Stefania Lucamante

il ricordo della Shoah come politica sociale : Roma, 6-7 giugno 2007

Gli atti del convegno Memoria collettiva e memoria privata

Elsa Morante e l'eredità proustiana

Esistono molte possibili soluzioni per narrare la famiglia. Fra realismo e mitopoiesi, il romanzo di famiglia raccoglie aneddoti e lessico, come i riti che legano i membri di una costellazione familiare. La defamiliarizzazione, fra straniamento e naturalizzazione delle relazioni, sfocia nell’invenzione di personaggi a volte surreali, creati per bilanciare il ricordo traumatico di rapporti interpersonali e quello angoscioso della propria infanzia. Mentre Natalia Ginzburg presagiva la rovina della famiglia, intesa nel suo senso più convenzionale, con Caro Michele, dopo il racconto sereno di Lessico famigliare, le varie generazioni narrate nel primo ventennio del Duemila in Prima di noi di Giorgio Fontana e Sangue giusto di Francesca Melandri rivelano come la storia, la politica, la società intervengano e decretino “l’a-linearità” e la necessaria relativizzazione del tempo vissuto da una famiglia. Oscillanti fra la finzione che maschera la realtà angosciosa del proprio vissuto – il caso di Menzogna e sortilegio – e la realtà che si vuole letta come un romanzo, i romanzi familiari contemporanei parlano di noi.

Generazioni e tempo nelle narrazioni di famiglia (2001-2021)

La felicità in differita

S. Lucamente

Despite an outpouring in recent years of history and cultural criticism related to the Holocaust, Italian women's literary representations and testimonies have not received their proper due. This project fills this gap by analyzing Italian women's writing from a variety of genres, all set against a complex historical backdrop.

Italian Women Writers, Jewish Identity, and the Holocaust

Forging Shoah Memories

The Italian bourgeoisie appear to be living through a period of self-evaluation. This collection examines what is "essentially Italian" in the development of the bourgeoisie, starting with the role of the individual in post-unification Italy. Members of the bourgeoisie were Italy's ruling class while the country underwent drastic political, economic, and social transformations during major historical eras and events, such as the two World Wars, the Fascist ventennio, the colonial enterprises of the Mussolini regime, the Racial Laws and the Holocaust, and domestic terrorism. The role of the bourgeoisie as indicator, inspiration, and conscience in current pop and high culture is also examined.

The Re-thinking of a Class

Italy and the Bourgeoisie

Sharon Wood

Elsa Morante has long been recognized internationally as one of the most significant, innovative, and important writers of the 20th century Italy. Nonetheless, there has, to date, been no full-length study in English dedicated to her work. Critical perspectives on Morante's literary achievement have shifted dramatically in recent years, and while this volume proposes to offer the first comprehensive evaluation of Morante to appear outside Italy, it also aims to take into account modern critical and theoretical developments. The authors' aim is to underline Morante's centrality in a broader context which goes beyond Italian national frontiers and deserves critical attention across a range of transcultural disciplines, departing from the traditional realm of philological analysis to encompass approaches informed by cultural and interdisciplinary studies. This volume gives a comprehensive insight into current thinking on and understanding of Elsa Morante's work. This book places her work in a much wider context of European culture, and traces her influence on a younger generation of writers.

The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante

Under Arturo's Star

Elsa Morante’s Politics of Writing is a collected volume of twenty-one essays written by Morante specialists and international scholars. Essays gather attention on four broad critical topics, namely the relationship Morante entertained with the arts, cinema, theatre, and the visual arts; new critical approaches to her four novels; treatment of body and sexual politics; and Morante’s prophetic voice as it emerges in both her literary works and her essayistic writings. Essays focus on Elsa Morante’s strategies to address her wide disinterest (and contempt) for the Italian intellectual status quo of her time, regardless of its political side, while showing at once her own kind of ideological commitment. Further, contributors tackle the ways in which Morante’s writings shape classical oppositions such as engagement and enchantment with the world, sin and repentance, self-reflection, and corporality, as well as how her engagement in the visual arts, theatre, and cinematic adaptations of her works garner further perspectives to her stories and characters. Her works—particularly the novels Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars, 1948), La Storia: Romanzo (History: A Novel, 1974) and, more explicitly, Aracoeli (Aracoeli, 1982)—foreshadowed and advanced tenets and structures later affirmed by postmodernism, namely the fragmentation of narrative cells, rhizomatic narratives, lack of a linear temporal consistency, and meta- and self-reflective processes.

Rethinking Subjectivity, History, and the Power of Art

Elsa Morante's Politics of Writing

A Multitude of Women looks at the ways in which both Italian literary tradition and external influences have assisted Italian women writers in rethinking the theoretical and aesthetic ties between author, text, and readership in the construction of the novel. Stefania Lucamante discusses the valuable contributions that Italian women writers have made to the contemporary novel and illustrates the relevance of the novelistic examples set by their predecessors. She addresses various discursive communities, reading works by Di Lascia, Ferrante, Vinci, and others with reference to intertextuality and the theories of Elsa Morante and Simone de Beauvoir. This study identifies a positive deviation from literary and ideological orthodoxy, a deviation that helps give meaning to the Italian novel and to transform the traditional notion of the canon in Italian literature. Lucamante argues that this is partly due to the merits of women writers and their ability to eschew obsolete patterns in narrative while favouring forms that are more attuned to the ever-changing needs of society. She shows that contemporary novels by women authors mirror a shift from previous trends in which the need for female emancipation interfered with the actual literary and aesthetic significance of the novel. A Multitude of Women offers a new epistemology of the novel and will appeal to those interested in women's writing, readership, Italian studies, and literary studies in general.

The Challenges of the Contemporary Italian Novel

A Multitude of Women

This book examines the many ways in which anger and indignation shape authorial intentions and determine the products of contemporary Italian artists.

Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic

The contributors extol changes in fiction, extricating the new elements in the hybrid and anticlassicist writing proposed by the Giovani Cannibali."--BOOK JACKET.

Stefania Lucamante

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