section explore many elements of the theoretical debate on difference, and its role in contemporary feminist thought and elsewhere.