Confession and Social Space in the Decameron

Contributor(s): Katherine A. Brown

This essay argues that confession in the Decameron is a liminal activity, which affords characters and readers a milieu removed from the space of society in which transformation and ultimately a temporary moment of transcendence of the secular world (almost a return to paradise) are achieved. In...

What a Difference a Sea Makes in the Decameron: The Mediterranean, a Structural Space of the Novella

Contributor(s): Roberta Morosini

This essay presents a reading of the Mediterranean sea as a narrative space in the Decameron. Through a reading of text and images, the paper illustrates the categories of mobile/static and foreign/domestic at work in the Decameron. It also introduces a third epistemological category, hybridity,...

Eros and Evanescence in the Decameron: The Weave of Love, Time, and Memory

Contributor(s): Timothy Kircher

This essay studies the interplay between the emotion of love and the sense of its transience, as the interplay is featured in the three authorial interventions of the Proem, the Introduction to Day 4, and the Conclusion. The author returns time and again to this interplay, emphasizing the role of...

“Forgers of Falsehood, Physicians of Nought”: Retailing Fictions in Boccaccio’s Decameron

Contributor(s): T. F. Gittes

Whereas Petrarch’s portrait of his doctor in Invectives Against a Physician is deliberately caricatural and seized at a glance, Boccaccio’s attitude towards doctors in the Decameron is far harder to grasp and easily overlooked. Yet, doctors and medical science are a central concern of the...

Fiction with Fiction: Confessing to Dante in Decameron I.1

Contributor(s): Simone Marchesi

This essay addresses one specific element of Decameron I.1, the curious order in which the holy friar questions Ciappelletto in his confession, and relates it to the larger dialogue Boccaccio establishes with Dante’s Commedia. By avoiding the canonical models of confessing penitents, which...

A Singular Boccaccio: Defending Poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogie

Contributor(s): Martin Eisner

This essay reconsiders the conventional division of Boccaccio’s career into two parts that is usually associated with his first meeting with Petrarch. Beginning with two fourteenth-century portraits of Boccaccio, it challenges this traditional account by calling attention to the continuities...

Introduzione [to Special cluster of Articles: Etica, impegno, letteratura: nuove figure / Ethics, Commitment, Literature: Contemporary Figurations]

Contributor(s): Eugenio Bolongaro

Tondelli and the 1980s: Four Keywords for a Reassessment

Contributor(s): Eugenio Bolongaro

This article challenges the interpretation of the 1980s in Italy as a period in which a large section of the population and, especially, the younger generation, turned away from politics and a retreated into the private sphere after the revolutionary ebullience of the 1960s and 1970s. The...

L’engagement in Italia tra passato e presente: Il caso Tabucchi

Contributor(s): Gianmarco Gallotta

Lo scopo di questo contributo è una presentazione del quadro intellettuale italiano attraverso l’espressione di uno degli scrittori più rappresentativi del secolo scorso: Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012). Analizzando la componente “impegnata” nei romanzi più rappresentativi, la cui tematica è stata...

Per una linea leopardiana dell’impegno: Sulla matrice etico-politica dell’opera di Gianni Celati degli anni Duemila

Contributor(s): Michele Ronchi Stefanati

Per lungo tempo, una certa tendenza critica è stata solita legare il concetto di impegno a quello di realismo, indicando come “letteratura dell’impegno” soltanto le scritture di rappresentazione e denuncia di una realtà sociale o politica e contrapponendola rigidamente al postmodernismo, visto...

In cerca della memoria: Ogni promessa di Andrea Bajani

Contributor(s): Alessandro Martini

Quali rischi corre una società incapace di ascoltare i propri testimoni, che li lascia scomparire quasi distrattamente? Che cosa accadrà quando sarà partito anche l’ultimo testimone di un’epoca e degli eventi che l’hanno segnata? Sono alcuni dei quesiti che strutturano la riflessione di Andrea...

Il futuro cannibale: Riflessioni intempestive su Free Karma Food di Wu Ming 5 e Sirene di Laura Pugno

Contributor(s): Camilla Skalle

I due romanzi analizzati nel presente articolo, Free Karma Food (Wu Ming 5 2006) e Sirene (Pugno 2007), sono ambedue ambientati in un futuro distopico molto vicino al tempo contemporaneo. Nel romanzo di Laura Pugno sono state scoperte delle sirene nell’oceano, e le mitologiche cantatrici sono...

«Che è occulto come in erba l’angue» (If. 7.84). Storia di un’immagine dantesca dall’antichità al Rinascimento

Contributor(s): Damiano Acciarino

Questo lavoro nasce con l’intento di studiare l’evoluzione nei secoli di un’immagine poetica, sorta nell’antichità e riadattata, in molteplici forme, fino al Rinascimento. Si tratta del serpente tra i fiori celato nell’erba, permeabile a varie infiltrazioni di carattere simbolico, allegorico,...

A Platonic Look at Herself: Knowledge, Love, and Soul in Sibilla Aleramo’s Dialogo con Psiche

Contributor(s): Barbara Alfano

Dialogo con Psiche (1909–10) has received little consideration from scholars of Sibilla Aleramo; yet, this is a work of paramount importance for understanding Aleramo’s approach to knowledge and hence gaining a deeper insight into her subsequent autobiographical novels. For Aleramo, knowledge...

Space and Relic in Frank Paci’s Black Madonna

Contributor(s): Eveljn Ferraro

This essay investigates Frank Paci’s dominant themes of death and life in Black Madonna and the author’s use of relics to retrace post-migrant spaces. I examine his connections between immigrant and post-immigrant generations in the microcosm of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and the way he preserves...

Palermo, 1799: cronaca politica, controrivoluzione e guerra santa in versi nell’ Empietà abbattuta di Mariano Ricci

Contributor(s): Gianpasquale Greco

Pirandello 150: Introduction

Contributor(s): Luca Somigli

La vita che ti diedi di Luigi Pirandello e L’attesa di Piero Messina

Contributor(s): Giuliana Sanguineti Katz

Questo articolo esamina in primo luogo il dramma di Pirandello La vita che ti diedi del 1923 e in secondo luogo il film L’attesa, del 2015, in cui il regista Piero Messina, ispirandosi al lavoro di Pirandello, ha creato un’opera profondamente originale. Sia il dramma sia il film svolgono il tema...

From Motherhood to Fatherhood: The Eclipse of Reason in the Taviani Brothers’ Tu ridi

Contributor(s): Manuela Gieri

The paper presents an in-depth analysis of Tu ridi, a free adaptation of some of Luigi Pirandello’s short stories, realized by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani in 1998. Within a filmography largely characterized by an attention to the historical, social, and political transformations that Italy...

On the Seriousness of Things: Pirandello’s Ma non è una cosa seria from Page to Screen

Contributor(s): Michael Syrimis

A study of Mario Camerini’s Ma non è una cosa seria (But It’s Nothing Serious [1936]), a film based on Luigi Pirandello’s eponymous 1918 play and typical of the 1930s Italian romantic comedy genre, elucidates the transformations that a literary conception undergoes when adapted for the screen,...