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• Staying or leaving? On the non-stereotypical representations of Naples

  36-53

  Antonio Sciacovelli

  Views:

  545

  The literary image of Naples, “Capital of the South”, that sees periodic alternations of crisis and splendour in the arts, is certainly dichotomous: on the one hand the locus amoenus in which inventiveness flourishes and different cultural traditions intersect and live together, on the other the symbolic place of immense social disparities, an outbreak of epidemics and the cradle of a lax and reactionary mentality. The image used by Benedetto Croce to define the city, “a paradise inhabited by devils” dates back to the Middle Ages, and is denied from time to time by the authors who intend to build a positive myth of Napoletanità, but already in the early 20th century, and then especially in the period from 1943 (to the present day), there are increasingly critical accents towards this image, which result - more than in hatred or in contempt for the city and its inhabitants - in a tendency to move away from Naples, to abandon a contradictory reality that does not solve its problems, but like a virgin forest grows back destroying every element of progress. The writers examined in the article are: Carlo Bernari, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Fabrizia Ramondino, Ermanno Rea, Giuseppe Montesano, Elena Ferrante.

• Umberto Eco and The Apocalypse

  146-159

  Giuseppe Palazzolo

  Views:

  242

  The Apocalypse is a mythologema that has provided symbolic forms and narrative structures to contemporary literature: Karl Löwith, Frank Kermode, Ernst Bloch are just some of the scholars who have focused on the endurance and productivity of the apocalyptic paradigm in the secular age. Umberto Eco has entertained a long dealing with the Apocalypse, ever since the publication of Apocalypse Postponed. In his essays and novels, the Apocalypse appears as a dispositive of revelation, but also of concealment and falsification (The Name of the Rose), and as a transmedia model of translation and reuse (Beato di Liebana, Enrico Baj, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana).

• “I can't write English, not even Italian... give me any 'giobba'": the Italian emigrants in the theater of Nino Randazzo

  56-68

  Marzia Caria

  Views:

  324

  The paper examines the cultural, social and linguistic representation of Italians emigrated to Australia in the writing for the theatre of Nino Randazzo, a playwright of Aeolian origin, who emigrated to Melbourne in 1952, considered one of the most important and prolific authors in the context of the so-called “letteratura dell’emigrazione”, and more particularly the Italian-Australian literature in italian language. Of particular interest is the theme of cultural and social prejudices of Anglo-Australians towards people of Italian origin, labelled as ignorant, impossible to acculturate and to discipline, largely linked to criminal organizations, which mostly speak a mixed variety of Italian and English. Thus, in particular, in the comedy Il Sindaco d’Australia (1981), in which the stereotypical (but hilarious) image of the emigrant from the south of Italy, impulsive and ambitious, characterized on a linguistic level by the use of Italian-Australian terms; and in the comedy Victoria Market (1982), conceived by Randazzo as a protest against the tendency on the part of Anglo-Australians to build stereotypes towards Italian-Australians, in this case the one that Italian equals mafioso. Randazzo’s theatre, however, manages to distinguish itself from the works of the majority of first-generation Italian-Australian playwrights for its attempt to demystify such prejudices and clichés in an enjoyable way. It is in the choice of a popular tone of comedy, also achieved through the skilful mixing of more traditional Italian forms with Italian-Australian terms typical of the years in which the narrated events are set, that the specific aspects in this author lay.

• «In piedi, guardando dal finestrino». Memoria, parola, corpo nell’immaginario ferroviario di Leonardo Sciascia

  73-84

  Andrea Schembari

  Views:

  170

  A disruptive and recurring image in Italian novels and novellas, starting from the mid-nineteenth century, the train assumes, in the work of Leonardo Sciascia, a peculiar function, not simply thematic. Linked to the indelible memory of the first journey of his childhood, the train soon becomes, for the writer from Racalmuto, a topos to resort to for the representation of some of the literary motifs dearest to him: the exercise of memory, the power of the word, the joy of bodies. Through the textual findings considered most significant, the contribution intends to offer a representative exemplification of the arguments proposed.