Primo Levi and Hunger

Contributor(s): Daniela Bisello Antonucci

When Primo Levi was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, he suffered from physical hunger. But the association of this real hunger—the lack of food—with his other desperate hunger—his desire to tell his story—created the energy to make a connection with the world after the Lager experience. This study...

Carmen Covito’s La Bruttina Stagionata: Bridging Feminist and Post-Feminist Literature

Contributor(s): Laura A. Salsini

Carmen Covito’s 1992 novel La bruttina stagionata serves as a connective text between two significant moments in Italian women’s writing: the feminist works of the 1970s and those published in the 1990s. Covito’s text adopts the sensibilities of a feminist work in its description of the female...

Preface

Contributor(s): Gabriele Scardellato

Uncompromising Gaze: The Art of Albert Chiarandini O.S.A., F.I.I.A.L.

Contributor(s): Olga Zorzi Pugliese, Guido Pugliese, Angelo Principe

A close analysis of the paintings by Albert Chiarandini inscribed in several genres (portraiture, landscapes and compositions) and evaluated in light of the artist’s life experience, diary reflections, and personal interviews, reveals his fundamental concern for social justice. He chooses to...

Malocchio in Nino Ricci’s Lives Of The Saints

Contributor(s): Michela Baldo

The evil eye or malocchio has appeared in the works of a number of Italian-Canadian writers but for most its role has been limited. In Lives of the Saints, however, the first volume of the trilogy of the same name by Nino Ricci, its role is fundamental to the novel’s narrative construction. The...

CHIN Radio and its Listeners: A Negotiation in the Post-War Commerce of Ethnicity

Contributor(s): Michele Amatiello

Canadian broadcasting underwent a period of transition following the Second World War. Government officials attempted to restructure radio to serve as an instrument for assimilation which would assist new Canadians in understanding Canadian culture and customs. In 1966, CHIN Radio AM 1540 was...

“Manage, Negotiate, and Challenge Identities”: Young Italian-Canadian Identities from the Eyetalian Perspective

Contributor(s): Domenico Servello

This study is an investigation of identity and Italian-Canadian youth in the post-World War Two period. A thorough examination of the limited secondary literature on this topic, as well an analysis of the works of authors, journalists and others published in the Toronto-based magazine Eyetalian,...

Zoppola, Zoppolani and Migration to Western Canada: A Sample Study

Contributor(s): Gabriella Colussi Arthur

This paper investigates the departures and arrivals of a group of Zoppolani, Italians from the northeast of Italy who travelled through Ellis Island to British Columbia in search of work between 1906 and 1923. Zoppola is a municipality located in the center west of the autonomous Friuli...

Anti-Petrarchism in the Decameron’s Proem and Introduction

Contributor(s): Joseph Grossi

Similarities of purpose between the Proem of the Decameron and the opening sonnet of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta have been noticed by several scholars. Students of Boccaccio and Petrarch are also becoming increasingly aware that the former was willing to criticize his friend, as he did when...

La creazione di una figura politica: L’entrata in Napoli di Ipolita Maria Sforza Visconti d’Aragona, duchessa di Calabria

Contributor(s): Veronica Mele

Il momento più alto di elaborazione e manifestazione dell’immagine pubblica di Ippolita Maria Sforza, duchessa di Calabria, si realizzò in occasione del viaggio che nell’estate 1465, da Milano a Napoli, doveva condurla sposa ad Alfonso d’Aragona. Il lungo itinerario attraverso quasi tutti gli...

“Godo d’essere italiano” : Saverio Almatura tra letteratura e arti figurative del Risorgimento

Contributor(s): Vincenzo Caputo

L’intervento si pone l’obiettivo di analizzare lo scritto autobiografico del pittore Saverio Altamura (1896). Tra la fine dell’Ottocento e l’inizio del Novecento numerosi artisti, napoletani di nascita o d’adozione (Altamura era nato a Foggia, ma si era formato nella città partenopea), elaborano...

La passeggiata prima di cena: percorsi dello sguardo, e la lezione di Georges Seurat

Contributor(s): Alessandro Giardino

L’articolo offre un’analisi dei legami intertestuali esistenti tra il racconto “La passeggiata prima di cena” di Giorgio Bassani ed il dipinto Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte di Georges Seurat. In particolare, l’articolo illustra questa relazione alla luce del dibattito...

On Dark Laughter: Leopardi’s and Beckett’s Humour

Contributor(s): Roberta Cauchi-Santoro

The desire not to desire is crucial to Samuel Beckett and Giacomo Leopardi. Beckett explores this theme in Proust where Leopardi’s poem “A Se Stesso” is thrice quoted. Before citing this poem, Beckett catalogues Leopardi as one of the philosophers who proposed the only impossible solution—the...

Memory, History and a Mother’s Resistant Mourning in Giuseppe Dessì’s Il disertore

Contributor(s): Amy Boylan

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...

"Cristina Campo’s Visions and Revisions: The essay ‘Una rosa' between 1962 and 1971"

Contributor(s): Cristina Mazzoni

A comparative analysis of the 1962 and the 1971 versions of Cristina Campo’s essay “Una rosa”—an interpretation of the French classic fairy tale, “Beauty and the Beast”—reveals several small but significant changes. These can be most usefully understood in the context of Campo’s conversion to...

Il linguaggio dell’amicizia e della città: L’amica geniale di Elena Ferrante tra continuità e cambiamento

Contributor(s): Laura Benedetti

L’ultimo romanzo di Elena Ferrante, L’amica geniale. Infanzia, adolescenza, continua una ricerca linguistica incentrata sulla dicotomia lingua/dialetto già evidente nella produzione precedente della scrittrice, mentre sposta l’attenzione dal rapporto madre-figlia a quello tra amiche, sentimento...

Between “New Realism” and “Weak Thought”: Umberto Eco’s “Negative Realism” and the Discourse of Late Postmodern Impegno

Contributor(s): Loredana Di Martino

The recent theory of a return of realism has sparked a lively and somewhat heated debate among contemporary italian thinkers, generating a split between the supporters of the philosophy of weak thought, and those who argue for an overcoming of postmodernism and the development of a new philosophy...

Uso strategico della L1: riflessioni ed esperienze

Contributor(s): Paolo Torresan

Perché scandalizzarsi a parlare di traduzione oggi, quando si tratta di una abilità messa in atto spontaneamente da molti studenti e praticata altrettanto sovente dagli insegnanti? In questo saggio partiamo da una ricognizione sull’uso della L1 nella storia della glottodidattica — preponderante...

"Colenda poesis, et inde Poete" (Gen. deor. gent., XIV, 22, 11): Boccaccio, la novità della letteratura e la libertà dei poeti

Contributor(s): Matteo Bosisio

L’articolo, dopo aver mostrato le esigenze storiche e culturali che spinsero intellettuali quali Mussato e Petrarca a ricodificare lo statuto della letteratura, si sofferma sulla difesa della poesia operata da Boccaccio. Il certaldese non solo giunge a un risultato innovativo, totalmente...

Humanism’s Other Inheritance: The Brutal Intertextuality of Boiardo’s Rocca Crudele

Contributor(s): Natalie Cleaver

In Book I of the Orlando innamorato, Ranaldo travels from Palazo Zoioso to Rocca Crudele, a distinct adventure that exists almost as a separate novella within the poem. At Rocca Crudele, he encounters an exceptionally violent scene that is composed of the most horrific moments of cruelty drawn...