A Window On The Italian Female Modernist Subjectivity

This collection of essays surveys some of the artistic productions by female figures who stood at the forefront of Italian modernity in the fields of literature, photography, and even the theatre, in order to explore how artistic engagement in women informed their views on, and reactions to the challenges of a changing society and a ‘disinhibiting’ intellectual landscape. However, one other objective takes on a central role in this volume: that of opening a window on the re-definition of the subjectivity of the self that occurred during an intriguing and still not fully studied period of artistic and societal changes. In particular, the present volume aims to define a female Italian Modernism which can be seen as complementary, and not necessarily in opposition, to its male counterpart.

This book explores the work of a writer, Annie Chartres Vivanti (1866–1942), who brought a transnational dimension to the marked provincialism of the Italian novel by addressing issues of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality on personal and international levels, and by creating work that distanced itself from much of the female-penned literature of the day, scorning both decorum and social respectability. Chapters in this book examine Vivanti’s output from multiple perspectives, taking into account her politics and her career as a journalist, writer, and singer, as well as her literary work.

Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies This book examines the theater of narration, an Italian performance genre and aesthetic that revisits historical events of national importance from local perspectives, drawing on the rich relationship between personal experiences and historical accounts. Incorporating original research from the private archives of leading narrators—artists who write and perform their work—Juliet Guzzetta argues that the practice teaches audiences how ordinary people aren’t simply witnesses to history but participants in its creation. The theater of narration emerged in Italy during the labor and student protests, domestic terrorism, and social progress of the 1970s. Developing Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s style of political theater, influenced by Jerzy Grotowski and Bertolt Brecht, and following in the freewheeling actor‐author traditions of the commedia dell’arte, narrators created a new form of popular theater that grew in prominence in the 1990s and continues to gain recognition. Guzzetta traces the history of the theater of narration, contextualizing its origins—both political and intellectual—and centers the contributions of Teatro Settimo, a performance group overlooked in previous studies. She also examines the genre’s experiments in television and media. The first full-length book in English on the subject, The Theater of Narration leverages close readings and a wealth of primary sources to examine the techniques used by narrators to remake history—a process that reveals the ways in which history itself is a theater of narration.

James Joyce and Photography is the first book to explore in-depth James Joyce's personal and professional engagement with photography. Photographs, photographic devices and photographically-inspired techniques appear throughout Joyce's work, from his narrator's furtive proto-photographic framing in Silhouettes (c. 1897), to the aggressively-minded 'Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak' in Finnegans Wake (1939). Through an exploration of Joyce's manuscripts and photographic and newspaper archival material, as well as the full range of his major works, this book sheds new light on his sustained interest in this visual medium. This project takes Joyce's intention in Dubliners (1914) to 'betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city' as key to his interaction with photography, which in his literature occupies a dual position between stasis and innovation.

This collection explores the notion of reframing as a framework for better understanding the multi-agent and multi-level nature of the translation process, generating new conversations in current debates on translational agency, authority, and power. The volume puts forward reframing as an alternative metaphor to traditional conceptualizations and descriptions of translation, which often position the process in such terms as transformation, reproduction, transposition, and transfer. Chapters in the book reflect on the translator figure as a central agent in actively moving a translated text to a new context, and the translation process as shaped by different forces and subjectivities when translational agency comes into play. The book brings together cross-disciplinary perspectives for viewing translation through the lens of agents, drawing on a wide range of examples across geographic settings, historical eras, and language pairs. The volume integrates analyses from the translated texts themselves as well as their paratexts to offer unique insights into the different layers of mediation in translation and the new frame(s) created for those texts. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies, comparative studies, reception studies, and cultural studies.

How do immigrants and their children forge their identities in a new land—and how does the ethnic culture they create thrive in the larger society? Making Italian America brings together new scholarship on the cultural history of consumption, immigration, and ethnic marketing to explore these questions by focusing on the case of an ethnic group whose material culture and lifestyles have been central to American life: Italian Americans. As embodied in fashion, film, food, popular music, sports, and many other representations and commodities, Italian American identities have profoundly fascinated, disturbed, and influenced American and global culture. Discussing in fresh ways topics as diverse as immigrant women’s fashion, critiques of consumerism in Italian immigrant radicalism, the Italian American influence in early rock ’n’ roll, ethnic tourism in Little Italy, and Guido subculture, Making Italian America recasts Italian immigrants and their children as active consumers who, since the turn of the twentieth century, have creatively managed to articulate relations of race, gender, and class and create distinctive lifestyles out of materials the marketplace offered to them. The success of these mostly working-class people in making their everyday culture meaningful to them as well as in shaping an ethnic identity that appealed to a wider public of shoppers and spectators looms large in the political history of consumption. Making Italian America appraises how immigrants and their children redesigned the market to suit their tastes and in the process made Italian American identities a lure for millions of consumers. Fourteen essays explore Italian American history in the light of consumer culture, across more than a century-long intense movement of people, goods, money, ideas, and images between Italy and the United States—a diasporic exchange that has transformed both nations. Simone Cinotto builds an imaginative analytical framework for understanding the ways in which ethnic and racial groups have shaped their collective identities and negotiated their place in the consumers’ emporium and marketplace. Grounded in the new scholarship in transnational U.S. history and the transfer of cultural patterns, Making Italian America illuminates the crucial role that consumption has had in shaping the ethnic culture and diasporic identities of Italians in America. It also illustrates vividly why and how those same identities—incorporated in commodities, commercial leisure, and popular representations—have become the object of desire for millions of American and global consumers.

The studies in this volume focus on works of art that generate bafflement, and that make that difficulty of reading part of their rhetorical structure. These are works whose subjects are not easily identifiable or can be readily associated with more than one subject at the same time; works that take a subject into a new genre or format (pagan into Christian, for example, or vice versa), and thus destabilize the subject itself; works that concentrate on the marginal rather than the central episode; and works that introduce elements of the preparatory phase-the indeterminacy that are native to the sketch or drawing, for example-into the realm of finished works. Unable to settle on a single reading, the effort of interpretation doubles back on its own procedures. This aporia, according to Aristotle, serves as the initial impulse to philosophical inquiry. Although the works studied here are in many ways exceptional, the aporias they raise register larger structural problems belonging to the artistic culture as a whole. Between 1400 and 1700, we see the emergence of new formats, new genres, new subjects, and new techniques, as well as new venues for the display of art. It is an implicit thesis of this book that the systemic shifts occurring in the early modern period made the emergence of aporetic works of art, and of aporia as a problem for art, a structural inevitability.

Structures and Subjectivities refers to what we can and probably cannot know about women in the early modern period. Scholars study the societal structures their disciplines call attention to; they are left to infer the subjectivities, the lived experience, of women whose lives they attempt to reconstruct. The authors of the essays in the volume, the fifth to emerge from conferences held by the University of Maryland's Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies, place the largest possible meanings on structures. They consider geographical boundaries and political and ecclesiastical institutions, the gendering of hierarchies and the power of place, the spaces that women constructed, inhabited, traveled in and worked in and, by extension, the literary and artistic conventions that both enabled and constrained their artistic production. They also consider, in several essays on pedagogy, the structures in which they and their students pursue the study of early modern women: institutions, departments, and classrooms. Joan E. Hartman is Professor of English emerita at the College of Staten Island, The City University of New York. at the University of Maryland.