Italian - Doctoral Theses

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Transgenerational trauma and the gendered body in postcolonial women's writing in Italy
(University College Cork, 2025-11-17) Kane, Noreen; Giuliani, Chiara; Ross, Silvia; Research Ireland; National University of Ireland
Over the past three decades, numerous literary texts have been published by women writers with origins in Italy’s former colonies in the Horn of Africa. These narratives provide a gendered perspective on Italian colonial violence and its legacy, challenging hegemonic Italian collective memory, which minimises Italy’s colonial endeavours. Simultaneously, the texts confront omissions in nationalist memories, which often erase women’s involvement in anticolonial struggles. This thesis explores the representation of transgenerational trauma in ten novels and memoirs, written in Italian and English, by women of Somali and Ethiopian descent. Though the writers come from various backgrounds, with differing relationships to Italy, each of the narratives in question foregrounds the trauma of Italian colonialism and its negotiation through the female body. The authors in question are Somali-born Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Somali Italian writers Ubah Cristina Ali-Farah and Igiaba Scego, Ethiopian Italian Gabriella Ghermandi, and Ethiopian American Maaza Mengiste. While this literary corpus has received well-deserved scholarly attention, much analysis assumes a Western or African American theoretical lens. My thesis adds insight into the representation of trauma and resistance in these works by interpreting them through both traditional trauma theories and memory studies, and Afro-feminist theories that foreground the Ubuntu worldview, emphasising interconnectedness. In three sections, I explore how trauma is transmitted within the family, through educational institutions, and how literature may intervene positively in the transmission of trauma. I contend that the narratives analysed, in both form and content, provide significant insight into the crucial role communities play in the negotiation of trauma. Whether through connection with ancestors, the more-thanhuman, or with readers, these narratives show that to break the chain of generational trauma, it is imperative to recognise our inherent relationality, which may involve, for many readers, an acknowledgement of our implication in the colonial past.
Hoc est enim corpus meum: christian art and passion inonography in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard
(University College Cork, 2012-07-24) Murphy, Jill; Rascaroli, Laura
In this thesis I examine how Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard deploy images from Christian art, particularly in relation to the Passion, in their respective oeuvres. Using the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on the image and post-Christianity as a methodological touchstone, I discuss how both directors locate the sacred in the human by using figuration adopted predominantly from Renaissance painting, but also from the work of later painters such as Goya and Manet, in the case of Godard, and more transgressive twentieth-century interpreters of Passion iconography, such as Francis Bacon, in the case of Pasolini. Through close readings of Pasolini's films that deal with the sacred, including La ricotta (1963), Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) and Teorema (1968), and Godard's later work, including Passion (1982), Je vous salue Marie (1985), Hélas pour moi (1993) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998), I consider how the selected works of the two directors overlap and interact in their use of art-historical imagery as a mediating agent for the sacred—specifically as figured by the human body—within the filmic image.
Contested nationhood: Literary Geographies of contemporary Italian Alpine borders
(University College Cork, 2025) Turini, Jacopo; Ross, Silvia; Giuliani, Chiara; Irish Research Council
This thesis examines the articulation of spatial identity, and the sense of nationhood as expressed in Italian literature set in the Alpine border regions from the 1980s to the present. It explores how the presence of the national border, along with its related geopolitical, cultural, and social dynamics, influences Italian-language literary production and the imagined geographies created by it. Texts provide insights into the geographical spaces they represent, while geography, in turn, influences the textual representation of place and spatial identity. Employing a geo-literary approach developed at the intersection of Literary Geography and Geocriticism, this study investigates how national, regional, and local belonging is expressed in selected works set in three Alpine border regions, in relation to the geo-social transformations that have occurred since the 1980s. These regions are the Piedmontese and Ligurian valleys along the Franco-Italian border, the Canton Ticino in Italian-speaking Switzerland, and the multilingual autonomous Italian region of South Tyrol. My geo-literary analysis identifies three types of textual geographies, that is, what emerges from the intersection of the places represented in the texts and the geographical contexts in which these texts are produced. Consequently, the thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1, on the Franco-Italian border, focuses on what I term geographies of transgression. Through the analysis of Vento largo (1991) and Le parole la notte (1998) by Francesco Biamonti, Il mangiatore di pietre (2004) by Davide Longo, and Un viaggio che non promettiamo breve (2016) by Wu Ming 1, the chapter explores how representations of the areas’ traditional transnational identity become tools to address geopolitical and environmental issues and challenge the normative geographies of the nation-state. Chapter 2 examines the Canton Ticino in Italian-speaking Switzerland, analysing Adrea Fazioli’s crime fiction novels L’uomo senza casa (2008), La sparizione (2010), Gli svizzeri muoiono felici (2018), and Le strade oscure (2022); Alberto Nessi’s poetry, and his novel Tutti discendono (2000); and Fabio Pusterla’s poetry, beginning with his debut collection Concessione all’inverno (1985). Their representation of the industrialised and globalised border area between Italy and Switzerland delineates geographies of ambivalence, as I have labelled them, which reflect the region’s cultural marginality and, at the same time, express tension between rootedness and displacement. Chapter 3 focuses on South Tyrol through Francesca Melandri’s Eva dorme (2010), Maddalena Fingerle’s Lingua madre (2021), and Luca D’Andrea’s La sostanza del male (2016). The three writers’ relationship with the region is developed through what I have called geographies of detachment, which reflect a deliberate effort to distance themselves and their work from cultural isolationism and ethnonationalist localism, while critiquing the region’s rigid linguistic boundaries. The Italian Alps represent a complex border zone – sometimes porous and open, at other times closed and isolationist. The findings of this study reveal that the national border is addressed in contemporary Italian literature primarily through local and regional perspectives strongly tied to the experiences of autochthonous communities. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the Alpine borders are a crucial site for examining the tension between change and resistance in the evolution of Italian spatial identities and the sense of cultural and national belonging.
‘Poeta che mi guidi’: Dantean afterlives in the poetry of Giorgio Caproni, Antonia Pozzi, Vittorio Sereni and Mario Luzi
(University College Cork, 2024) Galassini, Dario; O'Connell, Daragh; Irish Research Council
This study explores the enduring influence of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia on Italian literature and culture by focusing on episodes of readerly engagement and literary appropriation in the practices of four middle-generation poets (Moliterni 2021), all born between 1912 and 1914: Giorgio Caproni, Antonia Pozzi, Vittorio Sereni and Mario Luzi. The central argument of this study is that the four authors, who represent a cohesive poetic group within the generation itself for a variety of reasons, stand out as particularly exemplary and influential agents of the creative reception of Dantean poetics in the twentieth-century Italian literary panorama. The contribution aligns with Coolahan’s definition of reception (2020) to assess Dante’s impact on the manifold poetic developments of the Italian Novecento. Its fundamental research questions address matters of poetic influence, canon formation and literary monumentality. Rather than focusing on the poets individually, the project works on and further develops existing lines of contact between one another to explore transversal evolutionary trajectories that manifested consistently throughout the century. It centres on three main case studies that shed light on different understandings and modalities of engagement with the Commedia. Particular attention is dedicated to the poet Antonia Pozzi, who stands out for her significant marginalisation and consequently scarce literary recognition accorded to her, even in academic contexts. In this study, her engagement with Dante’s works is not only studied in relation to her own poetic production but also investigated via her personal Dante volumes as collected in her private library – either primary texts or secondary literature on the Medieval author. The study of the many marginalia in such texts proves informative of both her engagement with Dante and the school system that was in place in Italy during the 1920s as well as the contemporary debate on arts and humanities. Her poetic oeuvre, which has hitherto never been studied in relation to Dante, showcases interesting traces of the Dantean model. Pozzi responded to the Commedia in a personal way, most frequently elaborating on its central archetype of the journey, declined either in its infernal connotations or as a purgatorial ascent. The second case study of this contribution looks at the poetic works of the four authors as they modelled a new poetic form that opened to inclusiveness (Montale 1964). Pozzi is presented in her role as a forerunner of some of the century’s most important instances in terms of poetic linguistic advancements, with correlated implications on the positioning of the poetic Self. The study demonstrates how Dante played a pivotal role in shaping such poetic transformative experiences, proposing an inclusive textual model that can welcome dialogues and other prose elements. This shift eventually allowed twentieth-century poetry to dismiss the prevailing arguments of idealist thinking and its corollary of artistic effects with the predominance of lyrical and Hermetic stylemes. The study concludes by further analysing the nature of the new poetic Self as shaped by such inclusive poetry fashioned on the Dantean rather than the Petrarchan literary model. Drawing from socio-cultural readings of modernity that address episodes of permanent liminality (Szakolczai 2000, 2017) and the crisis of presence (De Martino 1956, 1973), selected poems of the authors elucidate the appropriations of the Dantean dichotomy of body and shade as well as the role of light as a dehumanising agent. Not only did the Commedia’s dialogic and plurilinguistic character help them frame a new poetic diction, but it ultimately granted them an image reservoir to draw from to represent best a new poetic Self that cannot describe its identity and can only thrive in an in-between position, as neither human nor non-human.
L’infante, la donna, la bestia: un’analisi ecocritica degli incontri non umani in Federigo Tozzi, Dino Buzzati, Anna Maria Ortese
(University College Cork, 2023) Ceravolo, Marco; Ross, Silvia; Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology
The authorial connections between Federigo Tozzi, Dino Buzzati and Anna Maria Ortese are notable and varied. Linked by a fervent animalistic and, in the case of the latter two, also environmentalist spirit, the non-human plays a central role in the works of the authors, who represent natural entities, animals, or fantastic creatures as narrative archetypes of universal pain. This thesis investigates the encounters between the human and the nonhuman in the works of Tozzi, Buzzati, and Ortese with the aim of answering the questions “what does otherness represent for the authors?”, and “how is this 'other' portrayed in their novels, short stories, and journalistic writings?”. To tackle these issues, my analysis considers three thematic areas, namely the representation of the child, the woman, and the beast, categories united by a perception of inferiority, and thus of marginalization, in a purely patriarchal social context. In the three chapters, one per individual author, the investigation of the three principal thematic areas makes use of a range of critical theories such as Ecocriticism (Garrard, Buell, Wolfe, Iovino), Animal Studies (Derrida, Cimatti, Regan, Singer), Ecofeminism (Warren, Adams, Plumwood, Ruether) and Children's Studies (Freud, Joosen, Khan, Kellert). In the works of the three authors, the animal is portrayed as abused, castrated, and killed, and this confirms how, due to a lack of logos, the nonhuman can be easily subjugated in human society. On other occasions, the animal, as a model of otherness, is acknowledged by the authors as a fragile entity, and thus in need of protection or defense. However, animality also serves the function of representing human figures through animalistic characteristics, or portraying characters who are placed on the same social scale as beasts enslaved to man: namely, women and children. Therefore, after having traced the narrative archetypes and symbolic connections between the child, the woman, and the animal in selected works of Tozzi, Buzzati and Ortese, the last part of the respective chapters addresses the salient themes of the three authors' attitude towards animals from an ethical-moral perspective. In the case of Tozzi, I analyze texts that draw upon his strong influence by nonhuman agents. For Ortese and Buzzati, I consider a selection of the authors’ militant journalistic production which advocates for the protection of those who have no voice to denounce their own oppression, existential imperatives of an ethical-moral order which constitute the critical building blocks of their animalist spirit. The conclusions highlight the connections between the authors through the three thematic cores examined (child, woman, and beast), and trace the positioning of the nonhuman in the authorial imaginary of Tozzi, Buzzati and Ortese, authors who are only seemingly dissimilar, but who are linked, instead, by a profound, indissoluble interest in the other.

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