Italian - Doctoral Theses

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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.
From literary text to digital story: an innovative approach to teaching Italian as a foreign language and an analysis of its impact on the manifestation of students’ expressive potential
(University College Cork, 2020) Lis Ventura, Sara; Chu, Mark; University College Cork
This study explores the impact on foreign language learning of an innovative pedagogical approach, one which brings together literature and digital technology. Specifically, it investigates how combining the analysis of a literary text and the creation of a multimodal composition can help students generate communicative artefacts that simultaneously adhere to the stylistic features of a specific genre and respond to personal expressive intentions. The purpose of the project is twofold. On the one hand, it intends to encourage a humanistic-holistic approach to foreign language teaching by re-establishing the role of the expressive and aesthetic functions of language and by re-focusing attention on learners as sensitive and emotional beings (Kramsch, 2006). On the other, it aims to contribute to the expansion of the concept of literacy in language education by exploring new ways of including multimodal composition in the language classroom. The study, which draws on the theoretical framework of the multiliteracies approach (Kern, 2003; Paesani, Allen & Dupuy, 2016), takes the form of a qualitative case study: eight second-year undergraduate students of Italian as foreign language were first introduced to a literary text, a mix of two genres (i.e. a recipe and an autobiographical narrative). They were instructed on the stylistic features characterizing the text and finally they were engaged in creating a multimodal composition. The last task involved producing a digital story, a short digital video based on a script of 250-350 words that combines the author’s narrative voiceover with a variety of multimedia tools, such as photographs, music, and sounds. The objectives of the research were mainly three: i) investigating the students’ multimodal orchestration practices in order to understand how their “voice” – reinterpreted here as sign of personal and emotional involvement in the meaning-making process – emerges in the digital stories; ii) exploring the impact of the combination of text-analysis and multimodal composition on the students’ development of genre awareness; and iii) examining their perception of the learning experience, in particular considering its impact on linguistic skills, intrinsic motivation, and emotional engagement. The investigation was undertaken by carrying out a multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) of the participants’ digital artefacts and a thematic analysis of their individual semi-structured interviews and reflective journals. The MDA was conducted from a social semiotic perspective and by applying the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005), an approach that aims at understanding how different resources are used by the author to construct textual personae, to manage interpersonal positionings and to negotiate and amplify emotions, judgments, and evaluations (Martin, 2000). The findings of the study show that the combination of literary text analysis and digital storytelling: i) can deeply engage students in the meaning-making processes by expanding their opportunity to manifest expressive intentions through multimodal orchestration; ii) can facilitate students’ development of genre awareness in the FL and promote the emergence of individual stylistic variations at the same time; iii) can intrinsically motivate the students, engage them on an aesthetic and emotional point of view, and be useful for developing their speaking and writing skills. Considering that due to the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic Irish higher education institutions have moved all teaching and assessment online, my study provides important insights into an approach that can be adapted and implemented in an online environment, thus offering a contribution to addressing some of the many challenges third-level language education is going to face in the next few years.
Distorted bodies: gender, sexuality and performativity in twentieth-century Italian fantasy literature
(University College Cork, 2018) O'Leary, Martina; Ross, Silvia; Cork County Council; University College Cork
Any examination of fantasy literature’s rich use of symbolic subject matter can reveal both the genre’s highly subversive potential, and its capacity to explore concepts generally perceived as off-limits, examples of which have famously been transgressive sexuality and gender expression. Simultaneously, all fields of gender studies contend that gender and sexuality are largely directed by social prompts proffering hegemonic ideals, including those exemplified through literary representations. This thesis investigates models of gender and sexuality articulated through unreal bodies in fantasy texts in order to explore and bring further insight to this unique relationship, and addresses the current paucity in Italian literary scholarship in this regard. Further, it examines whether the selected representative works spanning the twentieth century reinscribe or subvert patriarchal regulation of gender and sexuality, using fantasy genre theory (Todorov), feminist criticism (Butler), masculinity studies (Connell), queer theory (Sedgwick), ecofeminism (Plumwood) and posthumanism (Wolfe). This study explores a cross-section of twentieth-century Italian fantasy literature, given this period’s rich and active history in both the suppression and the development of gender and sexual rights and equalities. A chapter is dedicated to each of the five representative authors and a selection of their fantasy texts in order to provide an overview of the evolution of these themes in the chronological period covered. Luigi Capuana uses the trope of invisibility in his short stories “L’invisibile” (1901) and “Un vampiro” (1907) to articulate discussions on queerness and female sexuality, upholding a traditionalist attitude, as well as (unsurprisingly for his time) a general view of women and femininity as inferior. In contrast, Aldo Palazzeschi’s Il codice di Perelà (1911) and Stefanino (1969) treat femininity as a positive attribute in male characters. These works also explore sexuality, but with a progressive (though coded) aim, in developing compassion towards dissident sexualities. Italo Calvino’s fantasy trilogy I nostri antenati (1960) yields a fruitful discussion of masculinity, advocating lightness as a beneficial characteristic to be embraced, though the author utilizes other feminine traits to demonize male characters, and his portrayals of women and girls in general are found to be one dimensional – particularly in how they do not search for meaning, or attempt to understand the complexities of existence, as their male counterparts do, but are simply rewards for men. Anna Maria Ortese’s L’Iguana (1965) serves a specific goal of addressing various forms of oppression in society; her use of anthropomorphic characters in this and other works calls for reform in the treatment of groups marginalized due to sex, race and social class, utilizing the trope of the animal to identify modes of othering. Paola Capriolo’s collection of short stories, La grande Eulalia (1988), is heavily populated with central female characters, and problematizes the objectification of women, by contrasting the injurious outcomes of female characters’ submission to the male gaze, and their subsequent domination, with the favourable results that ensue upon resistance to such control. Though the discussions implicit within the bodily representations take issue with misogyny, Capriolo negates her association with feminist objectives, revealing the genre’s potential as a covert means by which to transmute standardized attitudes and prejudices, whether intentionally or not. This research aims to expand recognition of the fantasy genre’s potential influence and reach in how it communicates ideals and perspectives through subtle yet powerful symbolism, and to substantiate scholarly attention to and interest in the genre’s scope in this regard. An increased understanding of the poetics utilized to shape such identities and standards can, at the very least, inform an approach that questions the validity and appropriateness of literary instruction on social behaviours, and its influence in shaping the status quo. This exploration may, however, also raise active awareness of the little-acknowledged contribution effectuated by the modern Italian fantasy genre in the formation, or re-formation, of social norms and regulations on the body, gender and sexuality.

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