Eleonora Rao

Critics have often wondered why Woolf set this novel of English manners in a South American town, rather than in the London where she herself lived, and from which most of its characters come. Her diaries record an acute awareness of the way in which the unfamiliarity of a foreign country may lead the travellers to cast a critical perspective on their own accepted cultural habits and customs. The protagonist’s physical and spiritual voyage involves such a process.In addition travel and, as a consequence, movement suggest crossing cultural boundaries, trespassing, visiting, and capture; travel and displacement stage encounters with caste and division as well as with other significant and signifying barriers. Cultural dislocation foregrounds maps and mapping; maps represent barriers we know we are crossing, and often we are compelled to redraw the borderlines. Such a process may imply a necessity to search for alternatives modes of signification: a new place is an opportunity for cross-thinking, out of which something different may emerge, something that transforms, transvalues, and translates

Questions of genre, identity and female subjectivity comprise the focus of this comprehensive study of the contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. It explores the literary sense of the plurality of genres and narrative styles present throughout Atwood's published fiction, with the purpose of analyzing the revisitation of historical and canonical forms. The narrative possibilities inherent to specific genres constitute the basis of an examination of representations of selfhood in the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity that define the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process. Atwood's work proposes a gendered vision of subjectivity, wherein woman is characterized by a multiplicity of roles and subjective positions. Atwood's delineations of the marginality and polyvalency of her female characters are discussed in relation to sexual politics and gender difference. Of primary importance to the study is the texts' emphasi...

Il volume, concepito in onore di Maria Teresa Chialant, raccoglie 29 saggi che offrono un variegato itinerario interpretativo attraverso le forme del narrare, della rappresentazione scenica e della parola poetica, sia nel contesto della letteratura inglese e nordamericana che in quello delle letterature anglofone. A fare da filo rosso fra i diversi contributi è l'attenzione per i feneri dell'enunciazione letteraria, sui quali viene svolta una riflessione prevalentemente orientata a indagare la complessa relazione che 'il sistema dei generi' istituisce con la nozione di 'gender', intesa come categoria di analisi del fatto letterario, Pur nella varietà delel metodologie adottate, la cornice di riferimento per la gran parte dei contributi è l'orizzonte teorico inaugurato dalla critica femminista e dai studi di genere negli ultimi trent'anni del Novecento. I saggi, distribuiti in quattro sezioni, disegnano una fitta trama di percorsi letterari e intrecci culturali che spaziano dall'età di Shakespeare alla contemporaneità, ma investono anche l'esperienza del tradurre, esplorata alla luce del rapporto fra 'gender' e traduzione

Il titolo del libro che qui si offre allo studio e al dibattito contiene gi\ue0 I semi dell\u2019analisi complessiva: una riflessione di taglio culturalista sul periodo pi\uf9 recente della vita culturale in Gran Bretagna, un\u2019epoca di profonde trasformazioni e inattesi ibridismi. Il discorso parte da premesse metodologiche ben definite e si radica nella consapevolezza degli eventi storici e della loro portata innovativa. Esso conduce il lettore attraverso una rassegna di testi di significativa rilevanza politica e culturale , suggerendo strategie flessibili per la comprensione della contemporaneit\ue0 e mirate all\u2019elaborazione di un\u2019azione pratica nelle interrelazioni del mondo globale. Dotati di utili apparati bibliografici e storiografici, il libro si configura come uno strumento aperto a usi e applicazioni molteplici, sempre sotto il profilo degli studi culturali. PAROLE CHIAVE: Englishness, Britishness, Cultural Studies, cultura, societ\ue0, Storia/storie, Gran Bretagna, ibridazione, trasformazion

An arbitrary choice then, a definitive moment: October 23, 1990. It's a bright clear day, unseasonably warm. It's a Tuesday [...]. The sun moves into Scorpio, Tony has lunch at the Toxique with her two friends Roz arid Charis, a sUght breeze blows in over Lake Ontario, and Zenia returns from the dead (RB 4).This quote is from Margaret Atwood's 1993 novel The Robber Bride in which there is a character, Zenia, that mysteriously comes back from the world of the dead to that of the Uving. Burkhard Niederhoff makes very interesting and appropriate references to various returns from the dead in Atwood's narrative prose, including The Tent. Regarding her poetry, he notes a stubborn refusal "to be buried" in The Animals in that Country (1968) as well as Moodie's last meditations from underground, in The Journals of Susanna Moodie's final poem (1970).The starting point of his discussion are three texts by Atwood, one work of fiction, namely Surfacing (1972),...

This essay presents a synthesis of different conceptual approaches to the issue of cross-cultural experiences and contact-zones among cultures and languages, with a special emphasis on the importance of spaces of “crossing.” Through these critical lenses, national identity becomes a fluid concept, and borders are redefined as necessary but at the same time also shifting. The idea of “navigation” is here a key to working within a framework that simultaneously posits norms of identity and opens national identity up to discontinuity and displacement. The uneasy articulation of multiple figurations of displaced identities is key to the question of crossing linguistic and cultural borders.

Canadian literature written in English is now of age. Or so it would seem from the fact that this is the second of two volumes of the prestigious series Cambridge Companions to have been devoted to it in a fairly short time. First came The Cambridge Companion to Canadian ...

This essay discusses the two novels in question through the lens of intertextuality (visual arts, XIX century literature, fairy tales) and Lacanian pychoanalytic theory. The latter locates a connection between bodily fragments and the dissolving ego. Fragmentation discontinuity and contradictions in Atwood’s narrative are suggestive of a sense of lack of a rationalizing and unifying entry at work in the text. As a result the novels’ fragmented structures suggest the fragmented nature of subjectivity. *The Handmaid’s Tale* in particular is described as an example of “historiographic metafiction” as the gaps and ambiguities of the protagonist’s tale and its emphasis on being a ‘story’ suggest the impossibility of full representation

This paper discusses firstly, the  poetical space of celebrated American poet Adrienne Rich who died in March 2012, at the age of 82. The analysis focuses on Rich’s complex  figurations of female subjectivity as well as on her nuanced positions in relation to the public role of the poet today. Rich’s attention to the political dimension did not exclude intimate reflections on personal relationships and on their modalities. In this respect her poetry is close to another important lesbian author, the poet laureate Coral Ann Duffy. In The World’s Wife (1999), Carol Ann Duffy presents thirty sketches of famed men from both history and mythology by their wives. Each wife extols or criticizes her own husband in a combination of sarcasm and sentimentalism, with peaks of  extreme bitterness and self-pity. Such singular and irreverent feminine versions show a series of references to the animal world. As a matter of fact, Duffy creates a downright vast and varied bestiary, which focuses on th...

This essay presents a synthesis of different conceptual approaches to the issue of cross-cultural experiences and contact-zones among cultures and languages, with a special emphasis on the importance of spaces of " crossing. " Through these critical lenses, national identity becomes a fluid concept, and borders are redefined as necessary but at the same time also shifting. The idea of " navigation " is here a key to working within a framework that simultaneously posits norms of identity and opens national identity up to discontinuity and displacement. The uneasy articulation of multiple figurations of displaced identities is key to the question of crossing linguistic and cultural borders.

Alice Kaplan's memoir French Lessons (1993) is a story that deals as much with the issue of language learning as with that of cultural belonging(s). This " language memoir, " as it is typical of this sub-genre, is an intimate tale of the transition between languages and cultures. French Lessons recounts her evolving relationship with French language and culture in various phases of her life: starting from childhood, continuing through her graduate student years at Yale and finally as professor of French at Duke. Soon, however, in this unconventional Bildung, the second language turns out to be a verbal safe-house, an instant refuge when her first language and culture happen to be too uncomfortable. Ultimately, French provides a psychic space and a hiding place. Ultimately, however, as Derrida has shown, we are alienated from both the first and the second; we find ourselves to be more comfortable in one than in the other. This essay will analyze such processes with special attention to the part played by the body in Kaplan's building as a student and eventually as a teacher. The analysis will be linked with the text's peculiar narrative style: fast-paced, with simple, concise sentences, nevertheless extremely effective and moving.