139 research outputs found
Diario veneziano e altri racconti: la rubrica di Milena Milani sul quotidiano La Stampa. Con un affondo sul Premio Strega
No full textThis essay offers a thematic reading of some short stories appeared in the
column that Milena Milani held in the daily newspaper La Stampa (Stampa Sera) from
1950 to 1964. In her texts, Venice is one of the cities of her youth, where to discover the
everyday but also herself as a writer, a profession that will identify her spirit in life. My
research also aims to highlight a brief catalogue of Milani’s short stories between the
forties and the sixties that could be read in her books and in newspapers and magazines
of that period. In the end, I also offer a list of her books in Italian Archives and author
Funds connected to the Premio Strega: she wanted to participate to the prize in 1947
and then succeeded in 1954 and in 1964.This essay offers a thematic reading of some short stories appeared in the
column that Milena Milani held in the daily newspaper La Stampa (Stampa Sera) from 1950 to 1964. In her texts, Venice is one of the cities of her youth, where to discover the everyday but also herself as a writer, a profession that will identify her spirit in life. My research also aims to highlight a brief catalogue of Milani’s short stories between the 40s and the 60s that could be read in her books and in newspapers and magazines of that period. In the end, I also offer a list of her books in Italian Archives and author Funds connected to the Premio Strega: she wanted to participate to the prize in 1947 and then succeeded in 1954 and in 1964
Tu che distingui tra il sacro e il profano: "Havdalah" e ebraismo nella narrazione contemporanea, tra UK e USA
No full textIl successo di serie tv come Shtisel (2013) e Unorthodox (2020) è un chiaro sintomo dell’interesse del grande pubblico verso storie di scandalo o liberazione ambientate in comunità ebraiche ortodosse e ultraortodosse. Lo stesso interesse si registra nel romanzo contemporaneo in lingua inglese, spesso orientato dal bisogno di esplorare la zona di confine tra sacro e profano, morale e immorale, oppresso ed emancipato. La relazione tra ciò che è kodesh (sacro) e ciò che è hol (profano) è endemica alla tradizione ebraica, tanto da avere un nome: Havdalah. La Havdalah, letteralmente “separazione”, è un’antica cerimonia che segna la fine di Shabbat e celebra la distinzione tra la luce e le tenebre, Israele e le altre nazioni, il sacro e il profano. Fuori dalla sfera liturgica, la Havdalah nel senso più ampio di separazione, distinzione, partizione, è il principio che guida la pratica ebraica e anima una tradizione secolare che si configura come elaborazione dialettica della tradizione religiosa. Il saggio si propone quindi di indagare il ruolo del principio di Havdalah prendendo in esame tre casi studio: due romanzi, Disobedience (2006) di Naomi Alderman e The Innocents (2012) di Francesca Segal e una miniserie, Unorthodox (2020). Parti- colare attenzione sarà dedicata ad alcune delle aree più contese della battaglia tra hol e kodesh: le donne, il corpo e la sessualità
Masks Unmasked: A Journey Through Fin-de-siècle Europe
No full textIn her monograph Fragments, Genius and Madness. Masks and Mask-Making in the fin-de-siècle Imagination (2021), Elisa Segnini leads her readers on a journey through fin-de-siècle Europe with one extra stop in Japan. The universe unveiled by Segnini is populated by uncanny mask makers, men in drag, grotesque masquerades, deathly plaster casts, gruesome masks of exceptional men, criminals, and deviants. Masks, portraits, mirrors, busts, severed heads conflate into a picture of the complex ethos of the fin de siècle. This elegant volume, published by Legenda as part of the series Studies in Comparative Literature, is Segnini’s first monograph and a result of her research on the intersections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, theatre, and visual arts. By reading works of art originating in different countries, cultures and media in light of medico-legal discourses, Segnini establishes new connections, innovative patterns and interpretative models that complicate further, and in a positive way, the current picture of fin-de-siècle culture
The Return of the Shakespearian Jester. Postmemory and the Modes of Remembrance in Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights (2006)
No full textThe tight matrix of death and laughter at the heart of Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights (2006) is firmly rooted in the carnivalesque modes and tragic form of Hamlet. There is, I will argue, a striking affinity between Jacobson’s post-memorial novel and the Shakespearian tragedy: the return of the Ghost, with its demand for revenge and remembrance, may be read as an embodiment ante litteram of the anachronistic movement of postmemory. In overt contrast with the etiquette of tragedy, Yorick’s skull re-emerges from the earth of the graveyard and, a fool in the midst of a tragic tale, ‘carnivalizes’ Shakespeare’s play; similarly, all sorts of carnivalesque imageries envelop the post-memorial themes and tales of Kalooki Nights. Moreover, the return of the Shakespearian jester, amplified in Hamlet through jesting, puns and wordplays, mirrors the way in which the past re-emerges, carnivalized, from the rich and ambivalent textual soil of Jacobson’s novel
Poetics of the London Underground: A Journey in the City of the Windrush Generation
No full textPoetica della metropolitana londinese: un viaggio nella City della Windrush generation · Nella produzione letteraria dei migranti nel Regno Unito e dei loro discendenti, la Metropolitana di Londra si configura come importante locus fisico e immaginativo. Dopo l’arrivo della Empire Windrush nel 1948, la stazione di Clapham South divenne una residenza temporanea per i migranti provenienti dalle Indie Occidentali, molti dei quali trovarono lavoro nel settore dei trasporti. Il dislocamento dei migranti sotto le strade di Londra si traduce in un’estetica urbana verticale, in una città fatta di scale scoscese e ascensori tra- ballanti, specchio della traiettoria discendente dei primi anni della generazione Windrush a Londra. La città diviene così un famelico mostro urbano, le cui viscere, rappresentate dalla Metropolitana, trasformano i migranti in rifiuti culturali, masticati, digeriti e, infine, espulsi. Inoltre, la struttura verticale della città richiama il cosmo della tradizione cristiana: la Metropolitana diviene vestibolo degli inferi o Limbo, un luogo di straniamento e nomadismo che ricorda l’inferno psicologico dei Modernisti o gli spazi claustrofobici degli artisti di guerra; d’altra parte, la Metropolitana è anche dimora infernale dei dannati della terra, allo stesso tempo luogo di tormento e sito di cinesi creativa, dove antiche narrazioni vengono appropriate e riscritte.The London Tube plays a prominent role as a physical and imaginative location in many accounts and creative endeavours of post-war migrants to Britain and their descendants. After the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, Clapham South station was used as temporary accommodation for homeless migrants from the West Indies, many of whom took work in transport. Their displacement underneath the streets of London produced a vertical urban aesthetic, a city made of descending staircases and rickety lifts, which mirrored the downward trajectory of the early years of the Windrush generation in London. The city is personified and transmogrified into a ravenous urban monster: in its bowels, i.e. the Tube, migrants are chewed, digested, and discharged as cultural wastage. Moreover, the vertical framework of London recalls the vertical cosmos of Christianity: on the one hand, the Tube is rewritten as a vestibule of Hell or Limbo, a site of estrangement and vagrancy reminiscent of the psychological hell of the Modernists or the claustrophobic spaces of war artists; on the other hand, the Tube is scripted as the infernal home of the wretched of the Earth, at once a place of suffering and torment and a postcolonial site of creative kinesis, where old narratives are appropriated and rewritten
Libertà definibili: sulle tracce di Paola Masino e Milena Milani a Venezia. Postfazione
No full textIn questi Atti di Convegno, Paola Masino, Milena Milani e Venezia si propongono come tre poli di un dialogo a più voci. Alcuni dei volti e delle trame della vita in città, negli anni Trenta e Quaranta e nei decenni successivi, sono infatti riuniti attorno a due autrici che hanno saputo fare della scrittura un mestiere fecondo. Il loro contributo, evidenziato nel volume da nove relatrici, ridisegna il volto della laguna con particolare attenzione ai luoghi e ai tempi, cogliendo, di decennio in decennio, peculiarità e variazioni. Un profilo, quello di Venezia Novecento, poco o per nulla narrato dalle donne, che trova in questi saggi un timbro di autenticità.
In Svengali’s Fur Coat: The Legacy of Trilby in James Joyce’s Ulysses
No full textGeorge Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) forms part of the Late Victorian dramatic afterlife in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Reading Ulysses in light of the legacy of Trilby reveals yet another layer of the composite palimpsest that forms Joyce’s literary universe. In her well-known soliloquy, Molly Bloom remembers attending a performance of Trilby (1895) at the Gaiety with Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the role of evil Svengali. Trilby O’Ferrall, a singer and model, forms part of Molly’s repertoire of dramatic references and informs Joyce’s impression of womanhood. Moreover, Leopold Bloom appears in “Circe” enveloped in Svengali’s fur overcoat. In Ulysses, Svengali’s fur coat seems to point at a hidden, paternal legacy: the Jewish outcast of Trilby might in fact be read as the most theatrical among the forefathers of the Jewish outcast of Ulysses. Thus, under the legacy of Svengali, “Circe” appears as Joyce’s elaboration of theatre as a site of al-ternative jurisdiction
Woolf at the Scriblerus Club, or, Orlando Meets the Augustans
No full textIn Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf defines a potential path towards the renewal of biography, a path that, while moving away from tradition, maintains a strong bond with eighteenth-century culture. The paper considers how Woolf’s engagement with this particular past articulates her modern point of view on life writing. I am most interested in those aspects of eighteenth-century culture that work subversively against the hierarchical and androcentric aspects of the Victorian biographical tradition. In particular, looking back at James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Woolf seems to encourage a form of ‘copartnership’ between Orlando’s biographer and his/her elusive subject aimed at preserving human complexity and hybridity in biographical portrayals; moreover, the experimentalism of the Augustan female rake and Woolf’s awareness of some early attempts at female self-representation inform her understanding of the place of women, as biographers and as subjects, within the English biographical tradition
Books Unlocked: leggere nelle carceri del Regno Unito
No full textDa ormai più di dieci anni, il progetto Books Unlocked opera nel settore della giustizia criminale e porta narrativa di qualità in quasi cento istituti penitenziari del Regno Unito e della Repubblica d’Irlanda, con il supporto di bibliotecari, agenti e insegnanti. Il progetto nasce nel 2012 dalla collaborazione tra il National Literary Trust e la Booker Prize Foundation e prevede la donazione di una selezione di titoli tratti dalla shortlist del Booker Prize alle biblioteche carcerarie. Nel corso dell’anno, i romanzi vengono letti e discussi dai detenuti all’interno di gruppi di lettura gestiti dalle biblioteche. Si tratta di un progetto tanto ambizioso, quanto complesso: il verbo to unlock possiede infatti una grande ricchezza semantica, significa aprire una serratura, liberare, rendere accessibile, ma anche risolvere, trovare la chiave di lettura. Schiudendo il mondo narrativo all’interno delle carceri, Books Unlocked democratizza la narrativa di qualità e favorisce il coinvolgimento dei detenuti in ambito letterario, promuovendo così autostima e senso di inclusione sociale
A Rake's Progress of Stamford Hill? Howard Jacobson meets William Hogarth
No full textThe legacy of William Hogarth pervades the tropes, images and aesthetics of Howard Jacobson’s novel Kalooki Nights (2006), an exploration of the tragic history of the Jews and the burden of its memory, which he narrates in the cartoon mode. With a constant resort to verbal caricature, paradox, hyperbole and oxymoron, Jacobson re-enacts the irreverence, dynamism and structural complexity of the Hogarthian cartoon. Hogarth is also embedded in the architecture of the novel – his ‘Progresses’ interact nicely with Jacobson’s Bildungsroman, providing a model for its multi-episodic structure. Like the pictorial series, the novel guides readers and, at the same time, invites them to wander between several narrations, temporalities, moods and modes in a structural replica of Hogarth’s ‘serpentinity’. Moreover, Hogarth’s presence in Kalooki Nights comes out strongly in one of the storylines, set in the Buchenwald concentration camp, intertwined – much like Hogarth’s line of beauty – around the main narration. In it, Jacobson rewrites both The Analysis of Beauty and Four Stages of Cruelty, drawing a serpentine line of descent be- tween Hogarth, himself and the cartoonist/narrator of the novel
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