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Gramsci and The South as a Space of Emancipation
39-55Views:166The paper will actively engage with the contradictions found in Gramsci in an attempt to tease out the elements of emancipation found in his thought, as well as a sub-culture of opposition against Western notions of rationality. Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the Italian South and of the Southern Italian peasantry in relation to the formation of a radical politics of emancipation constitutes one of the most salient features of his critique of orthodox Marxism. I argue that for the Italian Marxist theorist, the liberation of the Italian peasantry is not only a project of social, economic and political emancipation. Rather, the peasantry’s emancipation is also seen as a project of cultural liberation, a liberation from the dominant strands of rationalist and positivist Enlightenment thought, which Gramsci saw as encapsulated in Crocean philosophy. For Gramsci, the task of the organic intellectuals is to create an ideational sphere in which the colonized South can potentially articulate and celebrate a culture that has historically been deemed backward and primitive. However, Gramsci’s analyses of the South also contain historicist encrustations, which create a dialectical tension in his theory of politico-cultural emancipation that has never really been solved. I argue that the positivist and progressionist encrustations of Gramsci’s program for the emancipation of the South is an instantiation of a wider, Western, 19th and 20th century intellectual tradition which conflates “progress” as such with emancipation, a tradition that goes beyond the Italian and European context, and that is even paralleled by the model for black emancipation in the American South put forth by a figure as seemingly divergent as, say, W.E. B. Du Bois in the The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
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From Italy to the USA: Cleveland Italians, Their Heritage and Traditions
110-118Views:421One would be hard-pressed to deny the influence Italians have had on the United States of America and on the very fabric of American cultural life. Not only are metropolises like New York City and Chicago with their populations in the millions home to significant Italian communities and neighborhoods but so are cities with several hundred thousand inhabitants like Boston, Baltimore, Syracuse, St. Louis, or Cleveland. The present paper intends to focus on Italians in Cleveland, Ohio, that undoubtedly constitute an organic and significant part of the city’s population. It aims to offer an insight into the formation of the Italian neighborhoods, from the first waves of Italian immigrants in the 19th century, and the opportunities of second-, third-, or nth-generation Italians to tend to their common Italian roots as well as to preserve their customs and traditions from the old country through a wide array of Italian cultural events, the city’s Italian community hubs and memorial sites, or the local Italian-American media
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“I can't write English, not even Italian... give me any 'giobba'": the Italian emigrants in the theater of Nino Randazzo
56-68Views:173The 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.
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Success and Translation of Italian Literature in Hungary
20-35Views:249Literary criticism, both in Hungary and in Italy, has paid great attention to the fortune and irradiation of Italian literature in Hungary, just think of the thirteen volumes, the result of the scientific collaboration of the Giorgi Cini Foundation of Venice and of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The article aims to offer a broad overview of the success of the Italian literature in Hungary, especially through translations. The article reviews the various historical periods and literary movements that characterized the literary contacts between the two countries. Until the second half of the eighteenth century, the irradiation of Italian literature was first of all manifested in the use of literary models and poetic formulas in the works of the major authors of Hungarian literature. The 19th century saw instead the season of translation of the great classics of the first Italian literature (Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio) translated again in the twentieth century, thanks also to the commitment of the Magyar Italianists. Finally, the article focuses on the present situation, describing the translations of contemporary authors
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The link between space and the individual in Petrarch and Leopardi
38-45Views:190The interdisciplinary approach in history makes it possible to widen researchers’ perspectives. Italian literature is one medium in which we can reflect the relationship between geography, identity and imagination. John Agnew’s idea that ‘Place is a meaningful site that combines location, locale and sense of place’ conveys the main aspect of a ‘meaningful location’ and gives us a framework within which we can rethink space and place through Italian literature.1 In my research, I intend to examine the connections between identity and landscape, how experiences form the view of the environment through Giacomo Leopardi’s Infinity (1819) and Francis Petrarch’s letter of 26, April, 1336 in which he describes a vision about his ascent up Mount Ventoux. My main aim is to present how the impressiveness of nature becomes visible through the experiences of Leopardi and Petrarch, which is part of their existence. The mountain and the sea are key elements of these texts. The two places chosen and described by the poets have different significance: while Petrarch considered that the Mount Ventoux is the place of spiritual fulfilment, for Leopardi the hill of Recanati meant an isolated place where he could let his imagination roam free. All in all, this research offers new perspective to discover relationship between Italian literature and other disciplines in order to answer other, complex theoretical questions. I examined the topic from an interdisciplinary view to highlight the ways in which history, geography and literature can be linked.
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Notes on László Gáldi's (Italian) stylistics
108-121Views:119The paper deals with László Gáldi’s Introduction to Italian Stylistics (1971), placing it in the coeval context of the methodological discussions between stylistics and structuralism in the 60s and 70s, as well as in the history of the Italian stylistics in the 20th century.
It investigates the theoretical sources of Gáldi’s book, which was influenced by different reference points: the European Romance philology, the Russian literary theory (mainly Viktor Žirmunskij’s approach to stylistics) and the Rumanian aesthetics and literary criticism.
Moreover, it shows the connection between the Introduction and Gáldi’s previous works, particularly the important book on the poetical style of Mihai Eminescu (1964), maybe Gáldi’s most relevant stylistic study, and other significant works of the same period (an interesting stylistic analysis of Musset’ Stances and a historical study of Rumanian versification).
In doing so, it shows the rich methodological and theoretical sources of Gáldi’s Introduction and the peculiar position of the Hungarian scholar in the history of European stylistics.
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Ondina and the ondine: Representation issues (verbal and iconographic) of the sporty woman in fascist Italy (ca. 1933)
140-160Views:559In late 1933, L'Osservatore Romano fuelled an argument against Il Littoriale, mouthpiece of the Fascist sport policy, about women’s sport: the Vatican Italian-speaking newspaper was against the public women’s athletic meetings, and the “immoral” shorts dressed by the young Italian athletes, such as Ondina Valla, going-to-be the first Italian woman to win an Olympic gold medal (1936, Berlin). Which was the situation of Italian female sports, at that time? Which was the influence of new women models coming from US? What was considered “immoral” by conservative people in 1933 Italy watching a women’s athletic or swimming meeting? How Hollywood stars could help Ondina and her mates on the road of female emancipation? These are the questions this essay is going to answer, helped by a lot of historical images, useful to reconstruct a whole collective imagination.
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Translate or not, foreign words
8-37Views:98In the early twentieth century, Gabriele D’Annunzio successfully proposed tramezzino instead of the English sandwich. Equally successful are some proposals formulated by Bruno Migliorini in the 1930s: autista and regista for the French chauffeur and régisseur. However, the original coinages of Arrigo Castellani in 1987 fail to take root: fubbia for smog, guardabimbi for babysitter, intredima for weekend, velopattino for windsurf, and vendistica for marketing. At the beginning of the 2000s, the volume by Giovanardi, Gualdo, and Coco Italian – English 1-1 reopened the debate among scholars. In 2015 the petition “Dillo in italiano”, launched by Annamaria Testa, achieved enormous success and demonstrated the intolerance of a large part of public opinion towards the massive influx of anglicisms. Following the petition, the Accademia della Crusca established the Incipit Group, a group of experts responsible for monitoring the entry of new anglicisms and suggesting possible Italian alternatives. In 2017, the Nuovo Devoto-Oli dictionary included in its lemmary the section Per dirlo in italiano, containing over 200 cards, that trace a brief history of as many English words or phrases that have penetrated Italian, explaining their meaning and context of use and suggesting a possible Italian equivalent. Il Nuovo Devoto-Oli broadly welcomes the most common anglicisms, helping those who do not know their precise meaning; but at the same time it has no reluctance to propose an Italian alternative, in the profound belief that such an approach is helpful to the reader and makes a positive contribution to the Italian language itself.
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The waves of languages between emigration and immigration: the Italian case
160-176Views:42The contribution fits within the existing research on the state of health of Italian abroad. It proposes the preliminary results on the linguistic imagination of a qualitative and quantitative research carried out in Toronto in 2022 that involved 100 informants of Italian origin belonging to different migratory generations. The results of the research highlight the pluralistic value of the linguistic imagination of the informants in which Italian strongly competes with other languages within a space of communicative possibilities. They refer to the traditional Italian language space both in Italy, with dialects, and abroad, with Italiese in the Canadian research context.
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The exaltation of Italian national identity in the discourse of Matteo Renzi
74-95Views:143Nations are one of the most well-established constructs in our society, and they represent a very attractive benchmark for personal and social identification. Political speeches, as well as, for example, media discourse and popular culture, constantly reiterate myth, culture and history of nations in order to reaffirm and preserve their positive image, and this tendency doesn’t seem to be weakened by some contemporary events like globalization and the reinforcement of transnational systems.
As a proof of this trend, the present work proposes an in-depth analysis of the speech held by the then Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the European Parliament on the occasion of the inauguration of the Italian semester of presidency on July 2, 2014, aiming to demonstrate that also supranational contexts are exploited to reiterate national identity and priorities.
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On the reduplication of the direct object and the indirect object clitics in Italian and Romanian
95-107Views:286The article consists in a contrastive presentation of the functions of clitic pronouns in the Accusative and Dative in Italian and in Romanian. It basically deals with clitic doubling, i.e. the double occurrence of the direct object complement and the indirect object complement. The clitic doubling of the direct object complement and the indirect object complement is an important issue with teachers of Italian to Romanian students and with teachers of Romanian to Italian students. All occurrences should get equal attention: those when clitic doubling is obligatory, when it is optional or when it is blocked
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Linguistic and cultural contacts between the two shores of the Adriatic. The Italian of Albanian writers
69-86Views:212Migrant literature is a powerful medium of expression which offers a great variety of interpretation and a great source of inspiration for scholars to investigate the different aspects of the life and those of the society. Finding themselves in-between, migrant authors have the opportunity to live (in) two or more languages and cultures bringing them together, changing and shaping them. It is precisely here where linguistic contact occurs and where different strategies take place becoming an interesting part of a linguistic and literary research. This article investigates the contact between Albanian and Italian language through the analysis of some of the works of Ornela Vorpsi, Artur Spanjolli, Ron Kubati and Anilda Ibrahimi. Taking into consideration the fact that these authors has decided to use Italian as their language of expression, this investigation offers some considerations of what this means to them and the impact on both languages. Considering the fact that these writers transfer in their texts not only important aspects of the culture but also some features of the Albanian language, it is interesting to see the way in which transference takes place and what happens to the text when two different and distant languages such as Albanian and Italian meet.
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The novel Libertà by Verga and the demythologization of Risorgimento rhetoric
30-38Views:305Giovanni Verga’s tale Libertà has often been object of multifaceted – and frequently discording –critical interpretations, being the most common readings those of who saw in it a clear bias for the Italian Risorgimento (despite its violent development), and those who read it as an expression of resilient skepticism by the author towards the same historic event. Leonardo Sciascia, for example, uses the term “mystification” to describe Verga’s attitude towards Bronte’s insurrection, at a time – 1860 – when Garibaldi was carrying out his well-known Expedition of the Thousand.
The essay goes through all the noteworthy moments of this critical tradition, eventually deducting that it is by no means possible to draw firm assertions about Verga’s political ideology with the sole literary work as a point of reference. It argues instead that the author’s literary eminence must be seen in his outstanding ability to raise such a vast array of multilayered interpretations in the readers.
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In favor of the "great mutilated". Pro-Hungarian Italian publications and the Transylvanian question in the interwar period
54-63Views:201The essay describes how was approached the Transylvanian question during the interwars period in Italy, by a part of the Italian intelligentsia particularly pro Hungarian.
Authors and books reflect in somehow the pro Hungary position emerged during the Twenties in Italy, supported by the revisionism of Fascist government and improved during the Thirties. Several books and essays proposed to change the borders between Hungary and Romania, until the Italian-German negotiation and the Vienna Diktat of 1940 -
Italy between history and historiography. In search of national identity
62-76Views:25Starting from the fundamental studies of the historian Giuseppe Galasso and in the context of a close confrontation with the most experienced European historiography on these topics, the essay reconstructs some issues of the italian national identity through the different guidelines of the historiographical debate from the nineteenth century to today in a comparative and historical setting of european modernity. The centuries-old duration of the events related to the process of formation of the Italian identity, from the tradition of the Roman Empire to the Risorgimento and national independence, passing through the long domination of foreign powers, finally ended with the unification of the peninsula and the state-building in 1861. The most significant terms of the identity discourse are thus affirmed: territory and nation, whose underlying grounds, however, still struggle to find shared reasons for a unitary understanding of the national historical framework. In this respect the category of national identity starts its construction at the time of the Romantic ferments and remains intimately linked to those anthropological traits that would have provided to found in the mid-nineteenth century the community of Italians, finally rejoined under the frame of a new State. Not a single identity, therefore, but a multiplicity of references to the rich, centuries-old Italian cultural heritage, rethought in the light of a decisive season for national destinies.
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"Nordic Mists" on the Strait. The roots Northern Sicilian Romanticism
28-46Views:136The present essay aims at tracing the influences of Northern European Romanticism on the works of some Sicilian authors of the early Nineteenth century. The objective is to debunk the myth of a “lower” level of the Italian Romantic literature when compared to the Nordic literature, as it is not focused on the representation of the dark areas of the self, of supernatural, fantastic, and irrational themes that are present in reality. Some ballads by Felice Bisazza (1809- 1867) and Vincenzo Navarro (1800- 1867) are examined. In these works the narration of popular legends highlights a ghostly and horrifying universe, mirroring real situations, such as the violence of the noble class and patriarchy, or the injustice of social inequality. A play by Giuseppe La Farina (1815- 1863), entitled L’abbandono di un popolo (1845), will be then considered; the author portrays the anti-Spanish revolt of 1676 in Messina by focusing on the disturbing and underground forces that intersect with the revolutionary movements. Lastly, the production by Tommaso Cannizzaro (1838- 1921) as translator will be analyzed: the writer makes the fascinating world of Scandinavian mythology available to the Sicilian and Italian public, through the translations of some cantos by the medieval Edda antica.
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Pepe-Lamartine A literary controversy and a duel for the Risorgimento
64-79Views:245The essay reconstructs the reactions in Florence provoked by the publication of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Le dernier chant du pelerinage d’Harold (1825), inspired by Lord Byron’s unfinished work. The portrait of absolute decadence of contemporary Italy, with the definition of its inhabitants as “polvere d’uomini”, outraged the intellectuals, who would have liked to respond in Vieusseux’s Anthology, the most important periodical of the time. Pietro Giordani also intended to reply to Lamartine by publishing an essay about Operette Morali of the young (and still unknown) Giacomo Leopardi, portrayed as a great and living Italian. Censorship prevented this and other responses, but not a harsh reference contained in a booklet by the Neapolitan exile Gabriele Pepe. His pride wounded, Lamartine (at the time in charge of the French embassy in Florence) challenged Pepe to a duel.
Pepe’s victory sparked a great enthusiasm in Florence and throughout Italy. The theme of offended honor (the symbolic kind, of the Italian homeland and of its Sons) and avenged with a Proof of Value became a constant and was imitated many other times, in reality and in literature, feeding the imagination of several generations. -
Goliarda Sapienza atypical "militant journalist"
198-214Views:244This paper retraces Goliarda Sapienza’s no-fiction production between 1981 and 1988, considering in particular two feminist reviews of that period such as «Quotidiano Donna» and «Minerva: l’altra metà dell’informazione» on which she wrote articles about society, most of them never considered before today. Excluding the topic of the prison in her most important novels L’università di Rebibbia (1983) and Le certezze del dubbio (1987), the 80s could be defined as a moment of experience inside and beyond the Italian political context. Her reflections on Feminism authorize an interpretation of her “anomalous” way of thinking. At the end, the need to belong to a group will also open the following season.
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Hungarian prisoners of war in L'Aquila (1915-1919)
183-197Views:298The aim of this paper is to present the life of Hungarian prisoners of war in the internment camps of L’Aquila, a city situated in the central part of Italy, during and after the Great War. The POWs were first detained in the caserma Castello (Castle barracks), which is a 16th-century fortress where units of the Italian Army were stationing as well at that time. This made it possible for the POWs to lead a relatively idyllic life, whose various aspects are examined in the paper, such as nutrition, accommodation, clothing, correspondence, religious life, daily routine and employment. The sources used include archival documents, two memoirs of ex-POWs and newspaper articles. The comfortable life of the POWs was dimmed by the lack of their families and the Homeland, the idleness and certain infectious diseases. From the summer of 1916, the prisoners were employed in agricultural and industrial works outside the prison camp and were hence transferred from the fortress to barracks and unused churches. It is unknown when the last Hungarian POW left L’Aquila, and yet one of them is proven to have been there still in July 1919.
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Hungarian POWs in Padula during the First World War
Views:270The prisoner of war camp of Padula, Italy, operated during World War One in a large Carthusian Monastery and barracks, has been the topic of several Italian, Czech and Slovakian studies, as it was one of the greatest Italian camps and served as the centre for the creation of the Czechoslovak Legion. However, thousands of its detainees were Hungarian, whose life has barely been discussed. This paper aims to present the life of Hungarian POWs held in Padula. With the help of sources pertaining to them, such as letters and memoirs, it is possible to deeply examine four aspects: religion, health, complaints and employment. Another aim of the study is to make a list of the Hungarian prisoners.
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The evolution of referential and predicational strategies in parliamentary debates on Italian immigration laws
Views:150This article presents the evolution of the use of two words in parliamentary debates, immigrato and extracomunitario, frequently used in Italian language in reference to a foreign person entering the country with the aim of staying. The corpus consists of the transcripted texts of the parliamentary debates related to eight laws on immigration between 1986 and 2019, analysed with both quantitative and qualitative methods. Collocations and co-occurences with verbs and adjectives are taken into consideration, as well as figurative language.
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Secondary school adolescents: identity, languages and hereditary languages. The case of the provinces of Biella and Vercelli
87-109Views:216This contribution is part of the tradition of heritage languages and linguistic and cultural identity. It mainly deals with the perception of the identity of students of non-Italian nationality or origin and their relationship with the language and the culture of origin, and those of the host community. More and more children and young people of non-Italian origin are present in Italian schools: the integration model pursued in Italy wants to respect cultural differences and language is one of the key elements of this process. The research concerned two provinces of Eastern Piedmont: Biella and Vercelli. Using a sociolinguistic and sociologic approach, a study was carried out through the administration of questionnaires concerning language and identity, the motivation towards integration, the perception and attitude towards one’s own language/culture of origin, and the Italian language/culture. The emerging picture presents sometimes ambiguous attitudes that can be defined almost as a “suspension” between the desire for “Italianisation” and the preservation of one’s roots. The research poses stringent questions schools and society are called to address on the construction (or reconstruction) of their own identity.
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Danese Cataneo: «felicissimo spirito» in Tasso's documents. The Amor di Marfisa and the Gerusalemme liberata
8-20Views:166Published in 1562, Danese Cataneo’s epic-chivalric poem Amor di Marfisa had a wide but undervalued influence in Torquato Tasso’s masterpiece, Gerusalemme liberata. In this short essay I’ll provide the necessary evidences to demonstrate the existence of a deep connection between those two poems, and establish how it is organized. In particular, Cataneo’s literary legacy, which is underlined by a long list of quote, is strongly perceptible for what concerns the expression of feelings and thoughts. Amor di Marfisa, in this regard, gives to the young Tasso an unusual example of epic poem interested in characters’ psychology: aspects such as the self-analysis and the fragmentation of the ego are underrated in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and all the other Italian poems in ottava rima, whereas they are fundamental in Cataneo’s poem. More than just an example, it represents for Tasso a training ground and a mine, where he founds themes and lexicon that later will be used in Gerusalemme liberata.
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«In piedi, guardando dal finestrino». Memoria, parola, corpo nell’immaginario ferroviario di Leonardo Sciascia
73-84Views:46A 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.
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Simone Giusti, Natascia Tonelli: Comunità di pratiche letterarie. Il valore d’uso della letteratura e il suo insegnamento, Torino, Loescher, 2021
152-154Views:110Review for Simone Giusti, Natascia Tonelli: Comunità di pratiche letterarie. Il valore d’uso della letteratura e il suo insegnamento, Torino, Loescher, 2021