Natalia Ginzburg S Global Legacies

Offering comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to Natalia Ginzburg, this volume situates Ginzburg’s works within major critical discourses to articulate innovative readings and mobilize further lines of inquiry. The first section, “World Literature and World Making,” uses translation practices, world literature, and transnational studies to theorize the growing popularity of Ginzburg. The second section, “Female Bodies, Voices, and Gazes,” draws on gender and queer studies, speech act theory, intersectional feminism, and media studies to begin to address gaps in Ginzburg scholarship. The last section, “Identity, Topography, and Forms,” approaches Ginzburg through the lenses of trauma studies, topography, novel and essay studies, and Jewish identity. Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies both makes available in English important Italian research and builds on significant international discourses. In bridging Italian and Anglophone scholarship, the volume engages students and scholars of Comparative and Italian literature, world literature, and women’s writing, as well as general readers of Ginzburg.

This collection represents some of the latest research on Primo Levi, the famous Auschwitz survivor Italian author, in the field of Italian Studies, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, literary theory, philosophy, and ethics. The author has collected an impressive group of scholars, including Ian Thomson, who has published a well-received biography of Levi in the UK (a US edition is due this year); Alexander Stille, who is a staff writer got the New Yorker as well as for the New York Times (he is also the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism ); and David Mendel, who knew Levi and had an extensive correspondence with the Italian writer. There are four essays on Levi's complex and fertile theory of the 'Gray Zone' and further essays on the myriad aspects of this thought. This is an excellent collection with new perspectives and interpretations of the life and work of Primo Levi.

"A model of academic praxis." - Public Books Elena Ferrante as World Literature is the first English-language monograph on Italian writer Elena Ferrante, whose four Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014) became a global phenomenon. The book proposes that Ferrante constructs a theory of feminine experience which serves as the scaffolding for her own literary practice. Drawing on the writer's entire textual corpus to date, Stiliana Milkova examines the linguistic, psychical, and corporeal-spatial realities that constitute the female subjects Ferrante has theorized. At stake in Ferrante's theory/practice is the articulation of a feminine subjectivity that emerges from the structures of patriarchal oppression and that resists, bypasses, or subverts these very structures. Milkova's inquiry proceeds from Ferrante's theory of frantumaglia and smarginatura to explore mechanisms for controlling and containing the female body and mind, forms of female authorship and creativity, and corporeal negotiations of urban topography and patriarchal space. Elena Ferrante as World Literature sets forth an interdisciplinary framework for understanding Ferrante's texts and offers an account of her literary and cultural significance today.

The hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from “a glowing light of modern Italian literature” (New York Times Book Review) Longlisted for the PEN Translation Award At the heart of Happiness, as Such is an absence—an abyss that pulls everyone to its brink—created by a family’s only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes, missing him; so does Mara, his former lover, telling him about the birth of her son who may be his own. Left to clean up Michele’s mess, his family and friends complain, commiserate, tease, and grieve, struggling valiantly with the small and large calamities of their interconnected lives. Natalia Ginzburg's most beloved book in Italy and one of her finest achievements, Happiness, as Such is an original, wise, raw, comic novel that cuts to the bone.

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?

In a dazzling collection of stories, the New York Times–bestselling author of The History of Love, National Book Award finalist Nicole Krauss, explores what it means to be in that most perplexing of partnerships: a couple. In one of her strongest books of fiction, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the confusion of what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman that has existed from the very beginning in all Western myths that inform our culture. Set in contemporary times in Switzerland New York, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles and South America, these stories open a window onto young women’s coming of age and their newfound, somewhat mysterious sexual power, as well as the opportunities and dangers it presents (“Switzerland”). In a Los Angeles of terrible wildfires, a high school student, distressed by her divorcing parents and determined to assert her agency in the intoxicating freedom of a dangerous environment, forges an original and surprising sexual path (“End Days”). Men play a key role in all these stories as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers—even as a husband who is not a husband (“The Husband”). The stories mirror one another and resonate beautifully with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel: aging parents and newborn babies; generation gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or one still to come. The two stories that bookend the collection, “Switzerland” and “To Be a Man,” perfectly introduce and play out the author’s major themes: sex and violence, men and women, coming of age and growing older.

A prominent and prolific Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) is known for her novels, plays, short stories, and essays. This collection brings together, for an English-speaking audience, a variety of critical perspectives on Ginzburg's work. The essays, all by North American scholars, examine the author's entire production. The topics examined include Ginzburg's struggle to define herself as a woman, a writer, and an intellectual; her interpretation of the relationship between historical events and private lives; her reflections on the women's movement and the changing nature of the family; and her mastery of a distinctly personal writing style. What emerges here is a nuanced and complex portrait of Ginzburg and her work. The reader is given a sense of the importance of her contribution, not only as a writer but as a witness to the events of the twentieth century. The volume also includes a chronology, a bibliography, and translations of some of Ginzburg's lesser-known writings, including three articles, a poem, and a one-act play.