Category: Research Page 1 of 2

2024

1. An article about Elsa Morante and Helena Janeczek (Annali d’italianistica): “Jewish Images and Transnational Histories in Italian Writing, from Elsa Morante to Helena Janeczek” This article is in the special issue, Fifty Years of La Storia: Elsa Morante beyond History (edited by Franco Baldasso, Ursula Fanning, Mara Josi, Stefania Porcelli, Katrin Wehling-Giorgi). It first outlines Jewishness across Elsa Morante’s oeuvre to show how Morante contributes to traditions of diversity in Italy, before putting Morante’s La Storia and Helena Janeczek’s La ragazza con la Leica inconversation with each other to examine their related representations oftransnational, Jewish, and Italian history. It includes grappling with a very troubling letter Morante’s former lover wrote her after the war. If you read the quote (in the first part of the article) and have thoughts, please talk to me, I am still thinking about it. This article relates to my current book project, partially described in Italian Culture.
2. An article about Italo Svevo and Virginia Woolf (MLQ): “Who’s Afraid of Italo Svevo? Routes of European Modernism between Trieste and Virginia Woolf’s London”  By exploring Svevo and Woolf’s shared modernist networks, including London’s influence and Hogarth Press, this article reveals Svevo’s significance as an author who has not easily fit Anglophone paradigms of modernist fiction and whose associations with Woolf contribute to the growing challenges to nation-based literary histories. Despite their multiple connections, Svevo and Virginia Woolf  have been difficult to envision together in part because their gender, backgrounds, and nationalities separate them. It comes partially from an interest in Hogarth Press’s two publications of Svevo’s works and their significance, as well as a long-standing confusion about Svevo’s limited presence in Anglophone criticism.
3. A chapter about the essays of Natalia Ginzburg, Elena Ferrante, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri (Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies): “Neither Rich, Nor Poor, Neither Jewish, Nor Catholic: The Legacies of Natalia Ginzburg’s Negations” In her essays on her childhood and in Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg repeats that she was mixed or nothing in a series of ways: neither rich, nor poor; neither Jewish, nor Catholic. While at times Ginzburg’s reflections on her nothingness lead to remarks about a sense of displacement or not belonging, in her essay “The Little Virtues” Ginzburg highlights the power of being neither rich nor poor, a space which creates the possibility of money not guiding one’s life. This chapter follows the negations of Ginzburg’s essays to analyze her creation of spaces that offer alternatives to the categories determined by society. In my ideal world (in which I write a chapter that is too long), I would have discussed Ginzburg’s use of né in her other genres as well. Ginzburg’s non-ideological grappling with these neither/nor spaces make her appealing for a variety of writers, especially in this century. The second half of the chapter considers how Elena Ferrante, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith use the evasive essay form to think through new models of being beyond conventional categories of class, gender, religion, nationality, race, and even language. While Ginzburg has made briefer appearances in past publications (including my book), it was wonderful to work more extensively on an author I have often taught and on whom I wrote my senior thesis as an undergraduate.
4. A chapter, co-written with Stiliana Milkova Rousseva, introducing the volume Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies (Palgrave): “Introduction: Global Ginzburg—Reading Natalia Ginzburg in the Twenty-First Century” Our introduction provides a brief overview of Natalia Ginzburg’s life and reception and then outlines the volume’s three sections and their critical coordinates. The first section, “World Literature and World Making,” uses translation practices, world literature, and transnational studies to theorize Ginzburg’s growing popularity. Teresa Franco focuses on translations into English, Silvia Caserta on the 2016 edition of Ginzburg’s earlier works, and Cecilia Schwartz on Ginzburg’s translations into Swedish. This section should be of interest to translators and scholars of world literature, even if they are not (yet?) into Ginzburg. The second section, “Female Bodies, Voices, and Gazes,” examines Ginzburg’s subjects whose bodies become sites of resistance against the patriarchal norms that govern the gendered expectations of society (Giovanna Faleschini Lerner), that subsume the female authorial voice (Serena Todesco), that regulate heteronormativerelations (Enrica Ferrara), or that dominate the cinematic gaze (Maria Rizzarelli). This section draws on gender and queer studies, speech act theory, intersectional feminism, and media studies to focus on Ginzburg’s marginalized characters and to address scholarly gaps. By putting Natalia Ginzburg in conversation with other significant authors, the third section, “Identity, Topography, and Forms,” explores key elements of her identity and literary genres: Cesare Pavese and Turin’s topography (Stiliana Milkova Rousseva); Elsa Morante and the archetypal family novel (Stefania Lucamante); Elena Ferrante, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and the essay form (Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski); Primo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Jewish identity (Domenico Scarpa). Through comparisons of these key writers and Ginzburg, this section’s chapters offer diachronic and synchronic approaches to Ginzburg’s varied forms. The three sections exemplify how Natalia Ginzburg’s writing can generate and sustain a range of theoretical lenses and approaches while remaining rooted in a recognizable and relatable reality—literature, translation, and the world; the body, the voice, and the gaze; urban spaces, novelistic forms, and expressions of identity. See an excerpt in Reading in Translation.
5. A chapter on Italo Svevo and Women’s Writing in Italo Svevo e i suoi mondi, edited by Olmo Andrea Calzolari and Giulia Perosa (Franco Cesati, forthcoming). Proceedings from a conference in Trieste (2023), see “Italo Svevo e le scrittrici del suo tempo.”  
6. An interview with Igiaba Scego in The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, edited by Corina Stan and Charlotte Sussman: “It Is Hard to Choose”: An Italian Author on Migration, Diaspora, African Literature, and the Limits of Labels This interview appears in the section “Language and Migration” edited by Derek Duncan. The author of Cassandra a Mogadiscio, La linea del colore, Adua, among other important works, Igiaba Scego was a visiting scholar at Duke in Fall 2022.  There will be a related conference at Duke December 9th-10th.

The recent past (2022-2023):

Forum Italicum published a special issue “Critical Issues in Transnational Italian Studies” (Summer 2023), edited by Serena Bassi, Loredana Polezzi, and Giulia Riccò. The issue’s wide range of scholarship provides a series of views on where Italian studies is, is headed, and should head. It includes my article “Italian Ghetto Stories: A Transnational Literary History” that examines Italian ghetto stories, which are distinguished by confusions of time, continuities, tourism, reflections on collective identities, and movements in and out, in order to outline one potential literary history. In contrast to German-language and Anglophone literary ghettos, Italian ones are generally absent as a critical category from literary debates, though they appear in works by Leon Modena, Israel Zangwill, Rainer Maria Rilke, Umberto Saba, Giorgio Bassani, Elsa Morante, Caryl Phillips, and Igiaba Scego, among others. A transnational approach can bring together works that have not been considered collectively because of disciplinary formations. Italian ghetto fictions expose the disheartening continuities of prejudice and, relatedly, have generally not been considered together because of restrictive ideas about the nation as an organizing principle.

With Salvatore Pappalardo, I co-wrote “The Emergence of Austro-Italian Studies,” for a special issue (New Directions in Austrian Studies: Empire & Post-Colonialism), edited by Tim Corbett, of the Journal of Austrian Studies. (Summer 2023): 63-73. The article charts the emergence of Austro-Italian Literary Studies with a focus on the complexities that such a categorization entails. Austro-Italian Literary Studies owes much to the disciplinary expansions of Habsburg and Austrian Studies, fields that build upon the multicultural, polyglot, and multiethnic heritage of Central Europe. This short article (which could have been infinitely expanded) addresses Habsburg Italian modernism, Austro-Italian postmodernism, and other works of literature as well as the developments in Literary Studies that make Austro-Italian intersections important sites for explorations of identity. Salvatore Pappalardo and I have both worked on Austro-Italian questions, especially in terms of Trieste, since graduate school. This issue of the Journal of Austrian Studies, as the next one will, brings together a range of pieces about the field of Austrian Studies. Our article, as so many in the issue, show the present expansion of “Austrian Studies,” which also builds on a long history of transnational, intercultural, and multilingual contexts and study.

In a recent (September 2022) issue of Italian Culture — the official publication of the American Association for Italian Studies and edited by Lorenzo Fabbri and Ramsey McGlazer — I published “For a Jewish Italian Literary History: From Italo Svevo to Igiaba Scego” 40 (2): 31–53. This article, as my one on Italian ghetto fiction, relates to my current book project on the Jewishness of Italian literature by outlining part of the project.  I argue that recognizing Jewishness as a crucial part of modern Italian literary history offers one path for discussing the current and historical diversity of Italian culture. The first section discusses key twentieth-century Italian authors — Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, and Italo Svevo — not to assess how Jewish they are, but to illuminate the Jewishness of modern Italian literature, which prompts a reconsideration of the construction of Italian identity. The second section, “Jewish, Black, and Italian: The Archival Fictions of Helena Janeczeck, Claudio Magris, and Igiaba Scego,” scrutinizes how these three authors interrogate Italy’s role in the persecution of Jews, racial violence, and colonialism, drawing on historical documents that show the gaps in dominant discourses and asking readers to reflect on how historical narratives have been constructed. Being more cognizant of Jewish Italians, their backgrounds, and their representations in literature contributes to the growing analyses of Italy’s diversity, adding to examinations of Italian literature that focus on belonging, borders, migration, and colonialism.

Edited by Helen Solterer and Vincent Joos, Migrants shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines the sustained contribution of migrants to Europe’s literatures, social cultures, and arts over centuries. My chapter, “Superman in Italy: The Power of Refugee Artists” (96–130), investigates an Italian collection of refugee stories from 2018, Anche Superman era un rifugiato: Storie vere di coraggio per un mondo migliore (co-edited by Igiaba Scego and UNHCR) to analyze key elements that Italian literature brings to discourses about migration literature, including questions about who is included in this category and the connections between texts and authors across time. Arguing for the importance of including untranslated works in debates about migration literature, the chapter puts Anche Superman era un rifugiato in conversation with two well-known collections, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018) and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns (2019) in order to trace how Italy is positioned in these three migration literature anthologies. Italy decenters ideas of one-directional migratory movement, because its history, geography, and politics highlight the complexity of describing migratory movement and the issues with assuming all countries follow similar models in terms of migration and its representations. The chapter ends with a discussion on how Anche Superman era un rifugiato reveals the connections between colonialism, migration, racism, and antisemitism in Italian history and criticism.

Migrants Shaping Europe was the subject of a New Books Network podcast. The volume has five sections: 1) A premodern cultural history, 11) Migrating in Spanish, III) Migrating in Italian, IV) Migrating in French, and V) Arts of Migration. My section, Migrating in Italian, includes chapters by Akash Kumar and Tenley Bick. In Chapter 4, Akash Kumar analyzes Sicily in the poetry of Ibn Hamdîs and Morocco in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in part to decolonize the way that these medieval authors are too often separated and interpreted via the lens of nationalism and nineteenth-century disciplinary formations. In Chapter 6, Tenley Bick examines the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino’s 2008 work, Porta di Lampedusa, porta d’Europa (Gateway to Lampedusa, Gateway to Europe), located on the Italian island of Lampedusa, which is closer to Tunisia than Sicily. Bick reveals how the artwork’s placement, materials, and modifications, including interventions by other artists, reveal not only the complex, varied, and often conflicting reactions of Italians today to migration from Africa, but also the connections of these varied reactions in terms of Italian colonization and decolonization. All three chapters in this section discuss works in terms of openness, and interpret Italy as a space that has always been a crossroads and created art that represents its hybridity

Natalia Ginzburg Global Legacies Discount & Table of Contents