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All seminars in this series commence at 4.15pm and take place in Brennan MacCallum Room 724.

For further information on these Research Seminars, please contact:

Thursday 11 September
L’archetipo della femme fatale: "La lupa" da Verga all'opera di Marco Tutino
Walter Zidaric (University of Nantes)

This paper explores the archetype of the femme fatale in Giovanni Verga’s short story La Lupa in its various theatrical and musical versions up to its most recent operatic adaptation by Marco Tutino.

Walter Zidaric is Associate Professor of Italian Language and Literature at the University of Nantes (France) where he teaches, amonst other things, the history of the opera and its relationship with Italian history and society. His research interests also cover migration literature and his last publications include the edited volume: L'italiano lingua di migrazione: verso l'affermazione di una cultura transnazionale agli inizi del XXI secolo.

Thursday 18 September
Translating Signs, Producing Subjects: Street Signs on Liverpool Road and Via Paolo Sarpi
Brett Neilson (University of Western Sydney)

This paper moves between two streets: Liverpool Road in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield and Via Paolo Sarpi in the Italian city of Milano. What connects these streets is that both have become important sites for businesses in the Chinese diaspora. Moreover, both are streets on which locals have expressed desires for Chinese signs to be translated into the national lingua franca. The paper argues that the cultural politics inherent in this demand for translation cannot be fully understood in the context of national debates about diversity and integration. Drawing on arguments about globalisation and the production of subjectivity, I suggest the representation of translation as the passage between conceptually different but comparable equivalents displays complicity with capitalist modes of exchange.

Thursday 25 September 2008
The poetics of bilingualism: Greek poetry in Italian words.
(The case of Dionisios Solomos, 1798-1857)
Vrasidas Karalis (The University of Sydney)

Dionisios Solomos is considered the national poet of modern Greece and his poetic idiom defined the way that poetry has been written and appreciated in the country for the last 200 years. Yet the most paradoxical element of his oeuvre is its bilingual character, written predominantly in Italian and only partly in Greek.

The paper focuses on the intense conflict of linguistic idioms throughout his mature work and on the creative process of trans-lingual and intra-lingual translation that we find in his manuscripts. Solomos wrote everything in Italian first, then translated his initial drafts into Greek, and finally worked on their poetic form through versification and rime. This very strange process may be called "the poetics of bilingualism" because in the final text both stages of articulation co-exist in a functional yet uneasy symbiosis. The ultimate outcome of the tension in his work is the fragmentary nature of his mature works, his inability to complete a text (in prose or poetry) and his final abandonment of his Greek poetry in the last ten years of his life.

Solomos' poetry reflects a major experiment in expression and articulation attempted in a period before linguistic nationalism established a national canon. The presentation discusses the creative process of bilingualism and its effects on the act of writing.

Thursday 9 October
Italy’s membership of the North Atlantic Pact revisited, 1948-49
Andrea Benvenuti (University of New South Wales)

Thursday 16 October
Piero Bigongiari's missing notebook
Theo Ell (PhD candidate-University of Sydney)

In 1947, with Florence stitching itself back together after the Second World War, Piero Bigongiari seemed ready to publish the poetry he had produced over the previous three years as a Quaderno nero. It was to be an expression of wartime angst and futility, a parallel statement to Mario Luzi's more fantastical Quaderno gotico, while also representing a lesson in experience and a cautious return to an idea of poetry as a naturally evolving life force, a notion which the bombardment of Florence had threatened to extinguish forever. But this encouraging return to literary life did not take place: the Quaderno nero was never published and Bigongiari went another five years without a major work of his going to print. This paper will draw on original research to attempt to explain why Bigongiari withdrew this promising work and what became of its remains.

Thursday 23 October - 2 presentations
Harry Potter and the Italian translation: Culture, Expressions and Intertextuality.
Maria Capobianco (Honours-University of Sydney)
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been arguably the most globalised novels of recent years. The series has been translated into 60 different languages and experienced enormous success the world over. The translation of such a work must cross not only linguistic boundaries, but also cultural and literary ones. And yet how is a series that is so deeply ingrained in British culture, setting and literary tradition effectively transmitted to an Italian audience? This paper will attempt to analyse the treatment of cultural elements, idiomatic expressions and intertextual references, in the Italian translations of the first and last books of the Harry Potter series (namely Harry Potter e la Pietra Filosofale and Harry Potter e i Doni della Morte). Does the translation of these elements affect the tone and nature of the Italian versions? Are there emerging trends or obvious changes in approach in the translations of books 1 and 7? What affect has the Harry Potter situation had (if any) on the world of translation?

Language dynamics in multilingual Switzerland: the position of Italian
Danielle Gehrmann (Honours-University of Sydney)
Recognising four official languages in the Federal Constitution, Switzerland stands unique in Europe in the respect to which German, French, Italian and Romansh are all accorded equal status. Within this multilingual scenario, how is the position of Italian, the Third Switzerland, defined? This paper will discuss Switzerland’s multilingualism and more specifically the status of Italian within it, in the light of such issues as societal and individual multilingualism, linguistic freedom, language rights and language planning. The role of Italian will be considered in relation to the other two main languages, German and French, both within the Confederation and more specifically within the canton of Ticino.

Thursday 30 October - 2 presentations
Multilingualism in online exchange: a study of the “In Italiano” chatroom
Enza Criniti (Honours-University of Sydney)

La filosofia del tempo di Antonio Negri
Robert Kelly (Honours-University of Sydney)

New accelerated pathways for Intermediate and Advanced students.
From 2008, students with HSC or equivalent language skills will be able to take Senior units in Italian in their Junior year. For details of the program and pathways to honours, click here.

Sydney student wins international essay prize
For the second year running, a student from the Department of Italian Studies has been placed equal first in the undergraduate writing competition run in conjunction with the Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo. Congratulation to this year's winner Luisa Marzullo who joins Theodore Ell who received the prize in 2006.