Italian and Italian American Studies Series Editor Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Hempstead, New York, USA
Aim of the Series This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14835
Virginia Picchietti Laura A. Salsini Editors Writing and Performing Female Identity in Italian Culture
Editors Virginia Picchietti The University of Scranton Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA Laura A. Salsini University of Delaware Newark, Delaware, USA Italian and Italian American Studies ISBN 978-3-319-40834-7 ISBN 978-3-319-40835-4 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40835-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961361 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents 1 Introduction 1 Virginia Picchietti and Laura A. Salsini Part I Poetry 17 2 The Broken Language of High Poetry: Agency and Emotion in Teresino by Vivian Lamarque 19 Enrico Minardi 3 Re-appropriation for a New Symbolic Order: The Search for Identity in the Poetry of Armanda Guiducci, Maria Luisa Spaziani and Oliva Gualtieri Bernardi 43 Rosa Cuda Part II Cinema 59 4 Mambo and Maggiorate: Italian Female Stardom in the 1950s 61 Elisa Uffreduzzi v
vi Contents 5 Mina: Narrative and Cinematic Spectacle of the Italian Woman of the 1960s 81 Paola Valentini 6 Beyond the Male Gaze Conceiving the Fourth Gaze in La bestia nel cuore 105 Ryan Calabretta-Sajder Part III Theatre 125 7 From Fairy Tale to Hysteria: Women in Italian Theater in the Early 1950s 127 Daniela Cavallaro 8 Telling Lives, Staging Silences: Dacia Maraini s Biographical Theater 153 Alex Standen 9 Staging the (Sur)real World: Soledad Agresti s Theater of Women 175 Raffaele Furno Part IV Prose 199 10 Writing History, Trauma, and the (Dis/Re) Appearance of the Body in Cutrufelli s La briganta 201 Sandra Waters 11 The Treasure Chest and the Talisman: Writing between Reality and Myth in Maria Giacobbe 223 Angela Guiso
Contents vii 12 Space and Sexuation in the Fin de Siècle Italian Female Narrative 249 Anna Marchioni Cucchiella Index 273
Notes on Contributors Ryan Calabretta-Sajder Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, focuses on queer and feminist theory in modern Italian literature and cinema. He has published on the works of Ferzan Ozpetek. He is currently the Director of Communication for the American Association of Teachers of Italian and the President of Gamma Kappa Alpha, Italian National Honor Society. Daniela Cavallaro is Senior Lecturer of Italian at the University of Auckland. She has published in the fields of Italian modern fiction, cinema, and theater. Her latest book is Italian Women s Theatre 1930 1960: An Anthology of Plays (Intellect, 2011). Rosa Cuda is Director and Associate Professor at the Middlebury School in Italy. She completed her Ph.D. and undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and a Master s degree in Didattica della Lingua Italiana at the Università di Ca Foscari, Venice. Her research area lies in the field of Contemporary Italian Literature, with focus on women writers. In recent years, in her role as director of a study abroad program, she has widened her field of research to include Second Language Acquisition and Assessment. Raffaele Furno is Professor of Theater History and Performance Theory at Arcadia University, Center for Global Studies, Rome Campus. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and an M.A. in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley. He has published several articles ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS on Italian contemporary theater, and a book titled Intra-cultural Theater: Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy. In 2015 he served as visiting scholar in the Department of Drama and Theater at National Taiwan University. Furno is also a theater director and actor, founder of Compagnia Imprevisti e Probabilità (www.compagniaimprevistiepro.com) and artistic director of the Festival Deviazioni Recitative. His work has been produced in Italy, USA, Senegal, Morocco, Germany, and Taiwan. Angela Guiso Teacher of Italian and Latin at Liceo Enrico Fermi in Sardinia, writes primarily about twentieth-century Italian authors. Her latest book is Il doppio segno della scrittura. Deledda e oltre (Delfino Editore, Sassari, 2012). Anna Marchioni Cucchiella teaches at the Università degli Studi di Roma. She writes primarily about Italian women writers, the representation of youth in youth literature, and the relationship between literature, cinema, and new media. Enrico Minardi teaches Italian and French at Arizona State University. His publications include two monograph books on the contemporary Italian writers Pier Vittorio Tondelli (2003) and Enrico Palandri (2010, with Monica Francioso). Forthcoming is a collection of essays on Italian modern poetry and cognitivist thought, Il Pensiero della Poesia, in collaboration with C. Caracchini. His current research interests focus on modern female authorship in Italian poetry. With Taylor Corse, he published the English translation of a collection of poems by the contemporary Italian poet Ferruccio Benzoni. Virginia Picchietti Professor of Italian at The University of Scranton, writes about women writers of the twentieth century, Italian cinema, and the Italian Shoah. She published a book on Dacia Maraini titled, Relational Spaces: Daughterhood, Motherhood, and Sisterhoods in the Writings and Films of Dacia Maraini (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2002). Laura Salsini Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware, writes primarily about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian women authors. Her latest book is Addressing the Letter: Italian Women Writers Epistolary Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2010). Alex Standen is Senior Teaching Fellow in the University College London Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham in 2011, with a thesis
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi on representations of gender violence in the narratives of Dacia Maraini. She has taught at the Universities of Birmingham and Auckland and her research interests relate to twentieth-century Italian literature, and gender and sexuality in Italian culture and society. Elisa Uffreduzzi research fellow of film history at the University of Florence (Italy), has focused her Ph.D. studies on dance in Italian Silent Cinema, especially concerning women on the silver screen. She is coeditor and co-author of a 2014 issue of the film journal of the Italian Association for Film History Research (AIRSC), dedicated to the topic of dance in silent cinema. Paola Valentini Associate Professor at the University of Florence (Italy), studies film noise, and audiovisual voice in its different expressions and as a field of interactions between cinema, TV, radio, discography, and new media. She has published Il suono nel cinema. Storia, teoria e tecniche (Marsilio 2006), Presenze sonore. Il passaggio al cinema sonoro in Italia tra cinema e radio (Le Lettere 2007), and Televisione e gioco. Quiz e società italiana (Archetipo 2013). Sandra Waters teaches at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and her research interests include women s writing, gender studies, the horror film, the collective author, and trauma theory.
List of Figures Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 A funny moment of the initial sequence of Il bambino che verrà. Teatro Remigio Paone, Formia. Photo courtesy of Riccardo Crimi 186 The three chiagnitrici at work. Teatro Bertolt Brecht, Formia. Photo courtesy of Paolo Parasmo 190 Soledad Agresti, in white, as Carola, with Annamaria Aceto, Anna Fraula, and Valentine Fantasia (from left to right). Teatro Bertolt Brecht, Formia. Photo courtesy of Paolo Parasmo 192 xiii