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Seminar series - semester 2 2009

Venue: Education Seminar Room 325 (Education Building – ground floor)
Time: THURSDAY 4.15pm on the dates below

27 August 2009

Dean Martin goes down under - una breve discussione sulla musica di tradizione italiana a Sydney, dal secondo dopoguerra ad oggi
Cristoforo Garigliano, Macquarie University, Sydney

Sulla base di vari esempi musicali e riferimenti storici, lo scopo di questo intervensto e’ illustrare e problematizzare le origini e le caratteristiche della musica di tradizione Italiana a Sydney. Facendo riferimento alle diverse politiche culturali vigenti sia negli Stati Uniti che in Australia negli anni dell'emigrazione Italiana di massa, si propone un’ analisi comparativa delle tradizioni musicali in entrambe i continenti, sottolineando parallelismi, differenze e legami storici. L’ intervento si chiudera' con un dibattito pubblico sulla percezione, in Australia, della musica "tipicamente italiana", con un invito al discutere il perche' e la veridicita' e le origini di alcuni stereotipi diffusi.

3 September 2009

[[b|Luigi Pareyson: Existence, Interpretation, Freedom ]]
Paolo Diego Bubbio, University of Sydney

Luigi Pareyson (1918-1991) was an important Italian philosopher. Author of ground-breaking books, as a professor at the University of Turin he had many famous students, including Umberto Eco, Mario Perniola and Gianni Vattimo. Unfortunately Vattimo is not very well-known in the Anglophone world, as his work has never been translated into English. This presentation aims at providing an introduction to this important figure. First I introduce Pareyson's biography and his cultural background. Then I reconstruct his philosophical itinerary: his early writings on Existentialism; his theory of interpretation, and his last meditations on the relationship between evil, freedom, and God. Also, issues such as existence, ideology, neopositivism, tecquique, interpretation, and religion in Pareyson's thought will also be considered during the presentation.

17 September 2009

A Renaissance Chapter in the History of Concordia
Francesco Borghesi, University of Sydney

This talk analyzes intellectual contexts in which the term concordia has been used in Italy between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Inspired by Pico della Mirandola’s project of pax philosophica, the aim of this paper is to shed light on different environments where concordia was used as a keyword. In doing so, the paper compares Pico’s project to, on one hand, the diffusion of appeals to civic concord in the political poetry of early Quattrocento Florence, and, on the other, the theological sources of the figure of Concordia depicted by Lorenzetti in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. Although the connection is only circumstantial, it provides interesting evidence in an attempt to outline a longue durée history of the idea of religious and philosophical concord, a term that has a long and important role in the civilization of pre-modern and modern Europe, but, unlike that of tolerance, has not received enough attention.

24 September 2009

The Marriage of Giorgina Craufurd and Aurelio Saffi: Mazzinian nationalism and the Italian Home.
Prof Ros Pesman, University of Sydney

The paper stems work I am doing on the Mazzinian movement in the Risorgimento and in particular on the role of love in building political networks, and political networks that cross borders. Mazzini lived most of the time between 1837 and 1867 in exile in Britain where he established a small but totally devoted network of men and women who became his main source of support and bankrolled his political activities and insurrections in Italy. My particular interest is in Mazzini's relations and those of other patriots with British women as well as on 'transnational' marriages. The subject of this paper is the marriage of two of Mazzini's most zealous disciples, Aurelio Saffi, a member of the lesser nobility in the Romagna who was one of the triumvirs alongside Mazzini in the 1849 Roman Republic and who arrived as an exile in Britain in 1851, and Giorgina Craufurd, an upper class British woman who had been born and brought up in Florence where she lived until she was twenty. Both saw their marriage as both a personal and political union in which they tried to live out the Mazzini vision of the family, motherhood and the moral regeneration of Italy. It was also a marriage in which Mazzini was a very real presence.

8 October 2009

The Arcadum carmina: a new approach to the Academy of Arcadia
Maurizio Campanella, Università La Sapienza, Rome

From 1690 up to about 1770 the Academy of Arcadia was definitely the most important Italian literary society: it played a key role in overcoming the Baroque, recovering the Renaissance and achieving some sort of literary unification of Italy. The Arcadia was also the only Italian literary movement which enjoyed a European diffusion, getting strong links with learned men (not only poets), chiefly in the catholic countries. A long-lasting stream of bibliography has stressed the negative hold the Arcadia would have had on Italian literature, hindering its modernization; still today the Arcadia is usually thought as a circle of poets devoting themselves to vacuous erotic poetry, old fashioned both in style and content. Right or wrong, that is only a partial view, since it does not take into account the bulk of Italian prose and Latin poetry the Arcadians wrote; actually, the latter was considerably more renowned abroad than the Italian lyrics. Starting from the three volumes of arcadum carmina (Rome 1721, 1756 and 1768), a thorough study of Latin poetry could lead to a better understanding of the Arcadian classicism (as for themes, literary forms, style, vocabulary) and shed a new light on the role the Academy played in the Italian culture during the 18th century.

15 October 2009

Translations of Italo Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno
Paul Croci, Honours student, University of Sydney

22 October 2009 - Italian Language Week

F.T. Marinetti and Futurism at the Interface between Science and Literature
Meg Greenberg, University of Sydney

29 October 2009

Federico Fellini’s Otto e 1/2
Jacinta Mulders, Honours student, University of Sydney