Past events

Research Seminars - Semester 2 2008

Family history, migration and photography in some recent Italian women’s novels

Speaker: Giorgia Alù
Date: Thursday 4 September 2008
Time: 4.15 pm
Venue: Room 724 Brennan MacCallum A18

Narrative texts that aim to reconstruct personal history, family history and biographies very often resort to the use of photographs. In many cases the process of writing is activated by looking at an old photographic image. At other times, the writing is inspired by oral stories or written documents, but a visual image is needed in order to identify, appropriate and document scenes and faces known through other people’s narration. In so doing, light is cast on an anonymous or forgotten photograph found in an archive or in a family album which is thereby given a personal meaning and a new story by the text.

This paper aims to explore the use of photographs in some recent hybrid books about family history and Italian migration by Italian women writers. It will look mainly at the way random and often anonymous visual representations of loss and dislocation are appropriated by the author and added to her story. It will be argued that rather than employing these images to support a reconstruction of her fragmented family past, the author uses them for identity performances, parental reconciliation, as well as in a search for blood connections and origins.

Giorgia Alù is Cassamarca Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests cover travel writing, representations of Southern Italy, the relationship between literature and photography and women's writing. Her book Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: Expatriate Women Writing in Sicily, 1848-1910 (Oxford/New York: Peter Lang) has just been published.

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 images of immigrants and Italians in contemporary Italian film
Luana Ciavola at the University of Sydney
22 May 2008

In this presentation, Luana Ciavola will analyse how the return of the director Francesco Maselli to his politically engaged cinema with the film Civico 0 (2007) and the work of the emerging director Carmine Amoroso with Cover Boy (2005) substantiate a recent trend in Italian cinema to represent immigrants and Italians as similar, embodying the status of ‘outsider’ and ‘other’ within Italian social reality.

In these two films immigrants and Italians are both represented as marginalized from the society and, as such, they are alienated within an Italy that, in turn, is represented as a ‘foreign’ country to both these groups. In these films the immigrant is represented as the ‘other’ who according to Kristeva, “confronts us with the possibility or not of being an other” (Kristeva, 1991, p. 13). The otherness of the immigrant challenges Italian society and reveals the existence of an ‘other’ within it, that is, the immigrant himself and the poor Italian, both socially and psychologically.

The Casualisation of Love: Emotions, the Economy and Employment in
Contemporary Italy
Paolo Bartoloni at UTS
8 May 2008

It is obvious that the question of how we love and what we mean by love in post-industrial societies cannot be separated from the question of how we work and what we mean by work (Kipnis, 2003). The very transformation of workplace semantics, stressing the significance of notions such as “no long term”, and employment strategies such as those based on the value of “weak ties” (Sennett, 1998) appear to be directly transferable to the emotional sphere. If it is true that we are in the age of “impatient capital” (Sennett, 1998), meaning the desire for rapid returns, it might also be true that we are in the age of “impatient love”, meaning the demand for quickly gratifying and consuming passion.

This lecture is the second of two on the evening on the theme Love and Lust and is part of the Articul8te seminar series at UTS. For further information and directions, please follow this link.

Fabricating Images: Jews, Clothing and the Sistine Ceiling
Professor Barbara Wisch at the University of Sydney
Thursday 5 April 2008

The Ancestors of Christ in the Sistine Ceiling traditionally have been viewed in a negative light–belonging to “the sphere of shadow and death”–in large part due to their murky tonality before the cleaning of the 1980s. The renewed visibility of the Ancestors has engendered much discussion, with several scholars proposing more positive interpretations. However, within this discourse a significant marker has been overlooked: Michelangelo placed a yellow, circular badge–the Jewish “sign” as it was called in papal decrees and city statutes–on the left shoulder of Aminadab, located prominently in the lunette above the papal throne. This illustrated presentation explores the implications of this sign as a quintessential indicator of demeaned status in a society that demarcated Jews by imposing degrading dress codes, legislated their role as moneylenders, and subjected them to humiliating public spectacles.

Barbara Wisch is Professor of Art History at the State University of New York College at Cortland. She is currently Visiting Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Sydney.

Mediterraneo: Mare Nostrum or New Frontier? The theme of the Sea in the New Italian Migration Literature
M. Cristina Mauceri at the Italian Institute of Culture
Friday 23 November 2007

From the Mare Nostrum of Antiquity, which allowed exchanges and sharing of experiences between distant people, with the intensification of migration movements the Mediterranean has become a new frontier. In her talk, M. Cristina Mauceri, Cassamarca Lecturer at the University of Sydney, will discuss the theme of the see in the narratives of authors who write in Italian and live in Italy although they were borne elsewhere.