Browsing by Subject "Italian literature"

This dissertation investigates the ‘woman philosopher’ in the works of fourteenth-century Italian author, Giovanni Boccaccio. Across his literature, Latin and Italian alike, Boccaccio demonstrated an ongoing interest in both philosophy and women, concepts that were at the center of various intellectual debates in fourteenth-century Europe. I use variations and commentaries found in the manuscript tradition to historically ground my literary analysis, showing how scribes, translators, and early readers drew attention to the relationship between gender and knowledge in Boccaccio’s works. While women have not been absent from critical studies of Boccaccio, existing interpretations often limit their discussion to the feminism or misogyny of his works. Drawing on thinkers who problematize the relationship between women and knowledge, I shift the scholarly discourse away from feminism/misogyny. Each chapter situates one or more Boccaccian figures within textual and material networks and shows how they employ “philosophy,” exploring distinct but related definitions of the term as outlined by Boccaccio. I contend that Boccaccio, in his vernacular masterpiece the Decameron and other works, presents not just one model of a woman philosopher but several, a plurality that challenges our inherited notion of what constitutes philosophy, to whom it belongs, and how we encounter it in our lives.

My dissertation, Fascist Fiction: Inventing the Lesser Evil in Italy and Brazil, accounts for the resilience of fascism by tracing the rhetoric of the “lesser evil”—a discursive practice constitutive of fascism—through contemporary politics and literature in Italy and Brazil. By invoking the looming presence of a graver, more insidious threat the rhetoric of the lesser evil legitimizes fascist violence against dissidents and vulnerable populations. Through an analysis of texts by fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile and his Brazilian counterpart Miguel Reale, I reveal that the rhetoric of the lesser evil is a constitutive part of fascist discourse and that in Italy and Brazil this aspect of fascist doctrine met a favorable combination of subjective and objective conditions which has allowed it to thrive within democratic structures. Finally, I argue that when moral claims such as the lesser evil work to obfuscate the understanding of traumatic and violent events within the public sphere, novels––precisely because of their putative fictionality––can offer persuasive counter-histories that re-contextualize fascist crimes and sometimes provoke acts of reparative justice by the State. My dissertation advances scholarship on the transcultural reach of fascist ideology: it contributes to an understanding of fascism’s place within a broader tradition of right-wing thought that continues to shape present-day politics in Europe and the world, and enriches our perception of the powers of literary forms.

This dissertation investigates the relation between narrative forms, in both literature and cinema, and historical moments of deep crises of the social order: the interregnum between Fascism and First Republic in Italy; the decolonization process in Algeria seen from metropolitan France; and the worker and student struggles of the Sixties and the Seventies. The goal of my analysis is to show how a traumatic reality can fracture the ideological discourse dominant in a specific historical moment, leaving a mark on the structural and formal (rhetorical) construction of the work of art. My analysis begins with Naples immediately after World War II, by focusing on the works of Curzio Malaparte and Anna Maria Ortese. I then move to Paris in the aftermath of the Algerian War, to analyze the early films of Éric Rohmer, Chris Marker, Guy Debord, and Agnès Varda. My investigation proceeds by examining workers’ struggles in Northern Italy in Vogliamo tutto by Nanni Balestrini and ends in Bologna during the years of the ’77 revolt, where Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s early work dramatizes the communal existence of the student-worker movement. My method is based on a formal analysis of devices of disruption of the mimetic flow: anomalous use of pronouns, fragmentation, tension between verb tenses, and disconnections of the point of view. All are features through which the historical moment, I argue, is inscribed in the reading-viewing experience.

The interdependent phenomena of piracy, privateering, and slave trading have been endemic to the Mediterranean since antiquity. However, from the mid-sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth-century, these phenomena – known at the time as corso – grew exponentially, both in volume and impact. For more than a century, corso played a significant role in influencing the commercial and social exchanges in the Western Mediterranean, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals from all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Although both Europe and North Africa were deeply involved in corso, its image in early modern European culture became almost exclusively associated with the Muslim World and the North African region – known at the time as “Barbary” – giving shape to one of the “Great Fears” of pre-modern Europe. However, besides the anxiety, misapprehensions, and prejudice, corso’s geographical and cultural proximity also sparked significant intercultural and interreligious interactions. My primary corpus examines a collection of non-fictional and fictional texts, including captivity and redemption narratives, pamphlets, and news reports, as well as Romance epics, Baroque novels, novellas, dramas, and comedies. Through this study, I show how corso’s discursive representation ended up playing a crucial role in shaping European understanding of the Western Mediterranean at the time. My study contributes to enriching the predominant Euro-Ottoman orientation of early modern Mediterranean and Orientalist studies by considering the plurality of early modern Orientalisms.

Rewriting Dante explores Dante’s reception and the construction of his figure as an author in early lyric anthologies and modern editions. While Dante’s reception and his transformation into a cultural authority have traditionally been investigated from the point of view of the Commedia, I argue that these lyric anthologies provide a new perspective for understanding how the physical act of rewriting Dante’s poems in various combinations and with other texts has shaped what I call after Foucault the "Dante-function” and consecrated Dante as an author from the Middle Ages to Modernity. The study of these lyric anthologies widens our understanding of the process of Dante’s canonization as an author and, thus, as an authority (auctor & auctoritas), advancing our awareness of authors both as entities that generate power and that are generated by power. By addressing the creation of his authoritative figure from its inception, this study sheds light on cultural production, both as a collective, almost anonymous, process and as a result of the intervention of prominent (and less prominent) individuals. By concentrating on the part of Dante’s oeuvre that may be considered less authoritative, that is, his lyric poetry, my study emphasizes aspects of the “Dante-function” that go unobserved when focusing exclusively on the Commedia.

This research interweaves the critical discourses related to the emergence of the author in the Late Middle Ages (Minnis, Ascoli, Auctor et Auctoritas) and the birth of the songbook as a literary genre (Barolini, Bertolucci Pizzorusso, Galvez, Holmes), also touching on the twentieth-century alleged ‘death of the author’ (Barthes, Foucault, Benedetti). I concentrate on the crucial function of editors and anthologists as mediators in the canonization of Dante through the material construction of manuscripts and books. This question has led me to explore canon making as a structure of power and the interplay of cultural hegemonies in its creation. I approach this problem through the lens of material philology because it is a productive interdisciplinary methodology, as is seen in the work of historians of the book McKenzie and Petrucci, and literary critics Eisner, Storey, and Nichols.

This thesis explores the phenomenon of canonical revision by migrant and postcolonial writers in Spain and Italy. By recycling, rewriting or revising canonical works or film movements of the host countries in which they work, these writers call attention to Spain's and Italy's concerted attempts to perform a European identity. In doing so, they simultaneously challenge the literary categories into which they have been inserted, such as "migrant" or "Hispano-African" literatures. Rather, these writers illustrate that these categories, too, work in tandem with other forms of exclusion to buttress, rather than challenge, Spain and Italy's nationalist attempts to overcome their-"South-ness" and perform European-ness.

The thesis consists of four chapters, each focusing on a different migrant writer. The first chapter examines how Amara Lakhous, an Algerian-Italian writer, models his novels after the film genre of the commedia all'italiana in order to make national and ethnic identity categories look like theater and spectacle. The second chapter analyzes how Najat el-Hachmi, a Catalan writer of Moroccan birth, rewrites a classic of Catalan literature (Mercé Rodoreda's The Time of the Doves) to challenge the oppositions between "immigrant" and "native," while also articulating a transnational, feminist critique of patriarchy. The third chapter studies how Francisco Zamora Loboch, an Equatorial Guinean exile in Spain, re-interprets Don Quijote as an iconically anti-racist text. The fourth chapter studies how Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo, a Congolese-Italian writer, recycles Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet in his novel Rometta e Giulieo in order to challenge the polarized dichotomy of "migrant" and "canonical" writing.

My work both draws on and critiques several, interrelated fields of scholarship, including Southern European studies, Afro-European studies, Mediterranean studies, migrant literary studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as criticism pertaining to specific canonical works these writers revisit in their works. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that a critique of racism or xenophobia in contemporary Spain or Italy necessitates not only a critique of the Global South against Eurocentrism, but also a simultaneous critique of Europe's North-South divide.

This dissertation, The Biopower of the Oldest Mafia: Economics, Biopolitics, and Ecology in Mediterranean Society, tracks the evolution of the Camorra criminal organization through a literary and cinematic study of its representations. I propose that we understand the Camorra not only as a global economic force but also as a modern technology of power that affects biological life of a vast population. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism and his notion of pastiche, merged with a biopolitical framework, I deconstruct a genre of popular movies known as “Neapolitan Westerns,” as well as literary texts such as Giuseppe Marrazzo’s Il camorrista (1984), Nanni Balestrini’s Sandokan (2004), and Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra (2006). Through the lens of these cultural products, my work shows how the Camorra created a totalitarian society, based on the ghettoization of migrants from different African countries, notably Nigeria. My research also draws a parallel between the Camorra and the French criminal organization, known as the milieu marseillais, operating in Southern France. Through the analysis of TV shows, movies, and novels, I demonstrate how over the last century the Marseille Mafia has shaped the geopolitics of the Mediterranean by exploiting the strategic position of the port of Marseille. In this way, the Marseille Mafia has exercised a pervasive power over North African migrants and controlled the flow of people and capital from former French colonies. The Biopower of the Oldest Mafia moves away from the long-standing literary, anthropological, and historical paradigm which considers the Camorra, and other Italian Mafias, either as the result of the backwardness of Southern Italian society or as a pathological articulation of the economic system. By using the notion of biopower, I demonstrate that the Camorra is a dynamic social system. I reveal its role as a transnational criminal organization affecting the biological life of millions of people by imposing precise sexual behaviors, regulating race relations, and systematically devastating the Mediterranean habitat in the name of profit. Finally, my analysis of the biopower exercised by the Camorra provides essential clues about the operating procedures of Mafia-like criminal organizations throughout the world.

In recent years, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges posed by climate change, political theorists and organizers have directed their attention towards the “crisis of care.” The crisis of care refers to a generalized yet unevenly distributed breakdown in the ability to maintain social, ecological, and political systems. The consequences of this crises are multifarious, harming underrepresented minorities and workers, health and education services, the natural environment, and the institutions of liberal democracy. Feminist care theorists have analyzed these interlocking crises of care from a variety of perspectives, criticizing the way care is distributed in a capitalist society, and even postulating the need to care for human and non-human entities that are interconnected through relations of interdependence. Nevertheless, the question of how to enact a politics of care remains open from theoretical and practical perspectives. “The Politics of Care: Feminist Infrastructures of Love and Labor” addresses this question by examining how a politics of care is produced as an effect of the interdependence between Global South and Global North, nature and culture, human and non-human. To do so, this dissertation critically reexamines the archives of two prominent strands of feminist thought: posthumanism (including decolonial critiques from Central and South America) and Marxist feminism (including critical race theories). It uses the methods of feminist political theory, film, and literary studies in Italian, Spanish and English. The results of the research are threefold. First, I argue for the inseparability of the strategies of love and labor, of regenerative politics and conflictual politics in organizing struggles over care. Second, I track the feminist function (how visions of gender and race emerge) within those struggles and theoretical archives. Third, I argue for the need for feminist infrastructures, and for a transnational understanding of care that is open to influences and practices from the Global North and Global South. Working across the divide between regions of the world, human and non-human, natural and technical, love and labor, “The Politics of Care” offers a complex view of interdependence conceived as infrastructure as a tool for organizing the politics of care.