- Charles Leavitt
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Notre Dame
343 O'Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, IN, USA 46556-5639 - 1-574-631-6886
Charles Leavitt
University of Notre Dame, Romance Languages and Literatures, Faculty Member
- University of Reading, Modern Languages and European Studies, Faculty Memberadd
- Postwar Italian Culture, Modern Italian Literature, Italian neorealist cinema, Italian Literature, Italian (European History), 20th Century Italian Literature, and 37 moreElio Vittorini, Elsa Morante, Cesare Pavese, Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Neo-realist film, Italian Antifascist Culture, Italian Cultural Studies, Modern Italian History, Corrado Alvaro, Romano Bilenchi, Italian Cinema, Alberto Moravia, Vasco Pratolini, Italian Film, Italian cinema (Film Studies), Italo Calvino, Italian Resistance Literature, Benedetto Croce, Emilio Cecchi, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Italianistica, Alfonso Gatto, Impegno, Italian intellectuals, Francesco Jovine, Ignazio Silone, Carlo Lizzani, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Renato Serra, Italian Neorealism, (Italian) Colonialism and Postcolonialism, Ennio Flaiano, Allied occupation of Italy, and Sociologyedit
- I am Associate Professor of Italian and Film and Associate Director of the Center for Italian Studies at the Universi... moreI am Associate Professor of Italian and Film and Associate Director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. I am also a Research Fellow of the University of Reading, UK, and a Fellow of both the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
My first book, Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History was awarded the 2020 prize in Film and Media Studies by the American Association of Italian Studies. [https://utorontopress.com/9781487507107/] My research interests include modern and contemporary Italian literature and cinema, post-war Italian history, and the intersections between the Italian and African-American experience.
A fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy, I have received an Outstanding Contribution to Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Reading and a Kaneb Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award from the University of Notre Dame.edit
Neorealism emerged as a cultural exchange and a field of discourse that served to shift the confines of creativity and revise the terms of artistic expression not only in Italy but worldwide. If neorealism was thus a global phenomenon, it... more
Neorealism emerged as a cultural exchange and a field of discourse that served to shift the confines of creativity and revise the terms of artistic expression not only in Italy but worldwide. If neorealism was thus a global phenomenon, it is because of its revolutionary portrayal of a transformative moment in the local, regional, and national histories of Italy. At once guiding and guided by that transformative moment, neorealist texts took up, reflected, and performed the contentious conditions of their creation, not just at the level of narrative content but also in their form, language, and structure. Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History demonstrates how they did so through a series of representative case studies. Recounting the history of a generation of artists, this study offers fundamental insights into one of the most innovative and influential cultural moments of the twentieth century.
Research Interests: Cultural History, Film Studies, European Cinema, Modern Italian History, Italian Studies, and 15 moreLiterature and cinema, Italian Literature, Italian Cinema, Film History, Modernism, Cinema, Italo Calvino, Italian neorealist cinema, Film and Media Studies, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Neorealism, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Elio Vittorini, and Italian Neorealism
Gian Paolo Callegari's prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone in Italy's response to the Holocaust. Among the earliest Italian creative works to confront the genocide of the European Jews, Callegari's... more
Gian Paolo Callegari's prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone in Italy's response to the Holocaust. Among the earliest Italian creative works to confront the genocide of the European Jews, Callegari's play challenged the legacies of anti-Semitism in European culture. Yet it also concealed the troubling history of its author's own Fascist anti-Semitism. Exploring this apparent paradox, the present essay situates both play and playwright in the postwar Italian context. I argue that Cristo ha ucciso makes possible a substantial reconsideration of the public reckoning that attended news of the liberation of the death camps. This is because, with its provocative claim that Christian forgiveness had to be abandoned as an impediment to justice, Callegari's play offered a radical alternative to the Christian humanist framework predominant in Italian narratives of the Second World War.
Research Interests: Theatre Studies, Jewish Studies, Modern Italian History, Italian Studies, Fascism, and 15 moreJewish - Christian Relations, Holocaust Studies, Anti-Semitism, 20th Century Italian Literature, Modern Jewish History, Italian fascism, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Calabria, Passion, Fascist propaganda, Jesus Christ, Ebraismo, Christian Studies, and Fascismo
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In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of... more
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of authors including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that postwar Italian intellectual impegno – defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform – was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated “myth of America” that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.
Research Interests: Comparative Literature, Translation Studies, Italian Studies, African American Literature, African American Studies, and 15 moreItalo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Langston Hughes, Italian fascism, Richard Wright, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Letterature comparate, Elio Vittorini, Letteratura italiana, W.E.B. Du Bois, Giorgio Caproni, Fascismo, Traduzione, Letteratura Italiana Del Novecento, and Novecento Italiano
This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the Italian reception of German Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s and explores their role in the development of Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. I argue that, precisely... more
This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the
Italian reception of German Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s and explores their role in the development of Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. I argue that, precisely because Italian critics approached the German critical category – and indeed all critical categorisation – with scepticism, they facilitated the more indiscriminate use in Italian of the term «neorealismo», which originated, at least in part, as a calque for the German «Neue Sachlichkeit», but which came eventually to constitute a distinct – and distinctly Italian – critical category. Focusing in particular on Giovanni Necco’s 1933 essay Neorealismo made in Germany, I argue that, in the Italian context, questions of classification and definition were deemed
peripheral to the critic’s task, meaning that references to «neorealismo», while customary, remained largely heuristic. As a result, Italian «neorealismo» was free gradually to shift and to expand towards its current definitions.
Italian reception of German Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s and explores their role in the development of Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. I argue that, precisely because Italian critics approached the German critical category – and indeed all critical categorisation – with scepticism, they facilitated the more indiscriminate use in Italian of the term «neorealismo», which originated, at least in part, as a calque for the German «Neue Sachlichkeit», but which came eventually to constitute a distinct – and distinctly Italian – critical category. Focusing in particular on Giovanni Necco’s 1933 essay Neorealismo made in Germany, I argue that, in the Italian context, questions of classification and definition were deemed
peripheral to the critic’s task, meaning that references to «neorealismo», while customary, remained largely heuristic. As a result, Italian «neorealismo» was free gradually to shift and to expand towards its current definitions.
Research Interests: Translation Studies, Modernism (Literature), Translation theory, Italian Cultural Studies, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), and 15 moreItalian Cinema, Modernism (Art History), 20th Century Italian Literature, Translation, Modern Germany, Italian neorealist cinema, Benedetto Croce, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Neorealism, Neue Sachlichkeit / New vision, Giorgio de Chirico, Italian Neorealism, Letteratura Italiana Del Novecento, Letteratura italiana contemporanea, and Novecento Italiano
Among the most iconic images in world cinema, the final shot of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945) has inspired an effusion of critical commentary but little critical consensus, instead giving rise to opposing... more
Among the most iconic images in world cinema, the final shot of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945) has inspired an effusion of critical commentary but little critical consensus, instead giving rise to opposing interpretations. I argue that the shot, in which the camera pans to follow a band of children as they march on a hillside overlooking the city of Rome, was shaped by a post-war dispute over the fate of Italian children after Fascism. Re-educating and re-claiming these children was felt to be one of the most pressing tasks facing Italy after the war, and I argue that it was this task that Rossellini and his collaborators sought to represent and even to undertake in their film. Thanks to their efforts, the final shot of Rome, Open City facilitated both a compelling confrontation with Italy’s Fascist past and a convincing – if far from straightforward – vision of its post-war future.
Research Interests: Film Studies, Film Analysis, Post-conflict Reconstruction and Development, Italian Cinema, Film History, and 15 moreChildren and War, Italian cinema (Film Studies), Italian neorealist cinema, Italian Resistance to Fascism & its interpretation, Italian fascism, Postwar reconstruction, Postwar Italy, Roberto Rossellini, Resistenza italiana, Storia Del Cinema Italiano, Antifascism, Antifascismo, Postwar Europe, Federico Fellini, and Italian Neorealism
This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty,... more
This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty, Italians increasingly dissented from Croce, but they remained more wedded to Crocean thought – and in particular to Crocean historicism – than has often been argued. Like their predecessors in previous generations, post-war Italian intellectuals positioned themselves dialogically, in constant conversation with Croce’s hegemonic philosophy. The antecedents of their reaction against Crocean historicism can therefore be identified in earlier responses to Croce’s thought, and in this essay I examine two such responses: those of Antonio Gramsci and Renato Serra. I also examine the contemporary resonances of the (partial) anti-Crocean turn, exemplified by a consequential 1992 debate over Holocaust historiography pitting Carlo Ginzburg against Hayden White. Comparing these various assaults on the ‘Crocean citadel of historicist idealism’, I argue that the challenge to Croce has been posed most cogently by those whose dissent from his dominant intellectual paradigm was inspired not by outright opposition but rather by doubt and scepticism. In the essay’s conclusion, I explore the significance of such scepticism, exemplified by the post-war critique of Crocean historicism, for the ongoing debates over ‘probing the limits of representation’.
Research Interests: Idealism, Historicism, Fascism, Second World War, Holocaust Studies, and 37 moreMicrohistory, Antonio Gramsci, Second World War (History), Leo Tolstoy, Hayden White, Norberto Bobbio, Holocaust, Giovanni Papini, Italian fascism, Positivismo, Benedetto Croce, Positivism, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Postwar Italian Culture, Italo-Turkish war (1911-12), Idealismo, Postwar Italy, Franco Fortini, Carlo Ginzburg, Giacomo Debenedetti, Gianfranco Contini, Renato Serra, Fabrizio Onofri, Shoah in Italy, Storicismo, Postwar Europe, Gaetano Salvemini, Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Luigi Russo, Saul Friedländer, Guerra Di Libia 1911 2011, Sapegno Natalino, Seconda Guerra Mondiale, Massimo Mila, Italian Postwar History, Cesare Luporini, and Gabriele Pepe
Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the... more
Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the interrelation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.
Research Interests: Italian (European History), Modern Italian History, Italian Studies, Italian Cultural Studies, Italian Literature, and 19 moreMetaphor, 20th Century Italian Literature, Cesare Pavese, Eugenio Montale, George Lakoff, Italian Political Thought, Italian fascism, Italian Antifascist Culture, Benedetto Croce, Umberto Saba, Postwar Italian Culture, Modern Italy, Carlo Levi, Postwar Italy, Roberto Rossellini, Elio Vittorini, Cesare Zavattini, Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Culture, and 20th Century Italian Cultural History
In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies,... more
In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies, shaping critical approaches to Boccaccio for decades after 1945. Reading scholarly and critical studies of Boccaccio alongside the Neorealist debates, I assert that throughout the second half of the twentieth century Boccaccio’s poetics were frequently discussed in a language borrowed from Neorealism, with his corpus evaluated by means of the standards endorsed by Neorealist critics. Just as Boccaccio’s poetics exerted an influence on the proponents of Neorealism, therefore, so too did Neorealism exert a lasting influence on Boccaccio scholarship, whose notions of Boccaccio’s ‘medieval realism’ should be seen as an outgrowth of the Neorealist poetics advocated by post-war Italian artists and intellectuals.
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In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of... more
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Translation Studies, Italian (European History), and 82 moreModern Italian History, Italian Studies, Translation and Ideology, Transnationalism, Postcolonial Studies, Race and Racism, Fascism, African American Literature, Italian Cultural Studies, Italian Literature, Italian Politics, Translation History, Italy (History), Racism, African American Culture, Second World War, Black Europe, African American History, Postcolonial Theory, African-American Literature, Civil Rights Movement, African American Studies, World Literature, Postcolonial Literature, World War II, 20th Century Italian Literature, Translation and literature, Translation and Interpretation, Italo Calvino, African-American History, Translation, Cesare Pavese, 20th Century African American Literature, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Anti-Racism, Anti-Fascism, Italian American Studies, Italy, Italian language and Literature, Literary translation, Italian Resistance to Fascism & its interpretation, Italian colonialism, Blackness, Cultural policy under Fascism, Italian fascism, Italian, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Italo Calvino as translator, History of Fascism, African-American Political Thought, Translation & Italian, Italian Litterature, Modern Italian Literature, Letteratura, Black Studies (in Europe), Emilio Cecchi, African-American Studies, African American Cultures, Razzismo, Letterature comparate, Elio Vittorini, Italiano, Letteratura italiana, Translating Italian to English, (Italian) Colonialism and Postcolonialism, W.E.B. Du Bois, Giorgio Caproni, Fascismo, Italian intellectuals, African American and African Studies/History, Impegno, Weltliteratur, Italian Colonialism, Italian Resistance Literature, W.E.B. DuBois, African American Literature and History, World and Comparative Literature, Black European Studies, and African-American Heritage and Culture
Research Interests: Film Studies, European Cinema, Italian Studies, Film Analysis, Italian Cinema, and 18 moreFilm History, Cinema, Italian cinema (Film Studies), Italian neorealist cinema, Film and Media Studies, Transnational Cinema, Cinema Studies, Italian, Stardom and Celebrity, Post-war Italian cinema, Neorealism, Roberto Rossellini, Storia Del Cinema Italiano, Italianistica, Italian Neorealism, Cinema Italiano, Ingrid Bergman, and Modern Italian Studies
The author contends that many of the conventions of Italian film studies derive from the conflicts and the critical vocabulary that shaped the Italian reception of neorealism in the first decade after the Second World War. Those... more
The author contends that many of the conventions of Italian film studies derive from the conflicts and the critical vocabulary that shaped the Italian reception of neorealism in the first decade after the Second World War. Those conflicts, and that critical vocabulary, which lie at the foundation of what has been called the ‘institution of neorealism,’ established an irreconcilable binary: Cronaca and Narrativa. For the neorealists and their critics, Cronaca stood for the effort to record data faithfully, while Narrativa represented the effort to employ the shaping force of human invention in the representation of information. This essay’s first section analyzes the earliest reviews of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta alongside the contemporaneous literary debates over Cronaca and Narrativa. The second section reconsiders the reception of Pratolini’s Metello and Visconti’s Senso, which similarly centered upon the conflict between Cronaca and Narrativa. The third section proposes that the concepts which have often been employed to unify neorealism are destabilized by the Cronaca/Narrativa binary. In search of a solution to neorealism’s conceptual instability, this essay proposes more critical and purposeful appropriations of the movement’s problematic genealogy.
Research Interests: Cultural History, Philosophy, Film Theory and Practice, Film Studies, Italian Studies, and 17 moreItalian Cultural Studies, Italian Cinema, Film History, 20th Century Italian Literature, Film Aesthetics, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Italian neorealist cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Neorealism, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Elio Vittorini, Film Style, Film Narrative, History of Film Theory and Criticism, and Italian Resistance Literature
The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature's historical formulations. This essay... more
The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature's historical formulations. This essay reclaims a forgotten milestone, the 1946 essay "La 'letteratura mondiale'" by the eminent Italian philologist and comparatist Luigi Foscolo Benedetto. What Benedetto's "letteratura mondiale" theorized, and what his critical and philological writings put into practice, was a mode of oppositional reading in which cultural, historical, and ideological difference would counteract the consensus of the present in order to engender a more cosmopolitan and open society. Benedetto's work was founded upon the belief that informed engagement with the literary text-attentive to its linguistic, thematic, and cultural alterity-can produce and support a burgeoning internationalism that will be social and political as well as literary. As I read him, Benedetto contributed two central insights to the historical development of world literature, insights that remain valuable to the contemporary desire for a truly global approach to literary study. First, Benedetto was more sensitive than virtually any other theorist to the difficulties inherent in the attempt to foster an egalitarian, comprehensive, and trans-national literary methodology. Second, he was more attentive to the power dynamics of literary study than were many of his contemporaries and predecessors, and thus offers a methodology to overcome the cultural prejudices and nationalist ambitions that tend to manipulate textual analyses and literary historiographies. Benedetto's insight into the necessity for a textual engagement that is also a social engagement has become all the more relevant today as scholars work to develop new, ethical approaches to world literature, and new methodologies for reading globally.
Research Interests: World Literatures, Translation Studies, Globalization, Italian Studies, Italian Cultural Studies, and 26 moreItalian Literature, Literary Theory, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, World Literature, Italian philology, 20th Century Italian Literature, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Italian literature (Literature), Anti-Fascism, Italian language and Literature, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian fascism, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Italian Litterature, Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, Poetry, Comparative Literature, Neorealism, Modern Italian Literature, Resistenza italiana, Elio Vittorini, Letteratura italiana, Filologia Italiana, Letteratura della Resistenza, .Literature and languages, Weltliteratur, and Italian Resistance Literature
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Research Interests: Testimony, Secular Humanism, Italian Studies, Fascism, Italian Literature, and 15 moreHolocaust Studies, Anti-Semitism, 20th Century Italian Literature, Holocaust Literature, Primo Levi, Holocaust, Italian fascism, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Resistance Literature, Elio Vittorini, Antifascism, Fascismo, Letteratura Italiana Del Novecento, and Crisi Dell Uomo Contemporaneo
Largely ignored by scholarship and increasingly occluded in historical memory, Tombolo was once so central to Italian culture and politics that even allusive references to the term could conjure the doubt, anxiety, and indignation of a... more
Largely ignored by scholarship and increasingly occluded in historical memory, Tombolo was once so central to Italian culture and politics that even allusive references to the term could conjure the doubt, anxiety, and indignation of a society working to recover after the war. A pine grove located between Pisa and Livorno, Tombolo housed a large American encampment, which was both a key staging site for the Allied invasion of Italy and a centre of power for the post-war American occupation. It was also the site of a flourishing black market, rampant prostitution, and racial tensions, which combined to give it an outsized role in the Allied occupation as well as in the Italian imagination. Indeed, a mix of prurience and prejudice made Tombolo a kind of Italian obsession after the war. It became the "città proibita" or forbidden city, the subject of lurid tales of white slavery, murder, and kidnapping, money laundering, and thefts totalling billions of lire. In countless journalistic exposes, short stories, novels, and even two neorealist films-Tombolo, paradiso nero (Ferroni, 1947) and Senza pietà (Lattuada, 1948)-Tombolo was the staging ground for a cultural confrontation with the transgressions of the Second World War and the post-war occupation. As such representations made clear, violent clashes in Tombolo pitted not only American against Italian but also white against black, northern against southern, man against woman, Right against Left. In art as in life, therefore, Tombolo became the "contact zone" for the competing racial regimes of Jim Crow and Fascism, and for the resistance against those regimes: the nascent American Civil Rights movement and Italian anti-Fascism. Then it was largely-but not entirely-forgotten. I argue that, despite this willful act of collective forgetting, the contact and conflict of Tombolo substantially re-shaped both Italian and American society in the years that followed the conclusion of the Second World War.
Research Interests: African American Literature, African American History, Occupation and Resistance in WW2, Cesare Pavese, Contact zones, and 15 moreItalian fascism, Questione meridionale, US Military History, Livorno, Allied occupation of Italy, Postwar Italy, Curzio Malaparte, Giorgio Caproni, Alberto Moravia, Fascismo, Italian Southern Question, Human and Civil Rights Abuses in the U.S. Armed Forces, Buffalo Soldiers, African-American Soldiers in Italy, and Italy-USA relations
In composing The Woman of Rome (La Romana, 1948), I argue in this chapter, Moravia was attempting to redress the twinned traumas of national history and personal memory. The novel's protagonist, a Roman prostitute, serves as the symbolic... more
In composing The Woman of Rome (La Romana, 1948), I argue in this chapter, Moravia was attempting to redress the twinned traumas of national history and personal memory. The novel's protagonist, a Roman prostitute, serves as the symbolic incarnation of-as well as the developing resistance to-bourgeois corruption and Fascist coercion. An intricate intertextuality facilitates this social critique, allowing Moravia not only to reclaim his repressed memory but also to redeem it, reexamining his own experience from the prostitute's perspective. Moravia imbued his protagonist with a host of figurative associations that lent her narrative-and her narrating voice-a profoundly transformative significance. Through her, he not only reclaimed his repressed memory but also revealed the structures of bourgeois social domination and bourgeois morality. More significantly, he explored the power of literary symbolism to transcend those structures, and to dismantle them. As the subjective center of his fiction, and as the symbolic embodiment of the confluence between his remembered encounter and his intertextual exploration, the protagonist of The Woman of Rome can be said to signify Moravia's renewed commitment to unseating the established order through the unfettered representation of uncensored reality.
Research Interests: Italian Studies, Italian Literature, 20th Century Italian Literature, Daniel Defoe, Henry James, and 15 moreItalian language and Literature, Italian Resistance to Fascism & its interpretation, Italian fascism, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Italian Litterature, Lingua E Letteratura Italiana, Letteratura italiana, Alberto Moravia, Fascismo, Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Culture, Letteratura Italiana Del Novecento, Letteratura italiana contemporanea, History of Italian Fascism and Fascisms, Immagini Del Fascismo In Italia, and Guy De Maupassant
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This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain... more
This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constructed throughout history continues to inspire innovative work on virtually every period of Italian culture. Rather than accepting the many assertions of realism and the many projections of idealism that have characterized Italian culture from its beginnings, this volume aims for a critical and multi-focal assessment of manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy.
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This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain... more
This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constructed throughout history continues to inspire innovative work on virtually every period of Italian culture. Rather than accepting the many assertions of realism and the many projections of idealism that have characterized Italian culture from its beginnings, this volume aims for a critical and multi-focal assessment of manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy.
Research Interests: Cultural History, Comparative Politics, Political Philosophy, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, and 33 moreDante Studies, Dialectology, Italian Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, Narrative, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, Idealism, Literature and cinema, Poetry, Fascism, Nationalism, Petrarch, Italian Literature, Literary Theory, Giambattista Vico, Realism (Political Science), National Identity, Feminism, Italian Cinema, Second World War, Cinema, Narrative Theory, Novel, Risorgimento, Machiavelli, Realism, Benedetto Croce, Machiavellianism, Neorealism, Ennio Flaiano, Giovanni Verga, and Paolo Sorrentino
The Italianist 37.2 (2017): 133-34.
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Research Interests: Religion, Secular Humanism, Italian Studies, Italian Cinema, Italian cinema (Film Studies), and 8 moreItalian neorealist cinema, Roman Catholicism, Anti-Fascism, Italian Resistance to Fascism & its interpretation, Italian fascism, Resistenza italiana, Italian Neorealism, and Italian Fascism and the Catholic Church
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Research Interests: Italian (European History), Modern Italian History, Italian Studies, Italian Cultural Studies, Italian Literature, and 18 moreItalian Cinema, 20th Century Italian Literature, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Italian neorealist cinema, Italian Resistance to Fascism & its interpretation, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian fascism, Italian Antifascist Culture, Benedetto Croce, Umberto Saba, Neorealism, Modern Italian Literature, Italian History, Resistenza italiana, Elio Vittorini, Letteratura della Resistenza, and Italian Resistance Literature
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Alberto Moravia's 1947 novel The Woman of Rome employs a surfeit of literary symbolism to represent its protagonist, the prostitute Adriana, in which she symbolizes the superabundance of reality that had come to supplant the autho's... more
Alberto Moravia's 1947 novel The Woman of Rome employs a surfeit of literary symbolism to represent its protagonist, the prostitute Adriana, in which she symbolizes the superabundance of reality that had come to supplant the autho's bourgeois moralism.