Sudbina i mit o povratku u Mjesecu i krijesovima

Author(s): Mirela Boloban / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 17/2019

Continuous reflection on the myth is dominant in Pavese's complete oeuvre; it is about the primarily implicit (every so often also explicit) thought that stands out as the background of his poetics. Works such as Dialoghi con Leucò, as well as completely theoretical ones like Mestiere di vivere unequivocally speak of the importance of the Greek myth and mythology in modern times. However, this idea became an integral part of his poetics: of Pavese’s poetry and, especially, of his final novels. The influence of the specific parts of ancient and Greek civilizations which survived in the cultural sphere in Pavese’s time marks not only the author’s literary work but also the whole philosophical system that guided him. This includes above all the myth of return and of childhood as a bearer of secrets and symbols, as the key for the mysterious forces that lead to the inevitability of destiny, a constant in Pavese’s thought and poetics. The evolutionary path intersected by the cosmic dimension of this philosophy turns into a personal, historical, and complex dimension. In the light of such a vision of the world, ancient and constant, the author also observes his personality, and his characters become symbols and representatives of that thought. Since myth and symbolism are a broad topic, the subject of this paper will be more specific: we will deal with the myth of return by showing the implicit presence and influence of one version of the myth of Odysseus dominant in the character of the protagonist of the novel La luna e i falò. There will be due attention paid to the presence of other versions of Odysseus in Pavese, which are discussed in detail by Antonio Viselli in Between Myth and Mythology: The Multiple Odysseus in Cesare Pavese's La luna e i falò as well as Dough Thompson in Cesare Pavese, A Study of the Major Novels and Poems. However, this paper will be dedicated to the analysis of what imposes itself as the most interesting component of the novel: the similarities and differences between Anguilla (as a symbol of human destiny, but also of a part of Pavese's personality) and Dante's Odysseus, analysing the circumstances, the cause of the journey, as well as the inevitable ruin.

Laž i obmana Else Morante kao freska sicilijanskog društva između stvarnosti i bajke

Author(s): Mirza Mejdanija / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 17/2019

The novel House of Liars by the Italian author Elsa Morante was published in 1948. Many literary critics were puzzled by this novel as it was, to a great extent, in contrast with the neorealist prose at the time. In her novel, Morante shows reality through lies and deception of the main characters, and the theme of their religiosity and escape from reality, which is the goal of our research. The novel sparked great curiosity among contemporary critics and delighted them. The work is complex and its characters unnatural and deformed by twisted ideas that are presented to them by the society that they accept no matter what cost. The characters are susceptible to a fake lifestyle bereft of love, justice, truth or spontaneity. They are constantly resorting to lies in order to overcome the inevitable disappointment that life brings and to feed their meaningless ambitions that lead them to self-destruction. The story of the novel is placed on a sentimental and historical canvas of nineteenth century Sicily and is primarily oriented towards the deforming aspects of the Sicilian mindset. The characters lack capacity to suffer their position in this world. For that reason, they have an instinctive desire to resort to myths and prejudice. The plot of the novel flows through blocks of narrative. The author constantly moves forwards and backwards in time, once again to the characters and events previously abandoned. She avoids simultaneity to the maximum and enjoys taking her own characters through time. The characters do not possess an essential feeling of religiousness. On the contrary, this feeling is manifested through idolatry and superstitious beliefs. Christianity is always depicted as idolatry and is devoid of its own essence, which is why the pagan myth is placed at the same paradigm. Both become material for sacred and theatrical rituals, such as fairy tales and legends this world is permeated with. Reality and appearance interchange incessantly, and one understands that the theatre for Morante is not only a magical place where miracles turn into reality, but something greater, a magnificent metaphor and almost an allegory of the world. The tragic play of lies, spells and the unreal finally ends after the death of the protagonist's parents. Ghosts and spirits settle, but only to reappear in Elisa's mind.

Утицај окултног на Луиђија Капуану и Луиђија Пирандела

Author(s): Mauro Ruggiero / Language(s): English Issue: 172/2020

Luigi Capuana (1839–1915) and Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) were two of the most important Italian writers who lived between the XIX and XX century. Capuana was an author, poet and journalist influenced by the works of Émile Zola, French author and founder of Naturalism, who was also one of the most important members of the Verist literary movement in Italy. Pirandello was a novelist, poet, short story writer, dramatist and author of 40 theatre plays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, and his work is famed worldwide. Both authors were also influenced by Western Esotericism, especially by French Spiritualism and Theosophy, which is noticeable not only in their novels and theatre plays but also in their writings about the theory of literature and related articles. This paper deals with the presence of Esotericism and Occultism in the works of these authors and in the overall culture in fin de siècle Italy, in order to show just how important these topics are to better understand their poetic opus and ideas about literature, culture and society at that time.

HORCYNUS ORCA: IL NUTRIMENTO DEL VIAGGIO, LA SEDUZIONE DELLA MORTE, L’INVENZIONE DEL LINGUAGGIO PER ESPRIMERE IL SENSO PIÙ VERO DELLE COSE

Author(s): Gabriele Ottaviani / Language(s): Italian Issue: 4/2017

In the Bible, both in the Old and in the New Testament, manna is repeatedly named, which is that unexpected gift of God, a Lord who loves life and protects it, to the people, showing his fidelity to his living word. The term manna in Hebrew is not a simple name, but a wonderfully wondered question: "What is this?" God, in fact, had brought food down to the time unknown, similar to the coriander seed, but of white color and honey flavored taste. But in the Horcynus Orca’s world manna cannot be just a gift, because every element is also its opposite; D'Arrigo speaks to those who read it with a new language of everlasting themes: for the life nothing is free, and its mystery cannot be unraveled unless you come to a compromise.

Il romanzo psicologico La madre di Eva di Silvia Ferreri (2017): interferenze di genere e contrasti tra vita familiare reale e ideale conducono a una nuova Genesi

Author(s): Lorenzo Marmiroli / Language(s): Italian Issue: 2/2020

Silvia Ferreri’s novel La madre di Eva [Eva’s mother], published in L’Aquila in 2017, is an artistic work which finds itself in between the psychological novel and the autobiography-confession, and deals with reflections and thoughts of a mother whose daughter, Eva, presents a gender dysphoria, and therefore decides to have a surgery in order to change gender. It is not just a gender novel, as the action takes place because of Eva’s decision, but the author shows the reader rather feelings and thoughts of the mother who, through a stream of consciousness, looks through her remainders and past decisions the reason of Eva’s so-called-sickness. The mother asks herself about her imperfection, as a mother who gave birth to an incomplete, wrong, creation. The novel presents interesting parallelisms with the Holy Bible: thus, the two characters of Eva and the mother, and their bound, need to be understood as mythical-archetypical characters, representing the relationship between creator and creature, divinity and human being, between God and the first man (and the first woman). The mother takes on herself the suffering of all the mothers of the world, while Eva suffers within a body not her own. The martyrdom and the suffering of the two main characters, Eva and the mother, will lead to overcome the sense of imperfection they feature, thus realizing a new, modern Genesis.

Spazio e Identità: Paolo Rumiz in Appia

Author(s): Ellen Patat / Language(s): Italian Issue: 2/2020

Walking – a modality of exploration of space that has kept its nature since ancient times with its typical Franciscan humility and that transforms feet in “the noblest organs of sense” (Rumiz, Appia, 2017) – on the one hand, leads the traveler to grasp the ‘truth’ of places, on the other hand, it makes the journey, often an initiatory one, take the form of an immersion in an inner geography or, better, into a choreography in which the individual engaged in their identity (trans)formation seeks their roots. In the footsteps of the Roman legions, on a road defined by Publius Papinius Statius the longarum regina viarum (the queen of the long roads), that is the Via Appia, the architype of all roads, in 2015 Paolo Rumiz and his patrol, as modern ‘pilgrims’ or ‘wanderers’, embarked on a journey of rediscovery that became a real battle denouncing the commodification and neglect of the territory in an attempt to reconstruct a connection between their identity and this place and its history. Modernity has engulfed the ancient road, a reflection of the Empire’s past glories and power, once a symbol of civilization and superiority as well as of commercial power. While large stretches of the road are still preserved and walkable, the undertaking becomes difficult outside the suburb of the city of Rome. The present paper aims at investigating the sense of identity that emerges from this travel account: the first focus will be on the concept of personal identity, pondering whether Rumiz could be defined a modern pilgrim, a legionary or a wandered; the second point then concentrates on the socio-cultural and national identity, taking the first steps, as Rutilius Namatianus had done, from Rome – defined by the Roman poet in his De redito suo “regina tui pulcherrima mundi” (of your world, outstanding queen) – to discover the territory of the South.

Dospívající protagonistka v současném italském románu: Motiv zkoušek ne-dospělosti

Author(s): Pavla Přívozníková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 57/2018

The essay focuses on the examination of the child or adolescent presence in the Italian adult fiction. Using text analysis it shows the role that the child or adolescent assume, on the semantic and also on the formal level. Special attention is dedicated to the representation of girl as a textual subject, which disposes of unique characteristics in contemporary Italian novel. Still in contemporary Italian prose, the girl protagonist has to undergo various exams and has to prove her im-maturity. The list of exams and the analysis of them conclude the essay.

Reportaż z zaświatów

Author(s): Jarosław Mikołajewski,Michał Jędrzejek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 796/2021

Ulisses w Piekle

Author(s): Stefan Klemczak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 796/2021

Luigi Pirandello’s Concept of Life and His Way to Fascism

Author(s): Luciana Brandi,Ubaldo Ceccoli,Clotilde Barbarulli / Language(s): English Issue: 38/2021

This article investigates Pirandello’s adhesion to the Italian Fascist Party by examining articles, interviews, letters, and essays with the aim of shedding light on the political dimension of this choice, so frequently mitigated by the critics, and of showing its relations to the author’s concept of life. Finally, by taking a close look at leading themes in the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal, the article raises the questions: To what extent is this text permeated with ideological elements? In what ways, similarly, does it transmit a view of the world that would connect Pirandello’s thinking to ideas that were mainstream in the society of his time.

Prijevodi - Miljenko Stojić

Author(s): Giovanni Pascoli,Arnaldo Beccaria,Giovanni Battisti Marini,Giacomo Perico,Luigi Giussani / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 107-108/2021

Poetry translation by Miljenko Stojić ("Il giorno dei morti" by Giovanni Pascoli; "I morti non invecchiano" by Arnaldo Beccaria; "Uno strano giardino" by Giovanni Battisti Marini; "A te che piangi i tuoi morti, ascolta" by Giacomo Perico; "Per i nostri morti" by Luigi Giussani).

Massimo Bontempelli giornalista e ammiratore dei Quattrocentisti: per un rinnovamento letterario della Terza epoca

Author(s): Dana Božič / Language(s): Italian Issue: 9/2021

The article presents selected newspaper articles and a preface written by Massimo Bontempelli which have been relatively unexplored and unacknowledged by the literary criticism. The comparative analysis of the preface from 1913 and selected articles from his early period and the early 1920s, shows that numerous core ideas pertaining to his cultural and literary project ‘novecentismo’, which was officially launched as a theoretical proposal between 1926-1927, were already present in his early editorial collaborations as well as the articles: the role of linguistic transparency, the importance of imagination, Bontempelli’s anti-canonical attitude and the role he assigns to the reader, to name a few.

The Grotesque and Myth in Giambattista Basile’s Il Pentamerone

Author(s): Antonela Marić,Marko Dragić,Ana Plavša / Language(s): English Issue: 36/2021

This paper, besides a short introduction concerning general information on themes and the structure present in the short story collection Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de’ peccerille, written by the Italian Baroque author Giambattista Basile, whose masterpiece enjoyed great fame abroad much earlier than in Italy, is concerned with the analysis of fantastic and grotesque elements which generally characterise oral tradition, fairy tales and myths. The above-mentioned elements were identified in the fifty short stories which Basile wrote and included in his collection. Various sources were used in the analysis, relying on myths and fairy tales with the aim of explaining the presence of the grotesque. Besides its great literary value, this collection is also of great historical importance because, just like many other examples of oral tradition, it fosters a vast span of costumes and traditions that are typical of the Mediterranean folklore. From one tale to another, the collection slowly but surely reveals the Mediterranean identity of the people from the South of Italy and explains the function of the grotesque and its didactic purpose.

Wiem, kim jest Elena Ferrante

Author(s): Edyta Zielińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 805/2022

Salvatore Quasimodo. La ricezione nelle antologie: il declino dopo l’apoteosi?

Author(s): Mariangela Lando / Language(s): Italian Issue: 1/2022

Is Quasimodo a writer still relevant, or do the moods of his poetry ring false? The anthological reception of Quasimodo’s works seems to focus on his role as the undisputed interpreter of Hermeticism. It is Quasimodo who is placed among the main diagnosticians of the modern human condition – attributing to him a significant role in twentieth century literature, as evidenced by the international accolades bestowed upon him, which led in time to his being awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 1959. Deep human reflections, full of turning points, insights and original stylistic solutions, converge in his works. This paper aims to examine the anthology volumes used in secondary schools in recent decades, and to analyze the differences between the presence of Quasimodo’s texts and those of other authors contemporary to him, in light of the different approaches of curators and anthologists. The author is interested both in the authorial canon proposed to students and in the functional uses of excerpts from selected works by Quasimodo.

Čitav život za jednu nasilnu smrt. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922. – 1975.)

Author(s): Pietro Citati / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 27/2022

Piera Paola Pasolinija upoznao sam prije dvadeset dvije godine, dok je bio mlad pisac, potpuno nepoznat, koji je živio na periferiji Rima i podučavao u osnovnoj školi u Campinu za dvadeset tisuća lira mjesečno. Zamolio me da ga odvezem u Fiuggi gdje je tražio material za knjigu koja će se dvije godine kasnije pojaviti pod naslovom Ragazzi di vita (Uličari). Čitavo sam poslijepodne slušao kako nekog mladića iz rimskog predgrađa ispituje o jednoj pljački. Želio je znati sve – doba noći, kvart, zgradu, ogradu, bijeg rimskim ulicama s policijom za petama – sa sitničavom potankošću, kao da sudbina knjige i njega samoga ovisi o točnosti njegova bilježenja svake geste i svake boje. Tako sam naučio da je književnost iznad svega kći preciznosti.

Nostalgia, Depression and Suicide as the Consequence of Acquired and Inherited Trauma in Amelia Rosselli’s Poetry

Author(s): Olga Zasada / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2021

In one of her many poetic motivation descriptions included in her literary works and comments, Amelia Rosselli points to tough-life experience as a factor influencing her artistic creativity. The Italian twentieth-century poet repeatedly emphasizes a direct impact of mental well-being as the driving force of her writing process. A gloomy flashback, hand in hand with a concept, experience, and fantasy, influence the expression of her pieces and structures the literary space. A minor overtoned reference to the grievous reality of Fascist Italy connected with the murder-for-hire of family members, sudden and premature death of her sweetheart and brother, mental illness in the context of the DNA memory, and, finally, the promise of suicide had all impacted noticeably upon the verses of her poems. Another thing worth mentioning is the issue of stress and hardships lived through by Amelia Rosselli’s mother and her immediate relatives just prior to the poet’s birth. According to the latest developments in medicine and cognitive sciences, any psychical damage influences bodily and mental functioning of persons not only directly affected by them, but also their descendants. The linguistic terms applied in the pieces of the Italian poet provoke a discussion of the phenomenon of post-memory. The term, which was proposed by Marianne Hirsch to refer to collective trauma inheritance, has been recently broadened by psychologists to encompass individual memory as well. The fragments written in four language codes (Italian, French, English, and music notation) offer hints to be used in the psycho-emotional analysis of the poet. Additionally, scrutinizing Amelia Rosselli’s nostalgic lyrical pieces, we can discern, by referring to psychological sciences, how the composition-making can constitute an auto-psychotherapy procedure. In terms of interdisciplinarity, the experience of melancholy and nostalgia in Amelia Rosselli’s artistic creativity covers the psychological, social, historical, cultural, political, and artistic areas.

Gli scritti italiani di Edvige Toeplitz Mrozowska sulla realtà sovietica in Asia Centrale e sulla rivoluzione bolscevica

Author(s): Monika Gurgul / Language(s): Italian Issue: 3/2022

The aim of the paper is to answer the question about the attitude of Edvige Toeplitz Mrozowska to the Soviet revolution with which she entered in a direct contact during her travel to Tajikistan in 1929. In the period between 1930‒1933 she devoted two texts, important in her literary output, to the revolution and the reality of Soviet Central Asia. The first is an account of the expedition to the Pamir Mountains led by Mrozowska, and, apart from the geographical subject matter typical of such texts, it contains observations regarding socialist changes in the newly established Tajikistan, while the second one is not only a collection of sketches related to the analysis of revolutionary reality, but also a kind of project with historical and even historiosophical aspirations.

Placentalna retorika – narativna avangardnost Pisma nerođenom djetetu Oriane Fallaci

Author(s): Astrid Kovačević / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2022

The article examines the possibility of a new, interdisciplinary, neo-poststructuralist, interpretation of Oriana Fallaci’s novel Letter to a Child Never Born, based on the postulates of poststructuralist text theory and psychoanalytic feminism, expanded by the results of research in stylistics and metrics. The presence of a specific, metaphorically presented, so-called placental rhetoric, a pronounced phonic and tactile rhetoric through which the author erases the boundaries of the physical and psychological, reality and fiction, text and context, will be described following a critical reading of theoretical literature and a linguistic analysis of selected fragments of the novel. This unusual pre-Oedipal rhetoric, immersed in biological tissues and body fluids, presents itself as a heterogeneus cosmic water space, a space within which the female body speaks. The intimate communication between the mother and her unborn child, that is, the author and her unborn text, conveyed through an unusual quantitative and qualitative distribution of punctuation and prosodic elements, phonetic and morphological variation, and subversive narrative bricolage techniques, presents itself as a symbol of rhetorical freedom, a space freed from patriarchal authority, a space of plural, inclusive, and fluid, female and feminine, textuality within which the physical becomes metaphysical, corporality becomes graphology, and writing becomes the carnal materialization of the human voice.

Entre Alexandrie et la France : les lieux de La Triomphante de Teresa Cremisi

Author(s): María Manuela Merino García / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2022

We propose a study on La Triomphante, the first novel by Teresa Cremisi, which narrates the journey of the protagonist from the south to the north of the Mediterranean. Taking Paul Ricœur Ricœur´s studies as a starting point, our analysis of the journey will unite the concept of narrative identity, which goes from sameness to ipseity in the discovery of alterity, to the triple schema of the journey proposed by Xenophon: anabasis, parabasis and katabasis.