Browsing by Subject "Italian literature"
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Item Imaginative appropriation : confronting otherness through the female body in the works of Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino(2011-05) Abell, Lynn Valerie; Raffa, Guy P.; Bini, DanielaThis report examines the ways in which Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino use images of the foreign woman as other. Specifically, both authors inscribe foreign territories onto the bodies of their female characters in order to confront complex cultural differences. Italy is the site of this gendered inscription in Pavese’s Il carcere, while various real and imagined foreign lands are made female in Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and Le città invisibili. In Pavese’s novella, the satyr-like Concia and the overly maternal Elena are embodiments of Southern and Northern Italy, respectively, and the failure of the protagonist to form a relationship with either woman represents his failure to assimilate into the mezzogiorno and his simultaneous rejection of northern society. In Calvino’s two works, female characters and attributes are consciously used to embody various foreign countries so that the protagonists may grasp the unknown, both physically and psychologically. By linking woman and terrain, Pavese and Calvino attempt to dominate distant lands, which are otherwise enigmatic and incomprehensible, in the typical Orientalist fashion.Item Leprosy and social exclusion in Italo Calvino’s Il visconte dimezzato and Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa(2011-05) Marcin, Sarah Elizabeth; Raffa, Guy P.; Biow, DouglasThe leper is the ultimate symbol of the social outcast. Plagued by connotations of not just contagion but of sinfulness and moral depravity, lepers have long been stigmatized and excluded from society. The Hebrew Bible declared them to be unclean, and their influence was believed to be wholly corrupting, as if their physical deformities were an external sign of their defiled souls. In the Middle Ages, those diagnosed with leprosy were made to undergo a particularly severe ritual that closely resembled the office of the dead, making them effectively dead to the world. They were then isolated from the healthy population in leprosariums, and their movements and behaviors were strictly controlled. However, their exclusion can be seen as serving a larger purpose than just the protection of normal society from infection in that it can be used by those in power as a mechanism of social control. The imputation of danger to undesirable persons of a given community ensures that they will be duly feared and ostracized. It is within this context that Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco make use of the idea of the leper as a social outlier in their novels, Il visconte dimezzato and Il nome della rosa, as a way to critique certain processes of exclusion, namely the construction and stigmatization of a social “other” as a means of maintaining social order. This report draws on the historical and literary treatments of the leper to discuss the ways in which Calvino and Eco successfully employ the image of the leper to represent the machinery of exclusion and to shed light on the continued marginalization of outcast groups down to the present day.Item So this is a man : renegotiating Italian masculinity through liminality(2011-05) Mabrey, Beatrice Giuseppina; Bini, Daniela, 1945-; Bonifazio, PaolaIn Italy, the period directly following World War II was marked by confusion and turbulence as the people struggled to reconstruct both the ideological and physical infrastructure of the nation. While much study has been dedicated to the evolution of femininity and the figure of the woman in this particular period, comparatively little has been written on the refashioning of masculinity in the texts produced in the period between 1940 and 1955. After the fall of the Fascist Regime, Italian masculinity undergoes a drastic transformation as the generation of young men born and raised under the tutelage of Mussolini’s reign attempt to separate themselves from the now-tainted codes of conduct governing male behavior. This report analyzes the renegotiation of Italian masculinity in G. Silvano Spinetti’s non-fictional account Difesa di una generazione (scritti e appunti), Italo Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Beppe Fenoglio’s short story “Gli inizi del partigiano Raoul” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita. These works, written and published in the postwar period, manipulate the vi marginality and privation experienced by the Italian population during the war and postwar period into a liminal state brimming with revolutionary potentiality. The protagonists of these texts (both fictional and non-fictional), isolated from the larger social context and deprived of individual identity, property and privilege, circumvent their polluted patriarchal lines in favor of an alternative ideological patriarchy. While Spinetti, Calvino and Fenoglio’s works advance their liminal narratives as a means of creating an emblematic Italian man capable of rejoining the generative discourse, Pasolini’s text renounces such a progressive view. In Ragazzi di vita, the only possibility for a masculine identity free of Fascism resides in a maintaining a perennial liminality.