167 research outputs found
Alternative Readings as Practice for Feminist Methodologies. A Case Study: Aphra Behn
No full textMoving from some crucial issues of second-wave feminism and in dialogue with a “rhetoric of space” that lies at the very core of third wave feminism(s), this essay shows how Aphra Behn’s empowerment and agency as writer and subject were attained thanks to a continual intersection of various forms of stratification. The essay re-considers her emblematic experimental novel Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave, a True History (1688) and shows how Behn’s empowerment and agency were achieved thanks to a continual overlapping of forms of stratification that involved questions of class, race, gender and nationality. In so doing it also examines how these same forms of stratification which are clearly depicted in Oroonoko, allowed Behn to explore and show the reader how systems of power based on gender discriminations operate and are consolidated. Oroonoko represents an emblematic example, since it is not only the work of one of the first women who earned her money by her writing, but also a text that gave Behn a prominence among those first women who explored woman’s nature and her own personal role in the public sphere. It is also thanks to Oroonoko that Behn took up a position that was later defined as feminist and, more significantly, as anti-slavery. But Oroonoko is also a colonial text in which Behn’s struggle for her empowerment as a writer, political commentator and subject is led inside a wider and specific colonial ideology that supported the slave trade and the Caribbean sugar production. An ideology that complicates Behn’s attempts to ‘produce’ herself as a writer, story teller, woman and political observer
L’ambiguità dell’amazzone in una prospettiva di genere: decostruzione e riappropriazione di un mito.
No full textLa natura multipla dell’amazzone, le leggende che la contengono nella cultura classica mediterranea, in quella nordica e dell’Europa orientale, la rendono una figura centrale per gli studi di genere e delle donne.
L’amazzone rappresenta una categoria ermeneutica capace di decostruire non solo la storia del patriarcato, ma anche di ripercorrere i modi con cui si sono formate le relazioni di potere e subordinazione tra uomo e donna e tra i vari gruppi etnici di cui la storia culturale dell’Occidente ha notizia fin dalle prime fonti greco-latine. Il mito delle Amazzoni rappresenta un punto di partenza che segna, e al tempo stesso rivela, l’inizio di una lunga storia di appropriazioni e violazioni del/sul corpo della donna, per secoli espropriata della sua soggettività e corporeità, costretta ad identificarsi in un corpo scritto per lei da una cultura e da un linguaggio patriarcale che, nel rappresentarlo, stabiliva anche specifiche differenze e ruoli. L’amazzone è al contempo una possibilità per le donne di ripensare il sistema binario che ha condizionato il rapporto uomo-donna producendo anche un’omologazione e indifferenziazione tra le donne stesse, non tenendo conto della complessità dei Soggetti (donna) differenti tra loro per etnia, classe, preferenza sessuale, storia e cultura.
Facendo dialogare letterate, filosofe, antropologhe, storici/che delle idee e storiche dell’arte, il volume rilegge alcune delle declinazioni che il mito dell’amazzone ha subito nel corso dei secoli e nelle varie culture, nonché i modi con cui la critica femminista se ne è ri-appropriata sia come luogo di empowerment e di agency per le donne che come spazio ambiguo e contraddittorio
The Voice of Women Writers in the Development of Literary Studies
No full textThe “voices” of women writers in the development of literary studies are still crucial issues for women’s and gender studies today. It is only in the last few decades, and mostly thanks to the lively dialogue between second and third wave feminism(s), that women’s and gender studies have been retracing and examining women’s genealogies and contexts. They have been looking for a multifaceted women’s tradition that is not only an “act of survival” but a radical revision of the (western) canon and its “holds over us”. Women’s and gender studies teach us that even when we deal with female genealogy and literature there may occur the risk of producing a totalizing narrative, favouring a process of “theorization” which would silence the differences among women themselves, as well as their differences from us, from the present day. According to an intersectional methodology in which the use of gender interacts with other paradigms of interpretation such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, national origin and age, they have shown how the subject and the self are dynamically construed through the intersection of different and sometimes opposed cultural formations. Hence to read women’s “voices” and “genealogies” is to disclose a series of debates, negotiations and even contradicting viewpoints, which still deserve to be explored, since literature, and we believe women’s literature in particular, continues to be a fruitful means of education, knowledge, criticism, and public engagement
Specchio del primitivo e ombra della civiltà: Premessa
No full textLe due metafore (specchio e ombra) insite in "Specchio del primitivo e ombra della civiltà" evocano le diverse valenze conoscitive che il primitivo acquista nel corso del Settecento e dell'Ottocento: due secoli profondamente attraversati dal dibattito sul significato di barbarie e civiltà, di natura e cultura, di progresso e involuzione
Tamora regina dei Goti: contaminazioni amazzoniche nel Titus Andronicus di William Shakespeare
No full textNel corso del Cinquecento il mito delle Amazzoni appare in molti resoconti di viaggio europei sul Nuovo Mondo che spesso se ne servono per colmare il vuoto conoscitivo di uno spazio geografico non ancora conquistato e per rendere intelleggibili i limiti e gli ostacoli ancora da superare. La figura dell'amazzone così come ereditata dalla classicità subisce un'intensa rielaborazione che in terra inglese acquista importanti valenze euristiche. La consapevolezza di essere governati da una donna, Elisabetta I, porta infatti la cultura patriarcale a riscrivere e rimodellare la figura dell'amazzone e la società matriarcale che la caratterizza. Il mio saggio, che si concentra in particolare sul'opera di Shakespeare Titus Andronicus (1590-1594) e sul personaggio di Tamora, è mostrare come nell'avvalersi della figura dell'amazzone e delle sue caratteristiche di donna guerriera attribuite a Tamora, Shakespeare apra il testo ai discorsi coevi sulla controversa origine dei Britanni, anch'essa caratterizzata come spazio di alterità e mostruosità femminile. Il saggio si propone anche di problematizzare una possibile identificazione della regina guerriera Tamora con l'immagine della regina Elisabetta che, ascesa al trono di Inghilterra diviene, come è Tamora nel Titus Andronicus, anche capo dell'esercito
“Orrore e Meraviglia: percezioni europee del selvaggio antropofago”
No full textLo studio, attraverso l'analisi di due testi di viaggio (The discovery of the Large Rich and beautiful Empire of Guiana di W. Ralegh e Warhaftig Historia und Beschreibung eyner Landschafft der Wilden Nacketen Grimmigen Manschfresser-Leuthen in der Neuenwelt America di Hans Staden), indaga l'incontro con il selvaggio, in particolare quello antropofago, sia come strategia discorsiva in cui il selvaggio diventa una proiezione delle contraddizioni e delle antinomie irrisolte dell'Europa cinquecentesca, sia come punto di vista fittizio che serve al viaggiatore inglese e tedesco per mostrare le proprie categorie ermeneutiche e rappresentare la propria appartenenza identitaria ad ideologica
Gender and Race: the Re-shaping of the Self in 16th Century English Travel Reports
No full textDuring the Early modern age the re-shaping of old paradigms of knowledge which were put in doubt by the discovery of the new world were part of a complex process of re-shaping and re-fashioning of the self in which questions of gender and race were deeply interconnected.
In many English travel reports of this period the accurate description of the natives of the recently discovered world or of those lands which had been partly penetrated by the medieval European merchants – such as South Africa or the far Eastern countries – gave the travellers the opportunity both to debate the origin and race of peoples who were not contemplated in the writings of the Ancients, and to re-discuss the peculiarities and manners of those Europeans, like the English themselves, who lived in the periphery of Europe and had been considered by the Ancients as savages that once inhabited the margins of the Roman empire, the borders of the oikumene. Such accounts also made it possible to establish and consolidate new paradigms of knowledge which started to use the idea of race as a central organizing category for a scientific and ethnical classification of differences built on a hierarchical scale of values where often tropes of blackness became general devices for the representation of ethnically, culturally and religiously “other”. At the same time, the travel reports and the way in which they used colours in displaying relations of power, allowed the English to re-discuss and re-write their own origin and identity in order to strengthen and justify their political and ideological position within the new European colonial politics. In line with the debates within gender and postcolonial studies on English Renaissance, I will try to show how the interconnection of gender and race lies at the roots of both the re-construction of the notion of self and identity, which starts during the early modern period, and the re-modelling of old paradigms of knowledge by the re-fashioning of the British and English past
“Educational space(s) and female communities in Margaret Cavendish’s A Female Academy and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part 1”
No full textThe essay interrogates the rise of women’s debate on a better access to knowledge in seventeenth century England by focusing on Margaret Cavendish’s A Female Academy (1662) and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part 1 (1694). I argue that both texts show that Astell and Cavendish perceived education as the means whereby equality between the two sexes, though hard to obtain, could be achieved, also suggesting that women’s critical thinking could better improve only when women are liberated from the influence and presence of men, thus literally separated in an all-female setting. In Cavendish’s and in Mary Astell’s works, despite the evident differences – a female academy for Cavendish and, as we will see, a religious retirement for Astell –, the role of space is of paramount importance since both writers perceive and represent it as physical and symbolic at the same time. I contend that they both understood that to improve women’s education, it was essential not only to envisage the existence of an intellectual all-female community, but to imagine this community located in a specific, thus visible and real, place
Reading Shakespeare in 18th Century English Literary Criticism: The German Case
No full textMoving from the recenbt debates within Shakespearean studies, reception studies and Kulturtransfer, I intend to explore the way in which Shakespeare’s plays were read by some emergent English literary critics and presented to a public of specialists that from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards was not only merely English but certainly international and in particular German. I will focus on some examples from those English essays that were translated into German or reviewed by German critics, since it is mainly from these sources that the image of Shakespeare was re-elaborated for the German public and appropriated by the German critics to respond to specific ideological and aesthetic values
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