italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
Dear colleagues,
I have been asked to advertise the following Book Launch Event at the IGRS
on 29th October.
The Institute for Germanic and Romance Languages and the Berlin Institute
for Cultural Inquiry invite you to the launch of
The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante's Aracoeli", co-edited by Manuele
Gragnolati and Sara Fortuna (Legenda, 2009)
29 October 2009, 6:30 pm -- Room 274/75; 2nd Floor, Stewart House
http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/events/seminars/book-launch-series.html
This is the first launch of the new IFGR book launch series “New Books in?”
intended to encourage the publication of books on subjects concerning any
of the Institute’s language fields ? French, German, Italian, Portuguese or
Spanish.
A presentation by Dr Adalgisa Giorgio will be followed by a discussion with
the co-editors and some of the contributors to the volume. There will be a
wine reception after the Q&A.
For more information about this series and/or to propose a book launch,
please contact the convenor, Eduarda Mota, at [log in to unmask]
Venue: Room 274/75; 2nd Floor, Stewart House, 32 Russel Square, London WC1B
5DN
Aracoeli (1982) was the last novel written by Elsa Morante (1912-85), one
of the most significant Italian writers of the twentieth century. The
journey, both geographical and memorial, of a homosexual son in search of
his dead mother is a first-person narrative that has puzzled many critics
for its darkness and despair. By combining scholars from different
disciplines and cultural traditions, this volume re-evaluates the
esthetical and theoretical complexity of Morante's novel and argues that it
engages with crucial philosophical and epistemological questions in an
original and profound way. Contributors explore the manifold tensions
staged by the novel in connection with contemporary philosophical discourse
(from feminist/queer to political theory to psycho-analysis) and authors
(such as Carlo Emilio Gadda, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pedro Almodovar). The
Power of Disturbance shows that by creating a 'hallucinatory'
representation of the relationship between mother and child,
Aracoeliquestions the classical distinction between subject and object, and
proposes an altogether new and subversive kind of writing.
Manuele Gragnolati is Reader in Italian at Oxford University and Fellow of
Somerville College. He studied Classical philology, medieval studies and
Italian literature at the Universities of Pavia, Paris IV Sorbonne and
Columbia in NYC. Before joining the Oxford faculty in 2003, he taught
Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He investigated
the relationship between identity and corporeality in Dante and medieval
eschatology, focussing on theories of embryology, the concept of the
resurrection of the body, the notion of productive pain, and the motif of
embraces. He also explored the intersections between language, textuality
and subjectivity in medieval and modern authors, editing volumes on
medieval performance and Dante's plurilingualism, collaborating with
Teodolinda Barolini on an edition of Dante's Rime, and publishing essays on
several medieval and modern authors from Guido Cavalcanti and Dante to Elsa
Morante and Giorgio Pressburger. His current projects deal with medieval
concepts of desire and contemporary appropriations of Dante. He serves as
Advisor to the Director at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
Sara Fortuna studied Philosophy, Linguistics, and Semiotics in Rome,
Palermo, Cosenza and Berlin. She taught at the University of Rome “La
Sapienza” from 2002 to 2006 and is now teaching at the University
“Guglielmo Marconi” (Rome). She was Research Fellow of the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2007-2008. She has
worked on theories of physiognomics, perception, origin and evolution of
language in eighteenth-century German philosophy, Dante, Vico, Kant, Hegel,
Wittgenstein, as well on aesthetics, feminist theories, and film. Her
current projects deal with ethics and language in modern philosophy;
aspectuality in the philosophical tradition; forgetting, subjectivity and
the shaping of identity in literary representations and critical
reflections. She is Associate Member ate the ICI Berlin.
Adalgisa Giorgio is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Bath,
where she is also a coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Research
Network. Her main areas of research are Italian contemporary women's
writing and Neapolitan narrative. Recent publications include the edited
volumes Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in
Contemporary European Narrative by Women (2002), (with Anna Cento Bull)
Speaking Out and Silencing. Culture, Society and Politics in Italy in the
1970s (2006), and (with Julia Waters) Women’s Writing in Western Europe:
Gender, Generation and Legacy (2007). She is currently working on a
monograph on Neapolitan writing.
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