This essay proposes a re-reading of Giuseppe Dessì’s Il disertore (1961) in the context of collective memory theory and postmodern concerns with mourning and melancholia. Through an examination of the way Dessì represents the interaction between individual memories and official memorialization in the post-WWI period, I argue that Dessì anticipates postmodern perspectives on commemoration. In particular, I look at the protagonist, Mariangela, both as a recuperation of the private and public anti-war activities of many Italian women, and as a melancholic mother whose refusal to obey normative modes of mourning results in a form of resistant mourning. Furthermore, it is precisely through Mariangela’s oppositional gaze that Dessì exposes the inadequacies of her town’s official receptacle of war memories, the monumento ai caduti, in order to interrogate the way collective—but also individual—memory is constructed.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Boylan, A., (2025), "Memory, History and a Mother’s Resistant Mourning in Giuseppe Dessì’s Il disertore", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Boylan, Amy. "Memory, History and a Mother’s Resistant Mourning in Giuseppe Dessì’s Il disertore." Quaderni d'italianistica 33 (2): 2013. 133-149. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v33i2.19421. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.