The essay investigates some stylistic and pragmatic variations across two genres and text-types pertaining to political oratory in Early Modern England. The speaker in question is the Renaissance monarch who, as many studies have shown from a cultural perspective, appropriates the forms of stage performance and, by manipulating them, acts his power and performs a relationship with his subjects. In this respect my study proposes to analyse and compare some aspects of non-literary and literary texts, Queen Elizabeth I's parliamentary speeches and Shakespeare's Henry V's monologues, as text-types which share a strong persuasive and argumentative aim and are both speech-purposed. The working hypothesis of my case study is that, by drawing attention to two specific speech-acts, directives and commissives, the evaluation of the illocutionary force of their speeches will shed light also on some typical features of the political discourse of Early Modern England.
My paradigms in this respect were Lady Anne Clifford and Alice Anne Thornton. They produced texts that have not even been mentioned or considered for centuries, but that have recently been partially rediscovered and appreciated by critics. My intent was to show how cultural factors and ideologies of the time influenced literary production, and to analyse the reasons that led these authors and their texts, first to oblivion, and later to recovery and canonization. When attempting to give a coherent answer to these questions, I kept in mind the background of Renaissance cultural memory and ideology, with particular regard to notions of femininity. Women writers are "mothers of the text", creators of new horizons, expert connoisseurs of the ideologies of their time, but also lonely, isolated, subjected women, ready to record their memories in voices that try to rise above a thousand other voices. ; The reasons that led women to overcome the injunction against cultural expression, including autobiography are one of the most relevant topics of my thesis. We know that many female characters were marginalized, if not made virtually invisible in many cultures and ideologies. That's why I tried to unveil the "counter" itinerary of women's writing from oblivion to canonization. ; English writers then began to deal with secular autobiography in the seventeenth century. Though excluded from the political scene and from public social life, Early-modern women writers seemed to be able to add something new and significant to the memorials and autobiographies of their own contemporary authors. When a woman wanted to be considered a member of a community whose experience was worthy of memory, she was confined by her own culture and family situation in the role of daughter, wife and mother, and she was seen almost exclusively as the subject of stories of religious experience, visions, trances, ecstasies. However, in the late seventeenth century, autobiography began to depart from an exclusively religious background and from the narrative account of the lives of men, and women began not only to record events related to male lives, but also to explore their identity and their own experiences in autobiographical form. Autobiography acquired the modern meaning of personal, introspective, secular writing, and, suddenly, the texts written by daughters, mothers and wives began to be recognized as real contributions to a genre in constant evolution. ; This doctoral thesis deals with the problem of canonisation and/or exclusion of women's writings from the literary canon of the English Renaissance. More broadly, it deals with issues of memory and cultural transmission. The first part of the thesis focuses on memory in different disciplines and on studies of memory in the contemporary critical arena. I tried to give an overview of the most recent progress in this field of study. The following chapters deal with issues of oblivion and recognition (up to the canonisation) of English women's writers in the Renaissance.
This research focuses on collective novels by the group of writers known before as Luther Blissett and afterward as Wu Ming: these literary works constitute a compact corpus as regards both formal features and messages transmitted by the plots. The six novels, as a whole, are expressive of showing to the readers and the critics many references and stimulations of reflection: observing their morphology, considering their expressive potential, they can understand that the literary works are structured as a network of relationships between events and people. The authors handle such a narrative material with audacious ability, by experimenting and innovating models: this research is structured to consider both resemblances persistence and differences diachronic evolution. The Wu Ming's idea of literature social role is substantial. The group cultural activity openly aims at claiming literature political value. Indeed, we investigate the importance in the novels of communities and of the knowledge spread within them. Furthermore, we would verify the coherence between texts substance and reflection sparks that the writers would come to let their audience share. Intending to gather Wu Ming's writing tendencies, we employ a method which is a key of highlighting novels different facets, in order to understand their rich meaning. So this investigation is structured on many levels. At the beginning it is focused on texts morphology and narrative structure elements; then, it is enriched by the comparison with significant resemblances of other literary works; in conclusion, it is oriented to reach the novels specific meaning in relation to necessities and features of the cultural milieu they are produced in. ; L'objet principal de notre recherche sont les romans collectifs du groupe d'écrivains connus auparavant avec le pseudonyme de Luther Blissett et ensuite avec celui de Wu Ming : ces ouvrages constituent un corpus compact tant en termes de caractéristiques formelles que de messages transmis par les intrigues. Les six ...
This research focuses on collective novels by the group of writers known before as Luther Blissett and afterward as Wu Ming: these literary works constitute a compact corpus as regards both formal features and messages transmitted by the plots. The six novels, as a whole, are expressive of showing to the readers and the critics many references and stimulations of reflection: observing their morphology, considering their expressive potential, they can understand that the literary works are structured as a network of relationships between events and people. The authors handle such a narrative material with audacious ability, by experimenting and innovating models: this research is structured to consider both resemblances persistence and differences diachronic evolution. The Wu Ming's idea of literature social role is substantial. The group cultural activity openly aims at claiming literature political value. Indeed, we investigate the importance in the novels of communities and of the knowledge spread within them. Furthermore, we would verify the coherence between texts substance and reflection sparks that the writers would come to let their audience share. Intending to gather Wu Ming's writing tendencies, we employ a method which is a key of highlighting novels different facets, in order to understand their rich meaning. So this investigation is structured on many levels. At the beginning it is focused on texts morphology and narrative structure elements; then, it is enriched by the comparison with significant resemblances of other literary works; in conclusion, it is oriented to reach the novels specific meaning in relation to necessities and features of the cultural milieu they are produced in. ; L'objet principal de notre recherche sont les romans collectifs du groupe d'écrivains connus auparavant avec le pseudonyme de Luther Blissett et ensuite avec celui de Wu Ming : ces ouvrages constituent un corpus compact tant en termes de caractéristiques formelles que de messages transmis par les intrigues. Les six ...
This research focuses on collective novels by the group of writers known before as Luther Blissett and afterward as Wu Ming: these literary works constitute a compact corpus as regards both formal features and messages transmitted by the plots. The six novels, as a whole, are expressive of showing to the readers and the critics many references and stimulations of reflection: observing their morphology, considering their expressive potential, they can understand that the literary works are structured as a network of relationships between events and people. The authors handle such a narrative material with audacious ability, by experimenting and innovating models: this research is structured to consider both resemblances persistence and differences diachronic evolution. The Wu Ming's idea of literature social role is substantial. The group cultural activity openly aims at claiming literature political value. Indeed, we investigate the importance in the novels of communities and of the knowledge spread within them. Furthermore, we would verify the coherence between texts substance and reflection sparks that the writers would come to let their audience share. Intending to gather Wu Ming's writing tendencies, we employ a method which is a key of highlighting novels different facets, in order to understand their rich meaning. So this investigation is structured on many levels. At the beginning it is focused on texts morphology and narrative structure elements; then, it is enriched by the comparison with significant resemblances of other literary works; in conclusion, it is oriented to reach the novels specific meaning in relation to necessities and features of the cultural milieu they are produced in. ; L'objet principal de notre recherche sont les romans collectifs du groupe d'écrivains connus auparavant avec le pseudonyme de Luther Blissett et ensuite avec celui de Wu Ming : ces ouvrages constituent un corpus compact tant en termes de caractéristiques formelles que de messages transmis par les intrigues. Les six ...
Current concepts of biopoetics deal with the analogy between evolution theory and literature as well as with the mutual challenges of evolution and aesthetics. These approaches do not take into account the fact that the relationship between bios and the scientific, anthropological and cultural knowledge is not given, i.e. it is not necessary in the metaphysical sense of being unavoidable. Bios is life in itself. Through the concept of "bio-poetics" I thus intend to deny the homology of the domains of bios and poetics, in order to find a method that does not capture life through the aprioris of conceptual frameworks. The affirmative biopolitics by Roberto Esposito, referring to the power and politics of life itself, opens up methodological perspectives for conceiving an "aesthetics of living" which, analogously, is not modelled according to exterior rules based on moral, political, social, scientific or poetological frameworks. Thus, the dynamics of living exceeds such schemes revealing itself as exceeding the operations which produce knowledge. Aesthetics means therefore the activity of material techniques that make visible the traces of life inscribed in the materiality of writings or of pictures. From these premises, I reconceive the bond between knowledge and literature referring to contemporary literary theories and analysing poetical processes and figures such as indeterminacy in literary texts of the 19th and 20th century written in Germany, France and Italy. Eventually, this reading of literary texts demonstrates the fictional production of an "other" knowledge about the dynamics of bios, evolving from the aesthetics of literature.
In one of his Treatises on Government, John Locke stated that «every Man has a Property in his own Person». The complex articulation of this apparently matter-of-fact argument has haunted the Western cultural imaginary, and has been transformed into numerous literary texts and figures. Ever since Mary Shelley started investigating an ante-litteram Foucauldian «unfolding»of life, the issues related to the «immortalization of the flesh and the amortization of the body»have become growingly relevant. In this paper, I shall aim at investigating the literary versions of the biopolitics of owning and disowning bodies, of ageing and dying offered by Kazuo Ishiguro, namely in his celebrated Never Let Me Go, and by Hanif Kureishi, who dedicated his novella "The Body" to an interrogation of the marketable value of human bodies and body parts.
The article analyzes the developments of the alternative editorial circuit promoted by the artistic-literary avant-gardes and counter-cultural movements in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, with specific reference to the production of literary texts. The organization of the production system and the intent of the producers are taken into particular consideration, identifying the cultural objectives defined within a strategy of social and political opposition. The characteristics of the literature born in the countercultural field are also studied in depth. ; Nell'articolo vengono analizzati gli sviluppi del circuito editoriale alternativo promosso dalle avanguardie artistico-letterarie e dai movimenti controculturali in Italia negli anni '60 e '70, con specifico riferimento alla produzione di testi letterari. Vengono presi in particolare considerazione l'organizzazione del sistema di produzione e l'intento dei soggetti produttori, identificando gli obiettivi culturali stabiliti nell'ambito di una strategia di opposizione sociale e politica. Vengono inoltre approfondite le caratteristiche della letteratura nata in ambito controculturale.
Questo articolo riguarda il 'personaggio' di Messalla nella poesia di Tibullo e le trasformazioni di cui esso è oggetto fra primo e secondo libro delle elegie: prima protagonista di azioni belliche, poi trionfatore, infine benefattore della comunità e pater familias che si compiace dei successi dei discendenti. Questo percorso, coerente con la tradizione senatoria, viene interpretato come indizio della progressiva 'integrazione augustea' del nobilis, messo ai margini del testo letterario e della vita politica. ; This paper concerns the 'character' of Messalla in Tibullus' poetry and his transformations in the first and in the second book of Elegies; at first, he is a protagonist of military actions, then a triumphator, finally a benefactor of his community and a pater familias pleased with the success of his descendants. Tibullus' portrait of Messalla is consistent with long-established senatorial paradigms but also neatly encapsulates the gradual 'Augustan integration' of the nobilis, marginalized both in literary text and in political life.
Nei quasi tre decenni dalla nascita della cosiddetta "letteratura della migrazione" gli studi critici sulle scritture in lingua italiana ad opera di autori stranieri si sono consolidati – osservando da vicino le innovazioni stilistiche o le contaminazioni lessicali e semantiche – e ampliati – adottando metodi e teorie filosofiche, etiche e politiche derivanti dagli studi postcoloniali. Nonostante ciò ben poca attenzione è stata dedicata al posto che i testi occupano nella società e nel mercato italiani. Un'analisi complessa delle scritture migranti italiane non può tuttavia prescindere dalla considerazione del testo come oggetto culturale, indagato cioè in quanto creazione individuale e collettiva, prodotto del mercato letterario e del sistema culturale italiano, bene di consumo ad uso di uno specifico pubblico e rappresentazione intesa come produzione di un significato. Sullo sfondo degli studi critici attuali e attraverso lo studio di specifiche opere – si prenderanno in considerazione soprattutto le opere di maggior successo degli ultimi trent'anni – e con l'aiuto di un esame particolareggiato degli elementi paratestuali, si intende dunque interrogare i testi sulle scelte narrative, le influenze socio-culturali e la dimensione valoriale in cui si collocano nella contemporaneità. Accanto alle forme di resistenza e decostruzione si colloca infatti la strumentalizzazione della condizione di marginalità, ottenuta mediante il reimpiego strategico di elementi stereotipati ed esotici come la drammatizzazione della differenza etnica e sessuale: un processo che è bene studiare a fondo, respingendo facili considerazioni di auto-subordinazione, ma misurandone le potenzialità sovversive nei confronti delle strutture di potere dominanti, e intendendolo come forma di agency contemporanea. In breve, l'oggetto – o meglio il soggetto – di questo studio sarà il ruolo assunto dalla produzione letteraria migrante e postcoloniale nel mercato editoriale italiano, al fine di esplorarne le modalità ed evidenziarne il grado di adesione ai paradigmi neocoloniali o le potenzialità di resistenza. ; In almost three decades since the birth "Italian Migration Literature", critical studies on Italian writings by foreign authors consolidated – closely observing stylistic innovations or lexical and semantic contamination – and expanded – by adopting philosophical, ethical and political methods and theories deriving from postcolonial studies. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the place that texts occupy in Italian society and market. However, an exhaustive analysis of migrant writings cannot ignore the consideration of the text as a cultural object, examined as both individual and collective creation, product of the literary marketplace and of the Italian cultural system, consumer good for a specific audience and representation as a production of meaning. Against the background of recent critical studies and through the study of specific works - the most successful works of the last thirty years will be taken into consideration - and with the help of a detailed examination of the paratextual elements, we therefore intend to interrogate the texts on narrative choices, socio-cultural influences and the value dimension in which they are placed today. Alongside the forms of resistance and deconstruction there is in fact the exploitation of the condition of marginality, obtained through the strategic reuse of stereotyped and exotic elements such as the dramatization of ethnic and sexual difference: a process that requires a thorough investigation, rejecting easy considerations of subordination, but by measuring its subversive potentialities against the dominant power structures, and understanding it as a form of contemporary agency. In short, the object - or rather the subject - of this study will be the role assumed by migrant and postcolonial literary production in Italian publishing market, in order to explore its methods and highlight their degree of adhesion to the neo-colonial paradigms or their potential of resistance.
Si fa qui una lettura comparata di testi letterari latini, in poesia e in prosa: da Claudiano, Agostino e Orosio; da Seneca, Gellio e Macrobio; di documenti storici e legislativi: dalla raccolta di biografie della 'Historia Augusta', da costituzioni dei codici tardoimperiali. Il nostro scopo è raccogliere ed esaminare alcuni casi di alterazioni del testo – minime ma non innocue – introdotte anticamente per iniziativa e volontà di 'scriptores' che erano insieme 'autori' e copisti. ; Presented here is a comparative reading of Latin literary texts, both in poetry and in prose: from Claudian, Augustine, Orosius; Seneca, Gellius, Macrobius; from historiographic and legislative documents: the collection of the 'Historia Augusta' lives, the constitutions in the late imperial codes. Our goal is to gather and investigate some slight – but not innocuous – ancient variants, which have been deliberately introduced by scriptores who were at the same time authors and scribes.
La ricerca indaga la presenza e l'opera di scrittrici italiane minori e poco visibili nel canone della scrittura educativo-letteraria fra Otto e Novecento, con una produzione editoriale letteraria rivolta alle scuole o ad un pubblico prevalentemente femminile. Essa si articola in tre parti, più una sezione introduttiva, in cui vengono analizzati i dati relativi a un campione di 277 autrici (definite scolastiche, non scolastiche, miste) preso come significativo di una realtà diffusa a livello nazionale. Nella prima parte della ricerca, dal titolo "Le idee", si evidenziano le diverse posizioni teoriche di alcune docenti all'interno della "questione femminile" nel corso dell'Ottocento, seguendo l'evoluzione delle teorie dell'educazione femminile che procedono di pari passo con il dibattito per l'allargamento dei diritti civili alle donne, e che ha il suo punto di maggiore avanzamento nel Congresso Nazionale delle Donne di Roma del 1908. Nella seconda parte, "I testi", vengono esaminati alcuni manuali scolastici (come quelli di Colombini, Pozzoli, Morandi, Vertua, Baccini), dal punto di vista letterario e di pratiche paratestuali, fra cui le dediche, che valorizzano genealogie femminili. Nella terza parte, "Le reti", si analizzano tre esempi di progettazione e coordinamento di opere femminili in rete (da Gualberta Beccari, Emma Tettoni, Emma Boghen Conigliani). La metodologia gender sensitive ha seguito un percorso indiziario, volto al reperimento di documenti, come lettere, opuscoli, conferenze, discorsi, recite scolastiche, saggi letterari poiché, secondo le indicazioni delle Annales (Aries, Duby, Lett, Ginzburg), riprese dalla storiografia dell'educazione, è importante partire nella ricerca proprio dalle micronarrazioni, dalle microstorie, dall'irrompere del quotidiano e delle vite ordinarie femminili nella grande storia politica, come in una black box of schooling, con una motivazione etica e democratica, mirata a uno spostamento di sguardo sulle dimensioni territoriali, locali, sulle omissioni e sulla rilevanza delle fonti e delle testimonianze private nella grande storia e nella storia sociale. ; This research focuses the presence and work of minor Italian women writers in the canon of literary-educational writing between the 19th and the 20th centuries, whose publications were meant for schools or for a female readership. Our study is divided into three parts, plus an introductory section in which the data relative to a sample of 227 women authors is analyzed. The writers are defined as educational, non- educational and mixed, and the sample is taken as representative of the wider national reality. In the first part, entitled "Ideas", we follow the theoretical positions about the "Woman Question" during the 19th century, as well the theories of female education, whose moment of greatest progress was The Congresso Nazionale delle Donne in Rome in 1908. In the second part, "Texts", famous schoolbooks (Colombini's, Pozzoli's, Morandi's, Vertua's, Baccini's one), are examinated in order from literary standpoint and para-textual practices, such as dedications, which highlight female historical or literary genealogies. In the third part, entitled "Networks", attention is given to three examples of networking, those projects and coordination of works were achieved by women (Gualberta Beccari, Emma Tettoni, Emma Boghen Conigliani). The gender sensitive methodology has followed a trail of clues aimed at locating documents such as letters, pamphlets, lectures and speeches, school recitals and literary essays since, according to the indications of the Annales (Aries, Duby, Lett, Ginzburg), influential in the historiography of education, it is important for research to start from micro-narrations, micro-stories, from when the everyday ordinary lives of women break into political history at large, as in a black box of schooling, with an ethical and democratic intent aimed at redirecting our attention to the local and territorial dimensions, to omissions and to the importance of private sources and testimonies in political and in social history.
L'oggetto principale di questa ricerca sono i romanzi collettivi del gruppo di scrittori conosciuto inizialmente con lo pseudonimo di Luther Blissett e in seguito come Wu Ming: si tratta di un corpus compatto, tanto per le caratteristiche formali, quanto per i messaggi delle trame. Le sei opere, nel complesso, forniscono al lettore e al critico una grande varietà di spunti e occasioni di riflessione: osservandone la morfologia, valutandone il potenziale espressivo, si giunge a comprendere che i romanzi sono strutturati come una rete di rapporti fra fatti e individui. Gli autori gestiscono il materiale narrativo con abilità audace, sperimentando e innovando i modelli: la ricerca valuta così tanto la persistenza delle somiglianze, che l'evoluzione diacronica delle differenze all'interno del corpus. Il collettivo ha un'alta concezione del ruolo sociale della letteratura; l'operazione culturale che svolge ambisce apertamente a rivendicare il valore politico della pratica letteraria. Esaminiamo così l'importanza associata al concetto di comunità e alla trasmissione del sapere al suo interno. Inoltre cerchiamo di verificare la coerenza fra la sostanza dei testi e le proposte di riflessione che gli autori vorrebbero rivolgere alla comunità dei propri lettori. Per cogliere le tendenze della scrittura dei Wu Ming utilizziamo una metodologia che metta a confronto sfaccettature diverse dei romanzi, per coglierne la ricchezza. Conduciamo così uno studio su più livelli. Dedicato in apertura alla morfologia dei testi, agli elementi delle strutture narrative; approfondito dall'analisi di corrispondenze significative con altre opere; orientato infine a cogliere il significato specifico dei romanzi in relazione con le esigenze e le caratteristiche dell'ambiente culturale in cui sono stati realizzati. ; This research focuses on collective novels by the group of writers known before as Luther Blissett and afterward as Wu Ming: these literary works constitute a compact corpus as regards both formal features and messages transmitted by the plots. The six novels, as a whole, are expressive of showing to the readers and the critics many references and stimulations of reflection: observing their morphology, considering their expressive potential, they can understand that the literary works are structured as a network of relationships between events and people. The authors handle such a narrative material with audacious ability, by experimenting and innovating models: this research is structured to consider both resemblances persistence and differences diachronic evolution. The Wu Ming's idea of literature social role is substantial. The group cultural activity openly aims at claiming literature political value. Indeed, we investigate the importance in the novels of communities and of the knowledge spread within them. Furthermore, we would verify the coherence between texts substance and reflection sparks that the writers would come to let their audience share. Intending to gather Wu Ming's writing tendencies, we employ a method which is a key of highlighting novels different facets, in order to understand their rich meaning. So this investigation is structured on many levels. At the beginning it is focused on texts morphology and narrative structure elements; then, it is enriched by the comparison with significant resemblances of other literary works; in conclusion, it is oriented to reach the novels specific meaning in relation to necessities and features of the cultural milieu they are produced in.
The relationship of Elio Vittorini with his own novel Uomini e no (Bompiani, 1945) was undoubtedly problematic and characterized by continuous second thoughts and revisions. This volume explains the reasons for the complex relationship between author and text, starting from the first moments of the genesis of the novel, documented by unpublished autograph papers, preserved in the Elio Vittorini Fund of the Apice Center of the University of Milan and studied here for the first time, together with the editorial materials of the first edition. The reconstruction of the further transformations of the text is testified then by the successive prints and by other unpublished archival documents that explain the literary and editorial project. The path traced therefore covers a chronological span from 1944 to 1966 - the year of the author's death and the last edition due to his will - and tells what were the poetic, ethical and political reasons that initiated the writing of the novel and that have motivated the successive continuous re-elaborations. The close analysis of textual materials allows us to enter the author's writing workshop, to explain the radical changes for the second edition of 1949, and then conclude on the revisions made for the last Mondadori editions of 1965 (Oscar) and 1966 (I Storytellers). The diachrony of a novel, to tell a crucial stage of the literary work of Elio Vittorini and to re-read the critical judgments on Men and no starting from the historical and philological authenticity of the text.
Le due opere esaminate in questa tesi, il De Nugis Curialium di Walter Map e la Topographia Hibernica di Giraldo Cambrense, sono spesso prese a esempio per descrivere la particolare commistione di stili che caratterizzò la produzione culturale della corte plantageneta. L'opera di Walter Map è generalmente indicata come esemplare del sarcasmo dei cortigiani e come espressione dell'interesse sviluppatosi in Inghilterra per i racconti di matrice folklorica. L'opera di Giraldo Cambrense è studiata soprattutto perché testimone dell'incontro tra la civiltà sviluppatasi in seno alle università europee nel corso del XII secolo e quella tipica dell'Irlanda nel pieno del medioevo. Questa tesi rilegge entrambi i testi alla luce degli interessi particolari dei loro autori e ai loro tentativi di carriera. Si sostiene che questi testi furono usati dai loro autori nel tentativo di fare carriera all'interno della gerarchia ecclesiastica del regno anglonormanno. Piuttosto che valutare tali opere per il loro valore letterario, si mostra come siano, da contestualizzare all'interno della complicata e mutevole lotta tra fazioni interna al regno anglo-normanno. Per tale contestualizzazione, si è contato, dopo aver analizzato le tematiche della frontiera, della regalità e del mondo religioso così come sono presentate dagli autori, sulla presenza nei testi di riferimenti precisi a uomini di cui è stato possibile ricostruire interessi e partigianerie. La relazione tra il modo in cui i temi erano presentati, i personaggi contemporanei citati e le esperienze degli autori ha permesso di ricostruire quale fosse l'uso pratico delle opere di Walter Map e Giraldo Cambrense – garantirsi un seggio episcopale – e come i due cercarono di raggiungerlo. ; Gerald of Wales was a Cambro-Norman courtier and author. His books on Ireland and Wales are unique examples of literacy talent and first-hand witness from the XIIth century Marches of Britain and Ireland. Similarly, Walter Map served at the court of Henry II and wrote the De Nugis Curialium at the end of the XIIth century. The De Nugis is a puzzling work in which one can find history, satire, and folktales. The thesis shows how under the courtly language of the works the authors tried to build and enforce their personal network in order to pursue their careers.
