Italian

Across time the Mediterranean has been a zone of variable intensities, alliances and tensions: it is where the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia meet, it is where North faces South in an asymmetrical relationship. Its histories—of Greece and Rome, of Christianity and Islam, of modernity and tradition—have evolved through exploration, trade, pilgrimage, imperial expansion, imaginings, vacation and migration. Travellers to this compelling region have recorded their journeys and their encounters with the Other in a variety of modes that have also revealed as much about themselves. Written by leading scholars in the field, this collection analyzes the notion of travel writing as a genre, while tracing significant examples of Mediterranean travel writing that return us to Ancient Greece, to Medieval pilgrimages, to Venetians’ diplomatic missions, to an Egyptian’s account of Paris in the nineteenth century, to French artistic journeys in North Africa and to contemporary narratives of privileged resettlement, death, and dislocation.

This conference will explore the theme of resistance in Italy looking at the literature, politics and aesthetics of innovation and subversion in Italian culture from Dante to the present. Whilst we hope to re-examine what one might designate as the classical Resistance (1943-45), we are equally interested in examining the ideas and practices challenging domineering tradition, illegitimate power and status hierarchies from early modern Italy up to now.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/languages/newsandevents/italianstudiesconference

Nato dalla sinergia tra studiose/i, attiviste/i, scrittrici e scrittori, il presente volume si propone come spazio aperto a una riflessione interdisciplinare sulle modalità discorsive impiegate per la rappresentazione della violenza di genere nel contesto letterario, cinematografico, teatrale e mediatico dell’Italia del terzo millennio.

As a physical space of habitation, dwellings may take many forms, such as houses,
castles, apartments, convents, caravans, huts, or barges. Moreover, dwelling – both noun
and verb – implies a certain ‘staying put’ or even permanence. Dwelling might then be a
state of rootedness and safety, the opposite of temporary spaces such as refugee camps,
prisons, and hospitals.
Space is a dimension that permits the formation of places, which for geographer
Doreen Massey (1994) has multiple non-static identities. A place within a space can
harmonize or clash with its surroundings. For Bachelard (1961), places and spaces
are tied to identity-formation via an architectural engagement with dwellings. As
a space of intimacy, a dwelling can constitute a ‘cosmos’ of the self, and it could be
explored through topographical surveys or mappings of the paraphernalia, ambiances,
memories, and imaginaries of living, as in the fiction and non-fiction of Georges Perec.
Exploring dwelling as a relationship with space, Bourdieu’s work on the ‘Berber house’
(1970) questions the modernist idea of space as nothingness or void. Heidegger’s
‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1954), an essential text for modern architecture, links
human inscapes with the (im)material realities of building and dwelling. For the
dweller, the relation to space and place entails simultaneously a withdrawal into a
demarcated space for shelter and the creation of a sense of belonging.
Humanity’s sense of place and space has never been more prominent than it is today.
The COVID-19 pandemic has confined many people to cramped urban dwellings or
inhospitable spaces (e.g., quarantine hotels), turned homes into offices, and changed
the topography of everyday life. This crisis, along with economic inequalities, climate
change, and mass migration events, confirms the need for a radical reassessment of
sustainable human dwelling on earth. This Symposium will engage in creative and
critical discussion on dwelling in both the verbal and the nominal sense and on how we
live or wish to live in the world.

The coming of age genre has long been a male-dominated tradition (Lazzaro-Weiss 1990), but—as a consequence of the great success of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend tetralogy (2011-2014)—topics such girlhood and female friendship have begun to gain greater visibility in literature and the media. The issue aims to explore the ways in which female youth has been represented in modern and contemporary Italian cultural production before and after Ferrante’s novels. How have girls and young women been portrayed through the decades? Have the ways of representation changed based on social role models?

The World Wars are two historical events that were characterized by an abundance of documents written by individuals. The upsurge of popular writings concerned all the countries that were involved in both Wars. These documents are important both historically and linguistically. The study of war writings has always been extremely important but it has been characterized by a new vigour due to the recent centenary of the First World War, and because of the emergence of new theories, such as gender and conflict theories, or the development of new tools, for example the Digital Humanities.

Our aim is to take stock of the state of studies on war writing at the turn of the two world wars.

The focus of this conference is to start from a comparative and multilingual perspective and then move on to the specific case of Italy. These two days of study form part of the MSCA-funded project Last Letters from the World Wars: Forming Italian Language, Identity and Memory in Texts of Conflict that will be presented during the event.

The first day will be devoted to English-language contributions on European war writing. We would like to propose an overview of war writings in European countries in several languages such as English, French, Spanish, Irish, etc. for the first day. The subsequent day will be dedicated to Italian studies and papers in both English and Italian will be accepted.