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• The novel Libertà by Verga and the demythologization of Risorgimento rhetoric

  30-38

  Mario Cimini

  Views:

  345

  Giovanni 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.

• Sardinia of linguists and Sardinia for tourists: discursive consonances and dissonances at the beginning of the twentieth century

  10-29

  Diego Stefanelli

  Views:

  208

  The aim of this contribution is to tackle an already highly researched subject by adopting a fairly unprecedented perspective. I would like to concentrate on the representation of Sardinia in one of the most important historical moments for the construction of the image of the island in a modern perspective: the first decades of the twentieth century. I will try to make two apparently distant text types interact: tourist guides and travel reports written by linguists. I will focus on two prototype examples: on one hand the Reisebilder aus Sardinien by Max Leopold Wagner; on the other, the Touring Club Guide dedicated to Sardinia, written by Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli. My intent is to trace the similarities and differences of the two textual typologies in presenting a region at the time universally imagined (and narrated) as different, atypical and in any case "peculiar". In doing so, I will also try to highlight continuity and discontinuity with respect to the nineteenth-century representative methods.

• Max Gobbo and the fantasy rewrite of a Renaissance period

  122-130

  Franco Zangrilli

  Views:

  136

  The paper examines thè characteristics of Max Gobbo’s writing in his fantasy novel Alasia - The Iron Maiden. The novel is set in a dystopian XVI century Italy infested by demons, vampires and other strange creatures. The novel unfolds in a clear and flowing prose, supported by a simple and effective writing, expressing thè complexity of a world of darkness, in thè hands of devils. It is full of suspense, of comings and goings, of mythical evocations, as of dramatic moments and a humorous multitone irony.

• «Occasioni» and «moments of being»: Montale's modernism

  21-37

  Adele Bardazzi

  Views:

  350

  This paper examines Montale’s position within the critical category of ‘modernism’ not only within the Italian context, but also within the European one. To this end, it aims to trace those presences at a textual level that suggest an affinity between Montale’s ‘occasions’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘moments of being’: some tiny and rare ‘disguidi del possibile’ that allow to see beyond the cotton wool of everyday life.

• The Last Mother: From Enrico Pau’s L’accabadora (2015) to Valeria Golino’s Miele (2013)

  85-95

  Bernadette Luciano

  Views:

  281

  L'accabadora, is a Sardinian term deriving from the Spanish word 'acabar' which means to finish or complete. It refers to a female figure in Sardinian popular tradition, 'the last mother', an angel of mercy who assists the terminally ill in leaving the world. In this paper I explore variations of this female figure in two contemporary films. Enrico Pau's film L'accabadora set in pre- and World War II Sardinia, revolves around a protagonist (Annetta) who is a direct descendant of this Sardinian tradition. The second film, Valerio Golino's Miele, proposes what might be considered a contemporary variant of the Sardinian folk figure. While the tabu subject of euthanasia certainly forms the backdrop to the films, what is foregrounded is the isolation and alienation of the female protagonists who carry out care-giving roles tied to death. Torn between the conviction that the tasks they perform as “last mothers” console or provide final moments of serenity to the dying and an intangible discomfort with their execution of the task, they remain seemingly haunted by their roles, exhibiting an unease that arises from societal discomfort with administering death and a profession that requires that they direct their care to the dying rather than to the living. The representation of the films’ protagonists, their framing and the construction of the journeys they undertake, turn both films into narratives of self-discovery, motivated by encounters with others and otherness, and visually configured by the physical mobility across transformed geo-political landscapes that is central to the films.