Books by Beatrice Sica
Il libro prende in esame l’antologia di racconti novecenteschi Italie magique curata da Gianfranc... more Il libro prende in esame l’antologia di racconti novecenteschi Italie magique curata da Gianfranco Contini e pubblicata per la prima volta in francese nel 1946. A partire dalle poche, densissime righe che Contini scrisse per introdurre presso i lettori francofoni la sua scelta di autori italiani, e guardando attentamente ai riferimenti culturali che esse contengono, Beatrice Sica svolge un’indagine sull’uso della categoria di «magico» in Italia e in Francia nella critica letteraria e artistica tra le due guerre. Dall'analisi del retroterra culturale che porta alla compilazione di Italie magique emerge un panorama internazionale ricco di incontri e scontri sulla nozione di «magia» in letteratura e in arte, che permette di avanzare una nuova interpretazione del libro di Contini: non semplicemente, come sostiene la vulgata critica, un’antologia di racconti fantastici che precorreva di decenni la riscoperta di questo genere letterario e nel 1946, slegata dal suo contesto storico, andava controcorrente rispetto alla temperie neorealista, bensì il tentativo di aggiornare i termini del dibattito culturale italo-francese svoltosi dal primo dopoguerra in poi sulla base delle nuove esigenze resistenziali ed esistenziali poste dal secondo conflitto. Contini mirava così a inserire la cultura italiana, appena uscita dalla dittatura fascista, in un più ampio panorama europeo, creando un ponte tra Italia ed Europa, tra passato e futuro.
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Poesia surrealista italiana traccia un percorso del surreale all’interno della nostra produzione ... more Poesia surrealista italiana traccia un percorso del surreale all’interno della nostra produzione in versi novecentesca, dando finalmente corpo a un’idea critica finora soltanto accarezzata cursoriamente o invece decisamente respinta: quella di un surrealismo poetico in Italia. In assenza di un movimento surrealista italiano paragonabile a quello francese, e quindi di un corpus criticamente accettato e riconosciuto a cui potersi rifare più o meno pacificamente, Beatrice Sica ha per la prima volta riunito in questa antologia testi che rispondono a un’ipotesi surrealistica come poteva essere praticata in Italia, tra le resistenze di una tradizione classicista e le controspinte razionalizzanti della grammatica e del canto della lingua italiana. Le poesie raccolte qui, anche se non sempre mostrano di liberarsi completamente dalle catene della saggezza italica, sono accomunate dall’abbandono al flusso automatico della parola e dalla ricerca del sogno, dell’inconscio, del delirio linguistico e dell’assenza di controllo formale, in modi ogni volta diversi e con risultati comunque notevoli. Si va dal 1909 al 1969, cioè dall’inizio dell’avventura futurista fino all’esaurirsi della spinta neoavanguardista, passando per l’esperienza dell’ermetismo. Precede i testi uno studio attento dei rapporti della critica italiana con il surrealismo francese, dalla nascita del movimento di Breton fino ad oggi. In esso si ripercorre per la prima volta interamente la storia dell’attrazione-repulsione verso le sollecitazioni surrealiste, facendo il punto sulle difficoltà di questa relazione e sulle sue implicazioni che vanno oltre il campo stretto della poesia ma investono il problema dell’identità culturale dell’Italia e delle sue più profonde radici.
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Articles by Beatrice Sica
Ugo Gobbi (1921-2012) e la storia della pediatria romagnola, a cura di Stefano De Carolis e Giulia Grossi (Pazzini: Villa Verucchio, RN), 2023
Ugo Gobbi's understanding of anarchism. Gobbi was an anarchist pediatrician in Rimini and contrib... more Ugo Gobbi's understanding of anarchism. Gobbi was an anarchist pediatrician in Rimini and contributed to the excellence of pediatric medicine in his city and Emilia-Romagna at large in the second half of the twentieth century.
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The Languages of COVID-19: Translational and Multilingual Perspectives on Global Healthcare, 2022
This article looks at the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of Dante’s Divine Comedy, showing ... more This article looks at the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of Dante’s Divine Comedy, showing how engagement with literature can facilitate a deeper exploration of the human experience of living through a pandemic. In discussing the relevance of Dante’s Divine Comedy to understand illness, trauma, life and death, I adopt a bilingual approach, looking at Dante’s text in Italian, because without considering the original language next to its English translation, it would be impossible to detect in full the core mechanism of repetition and variation that my reading aims to highlight.
This article sits at the intersection between modern languages and health humanities. However, literature here does not help us understand an individual experience of illness; rather, it offers an alternative mode of seeing and imagining our collective experience of the pandemic—and of life.
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Letteratura italiana contemporanea. Prosa e poesia dal Novecento a oggi, 2022
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Griseldaonline, 2022
L’articolo propone alcune riflessioni sul rapporto tra letteratura e disastro, sulla scorta sopra... more L’articolo propone alcune riflessioni sul rapporto tra letteratura e disastro, sulla scorta soprattutto di Maurice Blanchot, Italo Calvino, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Per verificare più concretamente questo rapporto viene riletto anche Dante. A differenza delle riletture metaforiche o allegoriche (passate qui in rassegna) della Divina Commedia proposte finora in relazione alla pandemia, l’articolo si concentra su Inf. III, 1-3, considerando il funzionamento del testo dantesco, in particolare della sua cellula base: la terzina. Alla luce di alcune osservazioni che Deleuze e Guattari fanno nel saggio De la ritournelle è possibile trattare la terza rima e il Covid-19, e più in generale letteratura e mondo, come due sistemi contigui e verificare come il testo letterario, con la sua costruzione retorica, si modella e agisce su strutture vitali profonde che vengono sollecitate ed emergono in tutta la loro pienezza in occasione di eventi traumatici come sono anche i disastri naturali e le pandemie.
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MHMN. Medical Humanities & Medicina Narrativa, 2020
This paper looks at how puppets can be used to address Covid-19. Puppets have long been employed ... more This paper looks at how puppets can be used to address Covid-19. Puppets have long been employed by psychotherapists to provide patients with a voice to act out personal fears, and by health professionals to teach children about health prevention and promotion. This paper proposes to use them not only to help children express their personal anxieties or teach them about the corona virus, but also to make them explore language more in depth by means of puns and plays on words. The paper is complemented by four short videos in Italian, posted on Vimeo, offered as a practical example.
MHMN. Medical Humanities & Medicina Narrativa, anno I, n. 2 (December 2020), pp. 75-85.
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Italian Studies, 2020
The article opens by considering how contemporary Italian Studies scholarship is situated in rela... more The article opens by considering how contemporary Italian Studies scholarship is situated in relation to the long-standing dominance of literary culture as a major disciplinary concern, and the persistence of traditionally conceived canons, questions, and methods. The authors discuss how the scope of literary research has expanded in recent years and become more enmeshed with sociological, political, and ideological enquiry. They review how previous definitions of literary cultures and practices have been refreshed with new theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, and through transnational dialogues and collaborative modes of research. A diachronic survey discusses key innovations both in the study of canonical or ‘high culture’ literary phenomena – such as Dante, Leopardi, or Futurism –, and in engagements with previously overlooked writing in popular genres or media, or by socially marginalised authors. It concludes by reflecting on how literary studies is both critiqued and defended within current debates over the standing of humanities research within and beyond the academy.
(with Daragh O’Connell) in Italian Studies, special issue, 75:2 (2020), pp. 1-15
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Cahiers d’études romanes, 2020
Italo Calvino nel Visconte dimezzato (1952) e nel Cavaliere inesistente (1959), Mario Monicelli n... more Italo Calvino nel Visconte dimezzato (1952) e nel Cavaliere inesistente (1959), Mario Monicelli nel film L’armata Brancaleone (1966), Emanuele Luzzati e Giulio Gianini nei titoli di testa per questo film e nel corto di animazione La gazza ladra (1964), creano dei cavalieri grotteschi, senza esercito, privi di lustro. Si tratta solo di una parodia che segue un archetipo ariostesco? Forse c’è un bersaglio nascosto, ed è la figura del condottiero impersonata dal Duce negli anni del fascismo. Consapevolmente o meno, questi autori sembrano reagire a distanza di tempo al controllo delle emozioni esercitato dal potere, quale lo descrive William Reddy in The Navigation of Feeling.
Published in: in L’esprit de parodie dans l’aire romane, edited by Perle Abbrugiati, Cahiers d’études romanes, n. 40, Aix-en-Provence, PUP (Presses Universitaires de Provence), 2020, pp. 141-156
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Resistance in Italian Culture from Dante to the 21st century, 2019
This article considers the role that mounted police had in Italy during the so-called Belle époqu... more This article considers the role that mounted police had in Italy during the so-called Belle époque and throughout Fascism, and looks at how writers in the fantastic genre such as Aldo Palazzeschi and Massimo Bontempelli depicted mounted police in their stories.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Italy was a period of social upheavals and riots in both agricultural and industrial areas of the peninsula. Order was restored with the intervention of the Italian army and cavalrymen in particular became the symbol of a repressive state that defended the interests of agricultural and industrial oligarchies. Even later, during the fascist period, mounted police still embodied the bourgeois mentality and social order. Palazzeschi and Bontempelli used mounted police as a character in their stories to oppose bourgeois social norms and conventions: their protagonists do not adhere to dominant, narrow-minded values and either fly away from this world defended by cavalrymen or see it collapse in an apocalyptic manner.
Palazzeschi’s and Bontempelli’s treatment of mounted police shows the power of the fantastic genre to oppose dominant values and enact a resistance that is not merely literary, but is very much in dialogue with social and political reality.
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Narrativa, 2018
Il saggio si sofferma sul mito della virilità nell’uomo a cavallo, considerandolo qui in partico... more Il saggio si sofferma sul mito della virilità nell’uomo a cavallo, considerandolo qui in particolare attraverso la figura di Mussolini condottiero. A partire dalle concezioni del maschile e del femminile elaborate da Otto Weininger e abbracciate in Italia da Giovanni Papini agli inizi del Novecento, e appoggiandosi anche alle teorie del tempo sulla folla e sull’educazione avanzate da Gustave Le Bon, l’autrice analizza il mito del Duce a cavallo sviluppatosi in Italia nel periodo fascista, guardando anche a come reagirono a questa figura iconica due scrittori molto diversi tra loro come Carlo Emilio Gadda e Aldo Palazzeschi.
In: "Narrativa", 40 (2018), pp. 49-67
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Studi culturali, 2018
This article examines written and visual representations of Mussolini on horseback and looks at h... more This article examines written and visual representations of Mussolini on horseback and looks at how they were received by men, women, and children in Fascist Italy. Drawing on Antonio Gibelli’s notion of «popolo bambino» and Gustave Le Bon’s works such as Psychologie des foules (1895), Psychologie de l’éducation (1902), and, most importantly, L’équitation actuelle et ses principes (1892), the author proposes the notion of «popolo-cavallo», showing the extent to which politics, pedagogy and propaganda became entangled in written accounts and visual representations of Mussolini as condottiero.
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in Transalpina, 21 (2018), pp. 191-214.
L’articolo esamina la rappresentazione di Mussolini a ca... more in Transalpina, 21 (2018), pp. 191-214.
L’articolo esamina la rappresentazione di Mussolini a cavallo nel mondo dell’editoria scolastica e per ragazzi durante il regime fascista. Sono presi in considerazione sia testi che immagini, mettendo in luce lo scambio che si attuava tra il mondo dei bambini e quello degli adulti soprattutto attraverso fotografie, cartoline, grafica. Attraverso la nozione di performativity già mutuata da Judith Butler in studi sulla costruzione dell’identità nazionale dei bambini nei regimi totalitari l’autrice mostra come l’icona del Duce condottiero non fosse soltanto subìta dai fanciulli ma implicasse una loro partecipazione attiva che li coinvolgeva in maniera ancora più profonda nel sistema di valori su cui era basata la dittatura mussoliniana.
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The Italianist, 38:1 (2018), pp. 1-26
This article looks at images of cavalrymen and knights in ... more The Italianist, 38:1 (2018), pp. 1-26
This article looks at images of cavalrymen and knights in twentieth-century Italian culture from Futurism to post-WWII culture. It looks at how men on horseback were represented in paintings, literature, art and literary criticism, and cartoons from 1915 to 1966, while they were losing their importance in military strategy and warfare. Considering both written and visual images as means to rewrite the past, the article aims to reflect upon the links between imagery, cultural tradition, history and ideology: as a very powerful icon, the image of men on horseback functions as a key to follow and understand the political and cultural developments of fifty crucial years of Italian history.
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Bollettino '900
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Raccontare la guerra. I conflitti bellici e la modernità, 2017
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Sinestesie. Rivista di studi sulle letterature e le arti europee, 2016
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Books by Beatrice Sica
Articles by Beatrice Sica
This article sits at the intersection between modern languages and health humanities. However, literature here does not help us understand an individual experience of illness; rather, it offers an alternative mode of seeing and imagining our collective experience of the pandemic—and of life.
MHMN. Medical Humanities & Medicina Narrativa, anno I, n. 2 (December 2020), pp. 75-85.
(with Daragh O’Connell) in Italian Studies, special issue, 75:2 (2020), pp. 1-15
Published in: in L’esprit de parodie dans l’aire romane, edited by Perle Abbrugiati, Cahiers d’études romanes, n. 40, Aix-en-Provence, PUP (Presses Universitaires de Provence), 2020, pp. 141-156
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Italy was a period of social upheavals and riots in both agricultural and industrial areas of the peninsula. Order was restored with the intervention of the Italian army and cavalrymen in particular became the symbol of a repressive state that defended the interests of agricultural and industrial oligarchies. Even later, during the fascist period, mounted police still embodied the bourgeois mentality and social order. Palazzeschi and Bontempelli used mounted police as a character in their stories to oppose bourgeois social norms and conventions: their protagonists do not adhere to dominant, narrow-minded values and either fly away from this world defended by cavalrymen or see it collapse in an apocalyptic manner.
Palazzeschi’s and Bontempelli’s treatment of mounted police shows the power of the fantastic genre to oppose dominant values and enact a resistance that is not merely literary, but is very much in dialogue with social and political reality.
In: "Narrativa", 40 (2018), pp. 49-67
L’articolo esamina la rappresentazione di Mussolini a cavallo nel mondo dell’editoria scolastica e per ragazzi durante il regime fascista. Sono presi in considerazione sia testi che immagini, mettendo in luce lo scambio che si attuava tra il mondo dei bambini e quello degli adulti soprattutto attraverso fotografie, cartoline, grafica. Attraverso la nozione di performativity già mutuata da Judith Butler in studi sulla costruzione dell’identità nazionale dei bambini nei regimi totalitari l’autrice mostra come l’icona del Duce condottiero non fosse soltanto subìta dai fanciulli ma implicasse una loro partecipazione attiva che li coinvolgeva in maniera ancora più profonda nel sistema di valori su cui era basata la dittatura mussoliniana.
This article looks at images of cavalrymen and knights in twentieth-century Italian culture from Futurism to post-WWII culture. It looks at how men on horseback were represented in paintings, literature, art and literary criticism, and cartoons from 1915 to 1966, while they were losing their importance in military strategy and warfare. Considering both written and visual images as means to rewrite the past, the article aims to reflect upon the links between imagery, cultural tradition, history and ideology: as a very powerful icon, the image of men on horseback functions as a key to follow and understand the political and cultural developments of fifty crucial years of Italian history.
This article sits at the intersection between modern languages and health humanities. However, literature here does not help us understand an individual experience of illness; rather, it offers an alternative mode of seeing and imagining our collective experience of the pandemic—and of life.
MHMN. Medical Humanities & Medicina Narrativa, anno I, n. 2 (December 2020), pp. 75-85.
(with Daragh O’Connell) in Italian Studies, special issue, 75:2 (2020), pp. 1-15
Published in: in L’esprit de parodie dans l’aire romane, edited by Perle Abbrugiati, Cahiers d’études romanes, n. 40, Aix-en-Provence, PUP (Presses Universitaires de Provence), 2020, pp. 141-156
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Italy was a period of social upheavals and riots in both agricultural and industrial areas of the peninsula. Order was restored with the intervention of the Italian army and cavalrymen in particular became the symbol of a repressive state that defended the interests of agricultural and industrial oligarchies. Even later, during the fascist period, mounted police still embodied the bourgeois mentality and social order. Palazzeschi and Bontempelli used mounted police as a character in their stories to oppose bourgeois social norms and conventions: their protagonists do not adhere to dominant, narrow-minded values and either fly away from this world defended by cavalrymen or see it collapse in an apocalyptic manner.
Palazzeschi’s and Bontempelli’s treatment of mounted police shows the power of the fantastic genre to oppose dominant values and enact a resistance that is not merely literary, but is very much in dialogue with social and political reality.
In: "Narrativa", 40 (2018), pp. 49-67
L’articolo esamina la rappresentazione di Mussolini a cavallo nel mondo dell’editoria scolastica e per ragazzi durante il regime fascista. Sono presi in considerazione sia testi che immagini, mettendo in luce lo scambio che si attuava tra il mondo dei bambini e quello degli adulti soprattutto attraverso fotografie, cartoline, grafica. Attraverso la nozione di performativity già mutuata da Judith Butler in studi sulla costruzione dell’identità nazionale dei bambini nei regimi totalitari l’autrice mostra come l’icona del Duce condottiero non fosse soltanto subìta dai fanciulli ma implicasse una loro partecipazione attiva che li coinvolgeva in maniera ancora più profonda nel sistema di valori su cui era basata la dittatura mussoliniana.
This article looks at images of cavalrymen and knights in twentieth-century Italian culture from Futurism to post-WWII culture. It looks at how men on horseback were represented in paintings, literature, art and literary criticism, and cartoons from 1915 to 1966, while they were losing their importance in military strategy and warfare. Considering both written and visual images as means to rewrite the past, the article aims to reflect upon the links between imagery, cultural tradition, history and ideology: as a very powerful icon, the image of men on horseback functions as a key to follow and understand the political and cultural developments of fifty crucial years of Italian history.
The second section focuses on Futurism and Science and contains a number of papers that were first presented at the fifth bi-annual conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), held on 1–3 June 2016 in Rennes. They investigate the impact of science on Futurist aesthetics and the Futurist quest for a new perception and rational understanding of the world, as well as the movement’s connection with the esoteric domain, especially in the field of theosophy, the Hermetic tradition, Gnostic mysticism and a whole phalanx of Spiritualist beliefs.
The Archive section offers a survey of collections and archives in Northern Italy that are concerned with Futurist ceramics, and a report on the Fondazione Primo Conti in Fiesole, established in April 1980 as a museum, library and archive devoted to the documentation of the international avant-garde, and to Italian Futurism in particular.
A review section dedicated to exhibitions, conferences and publications is followed by an annual bibliography of international Futurism studies, exhibition catalogues, special issues of periodicals and new editions.