Session Proposals
Contents
Quod non est in libris non est in mundo. Sull’interdisciplinarità nella letteratura italiana (Matteo Maselli, Teresa Agovino)
Territori dell'impossibile. Riflessioni sul fantastico moderno, contemporaneo e ipercontemporaneo (Simone Pettine, Domenico Tenerelli)
Italian Literature in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality (Adele Bardazzi)
Doctoral Dissertations in Progress (Andrea Penso)
Dante's Trasumanar and monsters (Chiara Caputi, Francesca Lopez)
Sicilia Erotica (Chiel Monzone)
Framing Ferrante: Adaptation and Intermediality from Troubling Love to The Lying Life of Adults (Russell Kilbourn, Roberta Cauchi-Santoro)
The Long Gaze of History: Antonio Scurati and Italian Fascism (Sandra Parmegiani)
Quod non est in libris non est in mundo. Sull’interdisciplinarità nella letteratura italiana
Matteo Maselli, Teresa Agovino
Il panorama letterario italiano è da sempre oggetto di studi interdisciplinari, intrusioni negli (e dagli) “altrui mestieri” che impreziosiscono o alterano il contenuto originale di opere fondamentali e hanno ricadute sui messaggi di volta in volta veicolati dagli scrittori.
Ciò accade sin dalla letteratura delle origini, in cui la commistione tra più discipline è prassi comune della creazione artistica: dai bestiari o lapidari medievali alle prime enciclopedie, forme testuali in cui le scienze in senso lato si rapportavano alle lettere, fino all’apporto della teologia alla poesia come nelle prove di Albertino Mussato o nella Commedia dantesca. O ancora, si pensi al connubio tra letteratura e arte che raggiunse autentici vertici con Le Vite del Vasari o alle speculazioni che poco meno di un secolo dopo alimentarono la prosa scientifica di Galileo.
In tempi più recenti, esempi di tal genere si fanno ancora più frequenti: dalla chimica di Primo Levi alla psichiatria di Mario Tobino, via via fino alle grandi prove della letteratura industriale ed ecologica, trame, discipline e mestieri si incrociano costantemente nella narrativa nazionale.
Il panel si propone dunque di raccogliere comunicazioni che vertono sull’interdisciplinarietà letteraria a tutto tondo. Alla luce di tali premesse, si invitano gli studiosi interessati a presentare una proposta di intervento (max 250 parole, in italiano o in inglese) e un breve profilo biobibliografico a m.maselli2@unimc.it e teresa.agovino@unimercatorum.it entro e non oltre il 1 marzo 2023.
Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: March 1st 2023
ORGANIZERS
Matteo Maselli
Università degli Studi di Macerata
Teresa Agovino
Universitas Mercatorum Roma
teresa.agovino@unimercatorum.it
Territori dell'impossibile. Riflessioni sul fantastico moderno, contemporaneo e ipercontemporaneo
Simone Pettine, Domenico Tenerelli
Per oltre due secoli il fantastico ha riconfermato la propria natura di genere letterario problematico: agevole da individuare anche ad una prima lettura, ma estremamente complesso da definire nel suo statuto teorico (Todorov preferì considerarlo non un genere, ma una frontiera tra generi differenti) e da sondare nelle sue concrete realizzazioni (contenuti e strategie narrative). Questa sessione si propone di indagare i testi del fantastico italiano – noti e meno noti, letterari e paraletterari – a partire dalle prime, timide comparse ottocentesche fino al fantasy dell’estrema contemporaneità, passando naturalmente per il mare magnum novecentesco. Saranno valutate proposte basate su approcci teorico-critici, semiotici, comparativi, e anche linguistici, purché basati su metodologie di indagine rigorosamente scientifiche.
Gli studiosi interessati sono invitati a presentare una proposta di intervento entro il 1 marzo 2023, allegando agli indirizzi mail simone.pettine@unich.it e domenico.tenerelli@gmail.com un unico file contenente: un abstract di circa 250 parole (ITA o ENG); un breve profilo bio-bibliografico.
Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: March 1, 2023
ORGANIZERS
Simone Pettine
“G. d’Annunzio” University (Chieti-Pescara)
Domenico Tenerelli
Université Rennes 2
Italian Literature in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality
Adele Bardazzi
The panel ‘Italian Literature in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality’ aims to discuss Italian literature that engage with recent developments in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Quantum Machine Learning.
If AI has been recurrent theme in science fiction, it is now directly implicated in the making of literary works – both fiction and poetry – across linguistic, cultural, and geographical borders. How is this developing within Italian literature and shaping new directions for the discipline of Italian Studies? To what extent, if at all, the literary and critical language employed so far can still work to investigate works produced by AI? In what ways can AI and AR, rather than bringing forward innovation – as they do in the sciences – lead literature backwards? How can AI shake and diversify the Italian literary canon? Does the advent of AI make the use of computer programming and other technologies used so far in literary works out-dated (e.g. Python programming language)? What does the interaction with AI and AR tell us about the nature of literature and poetry?
Papers engaging with questions of temporality, authoriality, communities, genre, and gender are particularly welcome, as well as theoretical and comparative analyses. Contributions wishing to focus on how Italian Studies could incorporate in its teaching methodologies AI and AR are also welcome.
Please consider submitting an abstract of no more than 150 words and a short bio-bibliographical note by 15 February 2023 to Dr Adele Bardazzi: bardazza@tcd.ie.
Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: 15 February 2023
ORGANIZER
Adele Bardazzi
Trinity College Dublin
Doctoral Dissertations in Progress
Andrea Penso
In this session we welcome papers from PhD candidates who want to present their research topics, or show the first results of their doctoral work. The goal is to provide a platform for early career researchers to showcase their research and discuss their strategies in a collegial atmosphere, in order to receive feedback and advice within the frame of an international conference. Submissions could include any topic related to Italian studies, such as the following:
Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: March 1, 2023
ORGANIZER
Andrea Penso
VUB – Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Dante's Trasumanar and monsters
Chiara Caputi, Francesca Lopez
Dante Alighieri expressed the transcendence of the human condition beyond its limitations through the verb trasumanar in Paradiso 1. It is rare evidence that Alighieri had thought of a kind of "transhuman" change in the early 1300s. In the past years, we witnessed the change raised by the feminist movements, especially the last wave called ''transfeminism'', which pointed out how ''being human'' it is not enough for the subjectivities in order to be recognized by politics. For this reason, the word ''posthuman'' was used to show how monsters can be active participants in our society, being part of us. In Dante's Inferno, throughout the journey of the character Dante into the depth of Hell, he encounters several beasts and monsters as he passes along the way. The seven main monsters - namely Minos, Cerberus, Plutus, Minotaur, Centaurs, Harpies, and Geryon - have the active role of guardians of the circles of Hell. Dante transformed their mythological identity to adapt their presence to his poem. We are interested in the exploration of how Dante represents the transcendence of the human condition and how this process involves monsters.
Participants are invited to give papers that explore the following aspects:
We accept papers in English and Italian. All submissions must be sent via email in a single Word document entitled "Last Name CAIS 2023" and contain the following items: an abstract (maximum 200 characters), a short bio, full name, email address, and affiliation. Please use "CAIS 2023" in the subject line.
Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: March 1st, 2023
ORGANIZERS
Chiara Caputi
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Francesca Lopez
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Chiel Monzone
La Sicilia è da sempre una terra di scrittura erotica. Sin dai secoli a.C. fino ai giorni nostri, molti autori e autrici hanno avuto inclinazione verso tale canone. Oltre al “famoso” Domenico Tempio poeta osceno del secondo Settecento, ma in verità portatore di ben differente tempra letteraria, altri hanno lasciato trace in versi e in prosa, sia in modo più sistematico sia occasionalmente. Il rimando, ad esempio, è ai vari Pirandello, Brancati, Meli, Camilleri, Aniante, Torregrossa, Panarello, ecc. Il panel che si propone, dunque, intende mettere assieme interventi che siano volti a evidenziare un erotismo siciliano variamente declinato, dai toni più crudi a quelli più blandi. Gli studiosi interessati a partecipare potranno far pervenire le proposte di contributo su un particolare scrittore e sulla dimensione erotica così come appare dalle opere che ha redatto. Si richiede che le proposte, anche in chiave comparata, non superino le 250 parole e che siano accompagnate da un breve profilo biobibliografico entro e non oltre il 1 marzo 2023.
Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: 1st March 2023
ORGANIZER
Chiel Monzone
Independent scholar (PhD) - Università Roma Tre
Framing Ferrante: Adaptation and Intermediality from Troubling Love to The Lying Life of Adults
Russell Kilbourn, Roberta Cauchi-Santoro
This panel surveys the cinematic and televisual adaptations of Elena Ferrante’s literary works, from Mario Martone’s L’amore molesto (1995) and Roberto Faenza’s I giorni dell’abandono (2005) to Saverio Costanzo’s L’amica geniale series (2018-), Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021), and Edoardo De Angelis’s Netflix series La vita bugiarda degli adulti (2023). In their 2021 collection, Ferrante Unframed, Roberta Cauchi-Santoro and Costanza Barchiesi set out to “unframe” Ferrante, “releasing [her] from the tight confines” of the debate around the strangely problematic status of a successful author whose writing has generally been associated with the works of Italian women writers. This panel seeks to build on this research by considering the literal framing and re-framing of Ferrante on TV and film screens. The aim is to extend and expand upon existing scholarship by considering the older forays into Ferrante adaptation alongside the more recent, 21st century remediations. In this respect the panel organizers seek papers that conjoin questions of modality (analog or digital), medium, mediation, and transmediation, with those of authorship, authority, and gender, around such key issues as genre and influence, commercial vs. independent, arthouse vs. ‘prestige,’ etc.
Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: March 01, 2023
ORGANIZERS
Russell Kilbourn
Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario
Roberta Cauchi-Santoro
St. Jerome's, University of Waterloo, Ontario
roberta.cauchi-santoro@uwaterloo.ca
The Long Gaze of History: Antonio Scurati and Italian Fascism
Sandra Parmegiani
In Il tempo migliore della nostra vita and especially in his trilogy M (destined to grow into a fourth and possibly a fifth volume), Antonio Scurati offers a memorialization of Italy’s past through historical fiction that closely adheres to and draws from original documents, personal memoirs, and archival sources. Carefully timed to coincide with the centenary of the March on Rome and fortuitously published during the first postwar Italian right-wing government and a new war in Europe, Scurati’s narrative portrayal of Italian Fascism has been hailed as a masterpiece and, occasionally, criticized as not sufficiently anti-fascist or factually inaccurate. Scurati’s revisitation and first overall narrative appraisal of Fascist Italy takes place at a time when communicative memory of those events is reaching the end of its natural life span (J. Assmann), and in the midst of what Scurati defines as an unprecedented cultural disengagement with history. In his response to Ernesto Galli Della Loggia on the Corriere della Sera (17 ottobre 2018), he wishes for a “new alliance between historians and novelists,” informed by the conviction that “to prepare the world to come, we will necessarily have to rediscover the profound sense of our history.”1
This panel invites contributions on Scurati’s narrative representation of Fascist Italy, which might include (but are not limited to): Scurati’s narrative strategies; the use of archival sources and historical documents; narrativizing the colonial other; female representation; Jewish identity and Fascism.
1. “Europa, zona di guerra. Il senso tragico della storia e la rinascita del romanzo francese.” Fictions, Studi sulla narratività, XIII (2014), p. 95.
Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: March 01, 2023
ORGANIZER
Sandra Parmegiani
University of Guelph