This paper examines the theme of hope in the poetry of Fabio Pusterla, in light of the poet’s recent return to this central motif. Drawing on the echoes of Heaney and Havel, the analysis focuses on a selection of texts in which the term “hope” appears explicitly, deliberately excluding those where the theme is only implicit. Preceded by a reconstruction of the paratextual sources through which the poet offers a more nuanced interpretation, the study highlights a transtemporal and transtextual layering articulated along three key axes: history, memory (both collective and individual), and nature. Hope thus emerges as both a poetic gesture and an ethical act, capable of enduring even under the most extreme conditions.
The aim of the article is – in its first part – to show how Dante changed the perception of love and women in relation to the established literary tradition, starting from the evolution that these concepts underwent in his own poetry. The second part is dedicated to an analysis, on the example of two heroines of the Divine Comedy, Francesca da Rimini and Cunizza da Romano, of how this unorthodox viewpoint translates into a deeper understanding of women, who are not reduced, as previously, merely to objects of erotic love, but possess a distinct personality that allows them to express their own views and defend their arguments based on the education they received, independently of their objective moral value (Francesca), and sometimes against popular opinions (Cunizza). It should be emphasized that this article represents only a small sample of the study of the theme of love and woman in Dante from a new, so far rarely adopted perspective.
Trauma as a topic in psycho-analysis, literature and politics has been articulated in waves. Defined by French clinicians at end of the 19thC., trauma has become an increasingly present topic in a host of disciplines. Today trauma is hype and in our wound culture it asserts individual identity. Yet, already in her 1917 Vae victis! novel, the British-born Italian writer Annie Vivanti develops trauma occasioned by rape during World War I as a central issue. In a very balanced presentation, she shows how the stigma of rape itself, the pros and cons of abortion, are traumatic and thus in interesting ways anticipates a century of social debate in terms of psychological, cultural and political perspectives. Against the backdrop of contemporary eugenics, Vivanti argues for serious consideration of the victims and their inclusion in the community at large. She contends that an inoffensive, secure environment and a relationship with other human beings (who thereby act as informal therapists) help to heal them from consequences of extreme violence. She uses a religious stance to resolutely inasmuch as surprisingly refrain from taking sides for or against abortion, half a century before it will become a fervently disputed issue.
Miriam and Severa, Nicolina and Antonietta, the young ladies Fiorillo, Caterina and Marietta, Sofia, Carmelina and Lucietta, Vanna and Ninetta, but also Viola and Remigia are some of the creatures of the twentieth-century Sicilian author, Maria Messina. They are sisters to each other but also to many other female characters presented to us by the writer, united by an unchangeable seclusion, by loves never found, by an inability to love themselves but also by sacrifices and regrets for their diametrically opposed sisters, subjected as they are to a patriarchal power. Discovered by Giovanni Verga, rediscovered by Leonardo Sciascia, and, in recent decades, especially by international scholars of gender studies, Maria Messina has given us not only wonderful pages of a Sicily of the past but also of sensitive topics regarding the universe of sisterhood. The sisters of Messina are “figures with a strong symbolic impact, which together draw a topography within which the narrative voice is placed and with it the gaze of the reader” (Sapegno, 2012), who grow (physically and psychologically) in an environment tormented by emigration, patriarchy, poverty, uncertainty and asphyxia, steeped in solitude but also in the inability to autonomy and redemption. live together and try to “solve” or erase, as they can. Maria Messina’s sisters are “abruptly alone like little girls holding hands in a dark room” (“Il telaio di Caterina” in Ragazze siciliane, p. 61) and offer, with their vulnerability, a pedagogical and inspirational tool to readers, to all sisters still, unfortunately, shocked by social injustices and lost loves.
In this article we will focus on the tension between hope and despair, between resignation and justice, between ethics and mortality that are at the heart of the work of the Italian poet Giuliano Mesa, and that starting from Quattro quaderni (2000) come to be declined through an increasingly close dialogue with Paul Celan’s tragic-utopian tension, which inextricably links the perspective of what is “lost” and what remains “unlost”, starting from the need to come to terms with the horror of the Shoah. The article focuses in particular on Mesa’s last collections, in which the figure and work of Celan repeatedly appear as the central hub of an ethical research that makes the “last saying”, paradoxically, a “saying again”, in the sign of aporia and ethics, for a poetry that relies on the “passio” of the possible, marked by the coexistence of despair and hope, affirmation and negation, apocalypse and resistance.
