DAY FOUR - SUNDAY, JUNE 9 

Description:

As analysed by various scholars (Dickie 1999; Moe 2006; Schneider 1998), the Italian Unification in the nineteenth century heightened a process of othering regarding the Mezzogiorno, relegating it to a role of subalternity compared to the more ‘advanced’ and ‘modern’ North. Following the footsteps of Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought (2012), today there is an epistemological change regarding the South and its representations (Ferrante 2019; Polizzi 2022), one that in particular involves forms of non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations across different cultural forms. The sessions explore a variety of perspectives, exploring the intersection between queerness, Southern Italy, and other elements.

Organizers: Alice Parrinello (University of Oxford) & Valentina Amenta (Università La Sapienza, Roma)

Chair: Alice Parrinello (University of Oxford)

Michael Tortorella (Independent Scholar)
Meridionalità contemporanee: riprendere decisionalità sui nostri territori per autodeterminare i nostri corpi

Francesca Romana Ammaturo (London Metropolitan)
Conceptualising meridian sexualities in Southern Italy: Theoretical and methodological challenges

Description:

«Bisogna riconoscere - scriveva Montale in un saggio del 1961 - che oggi il viaggio inteso come esperienza di vita non esiste più». Apparentemente muovendosi sulla falsariga del Levi-Strauss di Tristi tropici (la prima edizione italiana è dell'anno precedente), Montale riflette sulla «fine dei viaggi» e, con passaggio immediato, sul destino stesso dell'arte: quella pittorica, nella quale il paesaggio ha perso ormai la sua unità per esplodere, con Kokoshka e Morandi, in una rappresentazione di frammenti. L'evoluzione - o meglio degenerazione - tocca però soprattutto la forma romanzo e, commenta Montale, oggi il viaggio di formazione di Wilhelm Meister sarebbe inconcepibile. E tuttavia, a sei decenni di distanza, le analisi di Levi-Strauss e Montale (tra i molti) sembrano da rivedere, correggere e arricchire: il legame tra viaggio, rappresentazione del paesaggio e romanzo, soprattutto nelle sue forme ibride, sembra infatti oggi saldissimo, tanto da poter pensare al racconto di viaggio come epitome del genere. Basti pensare ad autori quali Bruce Chatwin, Geoff Dyer in area anglosassone, a Giorgio Vasta, Tommaso Pincio, Antonio Franchini in Italia, e molti altri.
Il panel si focalizza sulla letteratura italiana contemporanea e si propone di indagare il legame tra viaggio, romanzo e paesaggio in tutte le sue forme.

Organizers: Dalila Colucci (Università di Siviglia) & Raffaello Palumbo Mosca (Università di Torino)

Chair: Raffaello Palumbo Mosca (Università di Torino)

Dalila Colucci (Università di Siviglia)
Viaggio, paesaggio, carotaggio: il romanzo di Palermo di Giorgio Vasta da Spaesamento a Come in sogno

Lorenzo Marchese (Università di Palermo)
Viaggi della disconoscenza nella Sicilia novecentesca: Bonaviri e Cattafi

Elena Grazioli (Università Statale di Milano)
Dal viaggio in Italia di Piovene al paesaggio urbano del boom di Petrignani e Lupo

Description:

Elements like water and air are so all-encompassing as to elude territorial boundaries, extending well beyond the borders of any one nation-state. And yet, water and air, sky and sea, are integral to political and poetic imaginations. How do we attend to the material and symbolic aspects of these elements, beyond colonial fictions and fantasies of mastery? What are the effects of such fictions and fantasies on these elemental bodies, and how might water and air elude or resist capture by them? How does an elemental politics emerge from within Italian national culture and undermine its many violent enclosures and transgressions?

Chair: Rebecca Falkoff (Univeristy of Texas, Austin)

Akash Kumar (University of California, Berkeley)
Virgil’s ocean: An elemental approach to Dante’s imperial guide

Roberto Ferrini (Yale University)
«Di là dal capo». Sea boundaries and shipwreck in Verga's I Malavoglia

Federica Soddu (Rutgers University)
Rain, sand, and bombs. Sardinia’s continuing borders in the Trilogy of Bustianu’and Servitù Militari

Daria Kozhanova (Duke University)
From the postcolonial shoreline: Sea’s waves and translation in the Black Mediterranean

Chair: Eve Darian-Smith (University of California Irvine)

Eve Darian-Smith and Philip C. McCarty (University of California Irvine); Colleen C. Myles (Texas State University); Chiara Feliciani and Sandra Cavaliere (Graduate Institute of Geneva); Costanza Paolillo (New York University) 

Chair: Julie Robarts (University of Melbourne and European University Institute)

Marilyn Migiel (Cornell University) 
What Veronica Franco learned from Ovid

Julie Robarts (University of Melbourne and European University Institute)
Sexual slander of male members of the Academia degli Unisoni, and a newly identified print defense of Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677)

Cristina Perissinotto (University of Ottawa)
Utopian thought in Italy between Renaissance and Counterreformation

Description:

Following the recent publication of the co-edited issue of Rivista di studi italiani entirely devoted to poetry and the environment, this panel aims to extend the conversation to the luoghi della poesia, namely the spaces, places, territories, habitats, and landscapes of poetry–geographical, typographical, imaginary, and virtual. Poetry’s visceral rootedness in the world–or, equally significant, its stubborn vagrancy and its being out of joint with time and place–is too often overlooked. This panel features contributions about poetry and its intersections with or across the following areas: Environment, geography, academia, education, the publishing world, translation, the typed or handwritten page, digital platforms and experimentation, technology, film, photography, theater, music, sound, noise, reproduction, place, space, wilderness, and imaginary landscapes.

Organizer: Serena Ferrando (Arizona State University)

Chair: Alessio Giovene (Florida Atlantic University)

Mariagiorgia Ulbar (University of Malaga)
Residuo, deriva, vuoto, bosco: l’esplorazione creativa ed ecologica nella lettura e ricezione di poesia

Serena Ferrando (Arizona State University)
Spiagge, tronchi d’albero, scrivanie e versi: poesia tra l’umano e il nonumano  

Alessio Giovene (Florida Atlantic University)
‘Poetically Man Dwells:’ A spatial interpretation of Giovanni Raboni’s poems

Sophia Cartwright (Arizona State University)
The whole Springtime: Violence in love’s garden

Sponsored by the Italian Art Society

Description:

Recent scholarship has turned to examinations of the role of the body and its senses in the reception and use of art. In this panel, three papers examine ways that body-mind practices shaped and were shaped by the devotional art of early Renaissance Italy. All three papers concern art made for religious orders, where traditional monastic ideals tended toward a distrust of the body as a site of sin. With the rise of the mendicant orders and within a late medieval culture of religious reforms, the body instead became viewed as an appropriate site where the physical allowed for connection to the spiritual. These three studies examine various facets of this turn, from the way art and the body were used in tandem, to the idea of poverty and its physical effects, to iconographic innovations intended to encourage new ways of seeing God.

Chair: Holly Flora (Tulane University)

Rebekah Compton (College of Charleston)
The ascetic body: Alignment and composure in art for the Camaldolese order

Holly Flora (Tulane University)
Franciscan poverty and the body in illustrated Manuscripts of Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior

Allie Terry-Fritsch (Bowling Green State University) 
Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment and visual touch

Description:

The panel addresses the resurgence of baroque tropes in Italian art, music, and literature, with a special emphasis on spectral manifestation and a rhetoric of the trace. By drawing on Derrida's definition of hauntology, the panel will illustrate how ghosts can take the form of apparitions, auditory echoes, or literary perceptions. 

Chair: Alessandro Giardino (St. Lawrence University)

Itay Sapir (Université du Quebec à Montréal)
Around the fatal instant: Seventeenth-century art haunted by deaths

Eugenio Refini (New York University)
Reading (an) Aria, or, an exploration of Baroque memories through sound

Marcella Salvi (St. Lawrence University)
Echoes across time: Neapolitan spectres in Caravaggio's literary legacy

Chair: Claudio Fogu (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Claudio Fogu (University of California, Santa Barbara); Benedetta Cutolo (The Graduate Center - CUNY); Lorenzo Rinelli (Temple University Rome)