italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
Dear colleagues,
This message contains three announcements:
1. A new book from my colleague, Ennio Rao, on Humanisitic invective;
2. The latest volume of the series Studi e Testi, sponsored by Annali,
on women partisans by Rosetta D'Angelo and Barbara Zaczek;
3. Announcement of the 2010 Annali volume, to be edited by Cristina
Mazzoni, and call for papers.
Many thanks and wishes to all of you for the Spring 2008!
Dino Cervigni
1.
Ennio I. Rao, /Curmudgeons in High Dudgeon: 101 Years of Invectives
(1352-1453)/. Messina: EDAS, 2007. Pp. 192.
As the subtitle indicates, the book is a comprehensive account (the
first in the English language) of the more than 70 invectives exchanged
by Italian humanists during a span of 101 years, beginning with
Petrarch's attacks against some French adversaries in defense of Italy
and the liberal arts and ending with the epic controversy between Poggio
Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla. Other valiant practitioners of the art of
verbal vituperation included in this study are Coluccio Salutati,
Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Antonio da Rho, Francesco Filelfo, Antonio
Beccadelli Panormita, and Bartolomeo Facio, among others.
The Italian humanists, who were responsible for the revival of classical
learning known as the Renaissance, were not the originators of the
invective form or genre, but its continuators. Originating as the
“vituperatio” of epideictic speeches, invectives often represented a
negative biography of the adversary, ascribing ignoble birth, accusing
him of crimes ranging from rape, theft, plagiarism, corruption of youth,
and homosexuality to treason and heresy. The invectives have the special
merit of conferring a new dimension, a more vivid color to the
personalities of the humanists.
This book does not limit itself to a study of humanistic invectives. It
also surveys their Greek, Roman and medieval antecedents, beginning with
Homer’s /Iliad/ and the lost /Margites/, to the poets Archilochus,
Hipponax, and Callimachus, down to the Latin writers Ennius, Lucilius,
Catullus, Cicero, Sallust, Seneca the Younger, Juvenal, St. Jerome,
Berengarius, bishop of Poitiers, and Gerard de Berry.
The book can be obtained from Casalini Libri, ibs.it,
libreriauniversitaria.it, unilibro.it, and other book dealers, or
directly from the publisher, edas.it ([log in to unmask]).
2.
*Rosetta D’Angelo and Barbara Zaczek, editors and translators*.
/Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women/. Studi & Testi
9. Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d’Italianistica, 2008. Pp. 33 + 224. ISBN
0-9657956-8-3.
The volume is a translation of texts that explore the experience of
partisan women in Italy between 1943 and 1945, focusing on the
representations of a female body. The texts include autobiographical
narratives as well as fictional accounts of partisan women published
between 1944 and 2000. This anthology provides the American reading
public with a long-needed access to World War II from a perspective that
history and literature have often considered marginal and yet it offers
not only a rich source of information but also a valuable teaching
material for courses in Italian literature, culture, history and women’s
studies. To order the volume, visit the website of Annali and click on
Studi e testi (North America: $25 +$4 for shipping; Overseas: $25 +$7
for shipping).
3.
*AdI 2010: Capital City: Rome, 1870-2010. To be edited by Cristina
Mazzoni * ([log in to unmask])
The twenty-eighth issue of /Annali d’Italianistica/, to be published in
2010, will be devoted to the city of Rome from 1870 to the present day.
For the past century and a half, as for the rest of its long history,
Rome has been both the product of the imagination and one of its more
prolific and enduring agents; Rome is a material, geographical place,
but it also occupies the space of cultural representation. “Rome was not
built in a day,” it is commonly said; less frequently does one realize
that Rome was, and continues to be, built with words, images, and sounds
as much as with bricks, stone, and cement: no clear boundary may be
drawn between the real and the imagined Rome, between the city of myth
and the city on the map. Thus, the volume intends to investigate Rome’s
presence since 1870 in texts, films, events, works of art and
architecture, popular culture, and more.
The volume will be articulated chronologically into four parts: 1.
Across Two Centuries; 2. Fascism and World War II; 3. The Postwar
Period; 4. Into the Third Millennium.
/1. Across two centuries/. With the “Breach of Porta Pia,” Rome was
freed from the political authority of the pope and, shortly thereafter,
made the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Because it promised balance
and mediation, in addition to its considerable historic weight, Rome was
designated as the symbolic center of the young nation, through an active
manipulation of both its urban outline and its less tangible urban
culture: literature, politics, the arts, and those events that
eventually formed the text of Rome’s history between the nineteenth and
the twentieth century. All this was placed on top and in the interstices
of a city already some twenty-five hundred years old, an urban
palimpsest whose past never gets completely erased before the present is
built to take its place.
/2. Fascism and World War Two./ Viewing Rome’s recent past as a decadent
failure, Mussolini notoriously refashioned the capital so that it might
better reflect his grandiose ideals of a new Italy; his approach was a
mixture of reverence for Rome’s ancient past and ruthless desecration of
its legacy. Artists, writers, and filmmakers have reflected on the
novelties and the shortcomings of the regime’s myth of a monolithic
capital, their critiques often veiled so as to avoid censorship—though
the /Duce/’s demise and the traumas of the Second World War brought
about copious and far more diverse representations of Rome in all
available media.
/ 3. The postwar period./ The traces of its fascist experience rethought
and rewritten (with the names of streets changed, the significance of
monuments altered), Rome underwent further transformations during the
second half of the twentieth century. But continuity prevailed over
breaks with the past, and the city did not lose its long-standing
significance as a place of mediation and circulation with respect to the
rest of the country. Rome’s physical and allegorical contradictions, and
its social and political role for the Italian peninsula as a whole, are
expressed in the city’s art and architecture, literature and poetry, but
also its cinema and its popular culture.
/ 4. Into the third millennium:/ Along with the urban face-lifts
inspired by the 2000 Jubilee and the cultural politics of Rome’s recent
mayors, the late twentieth century and the new millennium have marked
Rome with a multicultural stamp. From the immigrants inhabiting both
center and periphery, and peopling contemporary films and books, to the
visible presence of foreign architects and artists, to the building of
the largest mosque in Europe, Rome’s provincial face is changing
rapidly. Rome was chosen as the capital of united Italy because it
signaled a mythical view of a nation unified in the past, while pointing
to a unified future. One of the many questions contemporary Rome invites
us to ponder, then, concerns the ways in which Rome’s 1870 promise of
unity has been and is being fulfilled, betrayed, or, rather, whether
such a view should be re-examined altogether.
For each section we welcome scholarly investigations on any aspect of
the city of Rome from 1870 to 2010.
Essays are due to the editor by May 1^st , 2009, with final versions due
no later than December 1^st , 2009. Essays must be in English, not
exceed 25 double-spaced pages, and conform to the MLA style; they need
to be submitted electronically, using Microsoft Word, and should include
a list of works cited. Interested scholars are invited to contact the
volume’s editor as soon as possible.
For further information or to submit an essay, please contact Guest
Editor Cristina Mazzoni, Dept. of Romance Languages, University of Vermont
([log in to unmask]).
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