There is nothing like war to bring tragedy and chaos into families, change life trajectories, and drive individuals toward a deeper sense of self. The historical landscape of Elisa M. Speranza's first novel gives her readers just that, a war narrative that contains an impressive novel of self-formation.The year is 1943 in one of the most vital southern cities, New Orleans, a place whose centrality for the identity and power of the United States cannot be understated. With its location along the Mississippi, it lies at the confluence of the most fertile among American valleys, a strategic market and port, and a magnet for immigrants. New Orleans appears as a city where immigrant neighborhoods live in peace, though still racially separated, where industrious communities strive to enjoy the freedom and pursue the happiness that the nation's founders had promised. However, in 1943 the country is enmeshed in the war against the Axis, its youth fighting on two fronts, Europe and Southeast Asia. Many of the immigrant men in New Orleans are stationed on one of those fronts, and the blue stars that proudly adorn the many shop and house fronts testify to the fact that each family lives day to day with the possibility of imminent tragedy.Rose Marino, the novel's protagonist, walks with trepidation to her first job interview at the Higgins Shipyard, determined to contribute, as much as her young age allows, to her country's victory. Her successful interview opens the path to a new career, as she will join the many women who work in the war industry. However, her job as a bookkeeper means more than simply serving the country, for Rose is propelled out of her family's grocery store into an unfamiliar world, still dominated by men but one to which she quickly adjusts, receiving great praise and modest financial recognition. Like her sister, serving as an army field nurse, Rose dreams of financial independence. Her objective is to save enough money to move out of the family home and escape her parents’ strict, outmoded codes of conduct. Her job turns into the engine of professional status and self-actualization. As she and her family confront the major issues Italians and, within this community, second-generation Italian females endured during this time, she gradually becomes an adult, ready to make her own decisions and fashion her own destiny. While her position at the shipyard solidifies, she is invited by the priest to befriend Italian prisoners of war who have been temporarily housed in the city's military barracks. Her relationship with one of them, a charming young soldier from northern Italy, will raise her to a new level of self-awareness and confidence as a young woman.Speranza's well-constructed novel is delightful and thought-provoking. Rose's character embodies the struggles many second-generation immigrant women faced during the war. With a name that suggestively links her to Rosie the Riveter, she enters the shipyard ready to fight her own personal battle with courage and determination and to conquer the obstacles that history, family, and society had imposed upon her. Among the important messages Speranza's character sends her readers one stands out, that World War II opened for young Italian American women unexpected paths to success and options to happiness that did not necessarily include marriage and motherhood.

fascinating pages on the future of languages (and European Languages in particular), wondering whether we are doomed to merge the Germanic and Romance traditions in a sort of dystopian super-language—as Lausberg foretold—or whether instead we will be able to gain control over the Babelic fragmentation of world idioms with the help of not-so-futuristic technology, as Roberto Busa (“il padre italiano delle Digital Humanities”, p. 85) has envisioned. The study of Romance philology endows us with the tools we need to address these questions, because:

This book describes Realism in twentieth-century literature from an estranged and unpublished perspective, and explores the hypothesis that some Italian writers (Vittorini, Pasolini and Calvino) looked at the expressive techniques of theatrical language as a privileged tool for the narrative elaboration of their own personal "theatrical Realism". The individual approach to the theatrical culture by the narrators taken into consideration is part of a wider tendency towards interdisciplinarity, and towards a breakdown of gender barriers concerning the whole of 20th century culture, with specific references to theories by Szondi, Brecht, Lukács, Gramsci, Contini and Bachtin. The author completes her theoretical investigation with a critical analysis of narrative masterpieces of the 20th century, such as The baron in the trees by Calvino and Conversazione in Sicilia by Vittorini.

The history of postwar Italy has been examined in numerous scholarly works in the past few years, in particular in the United Kingdom and North America, where historians are commenting more and mor...

(1761), La educazione (1764), Il bisogno (1766), le punte più avanzate di una poesia impregnata di valori civili e morali nella temperie culturale dell’Accademia milanese dei Trasformati. “Con tali scelte”, annota Baroni, “il Parini giustifica pure l’utilità dell’arte, come si legge nel suoDiscorso sopra la poesia dove spiega che essa ‘non è già necessaria come il pane, né utile come l’asino o il bue; ma che . . . bene usata, può essere d’un vantaggio considerevole alla società’ perché ‘contribuisce a render l’uomo felice’” (pp. 13–14). L’interesse per la poesia pariniana sta anche in alcuni scarti e spostamenti tonali che ne fanno un preciso termometro della realtà sociale e culturale, uno strumento sensibilissimo al variare dei costumi. L’ode A Silvia, scritta nell’inverno del 1795, è ormai lontana cronologicamente e per ispirazione poetica dall’ottimismo degli anni Sessanta. Nel fornire unaminuziosa griglia delle varianti,Mirella D’Ettorre si avvale di una documentazione più ampia rispetto al passato, arricchita con testimonianze significative come la stampa del Giornale poetico (“pubblicazione . . .mai messa a profitto dai precedenti editori per via della data del periodico, 1794, quarto trimestre, uscita in ritardo”) o l’opuscolo in sedicesimo della stamperia Davolio di Reggio (altro “testimone non conosciuto finora”). In A Silvia Parini ironizza sulla mondanità del “vestire alla ghigliottina”, una foggia femminile che lasciava scoperte le spalle, con una sottile fascia di stoffa rossa al collo che richiamava il colore del sangue: “Il vestire alla Guillotine è tutto bianco; il petto scoperto: un brindello rosso al collo: i capei neri, e che discendendo coprano un alcun poco il volto, ed anche il seno.” La contemplazione estatica della bellezza intride anche l’ode All’inclita Nice, contigua cronologicamente e tematicamente, dove il modulo pariniano dell’autoritratto, malinconico e insieme autoironico, si lega ai motivi del sepolcro e del canto (“Udrà del tuo cantore / le commosse reliquie / Sotto la terra argute sibilar”, vv. 130–132). L’ode Alla Musa che chiude la raccolta “riporta il tema della poesia al centro”, scrive Giorgio Baroni, e suggerisce una identificazione simbolica, l’“Italo cigno” assunto come “emblema di canto raffinato e raro, di candore e d’eleganza, mentre l’aggettivo consolida il legame con tutta un’alta tradizione culturale e letteraria” (p. 22).

Reviewed by: Science and Literature: From Dante to Calvino; A Festschrift for Pat Boyde Simona Wright Pierpaolo Antonello and Simon A. Gilson , eds. Science and Literature: From Dante to Calvino; A Festschrift for Pat Boyde. European Humanities Research Centre. Oxford: Legenda, 2004. Pp. xviii + 303. The 12 essays by well-known scholars from Great Britain, the United States, and Italy included in Science and Literature: From Dante to Calvino, edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Simon A. Gilson, promise a thought-provoking investigation into the dynamic relationship between science and literature that has characterized Italian poetry and prose since its early days. As noted in the preface to the volume, a F`estschrift honoring the critical work and literary investigations of Patrick Boyde, retired Serena Chair of Italian Studies at Cambridge University, it is a fact that although science and scientific knowledge have consistently found their way into the works of many Italian authors, from Dante, to Leopardi, to Calvino, seldom has this interdisciplinary area of research attracted the interest of critics and scholars. Thus the present volume intends to fill the void on this subject by addressing a series of questions and issues that span genres and literary periods, while at the same time concentrating on individual authors and their often controversial, but always challenging, methods of interfacing the scientific and the literary world. In the introduction to the volume, Antonello gives a comprehensive overview of the alternating fortunes that the linkage between literature and the scientific world has produced over the centuries, from the linear times of Dante to the discrete understanding of reality ushered in by the twentieth century. Noting that literature, particularly in Italy, has for centuries constituted the space where exchanges of ideas have taken place, he reminds the reader of the experimental, Galilean character of any literary pursuit. In it new ideas become the object of aesthetic and stylistic elaborations, deriving significance and meaning from the cultural environment that has produced them and which they, in turn, will contribute to reshaping. As he stresses the necessity to explore the interrelationship of literature and science from a historical and epistemological perspective, Antonello does not fail to recognize that such an exploration must possess its critical and theoretical apparatus, its own systematic methods of inquiry and investigation. The task of exploring the dialogue and interrelation between science and literature is made increasingly difficult by the realization that these cultures have, in the last two centuries, developed in dramatically different epistemological directions. Yet many contemporary historians and philosophers of science do not [End Page 258] accept the view that science and literature are separate cultures, impermeable to one another. In particular, scientists insist on a 'hybrid' paradigm when speaking of understanding cultural and creative processes. As can be easily proven, artists are the first to understand the metaphorical and analogical resonance of scientific theories while scientific paradigms are not developed in a vacuum, or ex nihilo, but represent the theoretical materialization of complex cultural transformations, of concomitant social and economic shifts. The task of Science and Literature and of the literary and cultural critic is thus to address theoretically and methodologically those hermeneutical issues that inform and legitimize this interdisciplinary area of research, in particular those involving the translatability of concepts from one universe to another, the definition of the trajectory along which scientific ideas become literary metaphors, and the study of the cultural and temporal hiatus separating the emergence of a scientific paradigm and its expression in literary works. The 12 essays contained in this four-part volume address the hermeneutical foundations outlined in the introduction in different and original ways. In the interest of brevitas we will be able to review only a few of these essays, all of undeniable intellectual depth and critical value. In part 1, "Dante and the Early Tradition," Zygmunt Bara´nski's "'Per similitudine di abito scientifico': Dante, Cavalcanti and the Sources of Medieval 'Philosophical' Poetry," sheds light on Dante's search for and dialogue with the poetic and philosophical models that preceded him, and that he aimed at transcending in the translation of his dottrina in the verses of the Commedia. Thus, the chapter focuses on both the translatability of...

Questa affennazione di Klaus Theweleit, tratta dal suo saggio The Bomb's Womb and the Genders ofWar, l focalizza il discorso su due ques Ioni fondamentali. La prima è sicuramente la più ricca di conseguenze per la presente analisi: se la guerra è concepita come negazione del principio femminile, come limite di demarcazione tra due universi contrapposti, quello della violenza e della distruzione e quello della creazione, è concepibile una letteratura femminile sul tema, in quali fonne e con quali contenuti? E se questa è non solo possibile ma opinabile, quali componenti tematiche, quale stile e quale ideologia distinguono la scrittura femminile sulla guerra da quella maschile? Se la guerra è stata storicamente patrimonio evenienziale, cognitivo ed espressivo di un sistema eminentemente maschile, i suoi effetti si sono in brevissimo tempo ripercossi sull 'universo esperienziale della donna, alterandone drammaticamente il corso. Di questi mutamenti e rivolgimenti non rimane tuttavia stimabile traccia letteraria, essendo ogni epica incentrata sulla figura di un eroe o di un popolo che combattono una guerra tutta detenninata e definita dal segno e dal codice maschili. Dopo aver evidenziato la preponderanza del principio di competenza maschile e la fondamentale assenza della voce e del punto di vista femminili' la critica esamina le ragioni di un tale sbilanciamento prospettico e rintraccia nella mancanza di partecipazione diretta all'evento uno dei motivi essenziali della esclusione della donna dal panorama della letteratura di guerra. Per secoli si è mantenuto infatti l'assunto che la donna non potesse descrivere con incisività ciò che essa non aveva sperimentato in prima persona, lo scontro cruento. Ancora più oppugnabile della questione della assenza del coinvolgimento diretto è il problema del genere, la cui funzione