A Multitude of Women

Lucamante, Stefania

doi:10.3138/9781442688667

Cited by 17 publications

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“…These authors’ modes of autobiographical writing illustrate the workings in Italy of a strongly subversive push towards a historically transforming deviation from literary orthodoxy, as exhaustively theorized recently by Stefania Lucamante (2008): a movement entirely propelled by women. What is most interesting about these three writers in particular is that neither they nor their works can be considered ‘marginalized’ in the classical sense of the word.…”

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confidence: 76%

Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Lia Levi: Jewish Italian women recapturing cities, families and national memories

Clementi

2013

European Journal of Women's Studies

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To this day, the Italian Jewish literary postwar canon is undisputedly ruled by Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Carlo Levi. This study of three major Italian Jewish women writers -Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Lia Levi -highlights the presence in Italian literature of a subversive Jewish écriture feminine. These writers' formal independence and subversive redeployment of narrative and thematic strategies not only consolidated a strong female voice in Italian literature but also produced a specific Italian brand of Jewish literature. The following analysis shows how, through their literary 'life miniatures', Ginzburg, Sereni and Levi recentre the domestic everydayness of woman's personal and historical experience, while, simultaneously, challenging the traditional representations of women's positions within family and within the public space, as well as interrogating their Jewish identity vis-a-vis their country's Fascist past. In particular, this article focuses on the way in which all three authors portray themselves as women trying to strike a balance between their Jewish identity and history alive only in the domestic space of their family lives, and their gender identity which is repressed by the patriarchal system both in the house and in the public arena. These women respond by moving 'out' of their homes, by exploring the city spacethus turning the 'urban monster' into a positive locus for women's self-determination and political action -and by bonding with other women. Through a demasculinization of the city space, these memoirs re-elaborated notions of family, Judaism, private and historical memory, and they reinvented a poetics for the 'small virtues' (piccole virtù) of woman's everyday existence while also pioneering a new space in literature that radically changed the direction of patriarchal Italian (and Jewish Italian) culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

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confidence: 76%

Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Lia Levi: Jewish Italian women recapturing cities, families and national memories

Clementi

2013

European Journal of Women's Studies

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“…20 Thus, they have never really entered the official canon, a situation that also seems to reflect the Italian picture, as outlined by Lucamante: The interaction that takes place between female writings, literary tradition, and conventional ways of reading texts needs further discussion in order to bridge these diverging paths of what one can think of today as separate female (unofficial) and male (official) canons of the Italian novel. 21 Of course, one might object that the reviews published in the daily press can hardly refer to all aspects of a novel due to their limited length. Nevertheless, in addition to providing a compulsory summary of the plot, a critic should be able to say something about the aesthetic characteristics of a literary work, its genre, and its literary context:…”

Section: Stars Without Constellationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ferrante Feud: The Italian Reception of the Neapolitan Novels before and after their International Success

Schwartz

2020

The Italianist

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This article analyses the Italian reviews of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, published in the years 2011-2014. The focus of the study is twofold: first of all, it examines how Ferrante's works have been assessed in the Italian press, and secondly, it investigates whether the Italian reception of the works has been influenced by their internationaland especially Americansuccess. Drawing on previous studies of the evaluation of female writing by Anna Williams, Stefania Lucamante, and Tiziana de Rogatis, the analysis emphasises how Italian critics in a selection of reviews published in newspapers, literary magazines, and collective blogs have approached Ferrante's writing from the perspective of style, content, genre, and literary contextualisation. The analysis shows that the reception of the first two parts of Ferrante's quartet has striking similarities to the patronising patterns uncovered by Williams, while the reviews after the international success are more appreciative. These results are also discussed with regard to literary consecration and canonisation by highlighting how Ferrante is addressed in recent books on contemporary Italian literature. SOMMARIOQuesto articolo analizza le recensioni italiane della tetralogia L'amica geniale di Elena Ferrante, pubblicata negli anni 2011-2014. Lo scopo dello studio è duplice: innanzitutto prende in esame come le opere di Ferrante siano state valutate nella stampa italiana e, dall'altra, si propone di indagare se la ricezione italiana sia stata influenzata dalla fortuna internazionale, soprattutto quella statunitense. Partendo dagli studi sulla valutazione critica della scrittura femminile di Anna Williams, Stefania Lucamante e Tiziana de Rogatis, l'analisi sottolinea l'approccio dei critici italiani alla scrittura di Ferrante dal punto di vista dello stile, del contenuto, del genere e del contesto letterario in una selezione di recensioni pubblicate su quotidiani, riviste letterarie e blog collettivi. L'analisi rivela che la ricezione delle prime due parti della tetralogia di Ferrante ha somiglianze con gli schemi paternalistici rilevati da Williams, mentre le recensioni pubblicate dopo il successo internazionale sono più elogiative. Questi risultati dell'analisi sono anche discussi in rapporto ai processi di consacrazione e canonizzazione letteraria mettendo in risalto il discorso su Ferrante in alcuni volumi recenti sulla letteratura italiana contemporanea.

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“…11 Even if one had not noticed the curious assonance between the name Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante, Ferrante herself has highlighted her indebtedness to Morante's work in a number of interviews, and the North American press has explicitly defined Ferrante as the New Morante. Various parallels between the two Italian women writers have also been drawn by several literary critics: see Lucamante 2008;Patrizia Sambuco, Corporeal Bonds: The Daughter-Mother Relationship in Twentieth Century Italian Women's Writing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Siriana Sgavicchia, Il romanzo di lei: Scrittrici italiane dal secondo novecento a oggi (Roma: Carocci, 2016). Sgavicchia also highlights significant interferences between Ortese's and Ferrante's work, whereas Ricciotti draws an explicit comparison between the two ('A Confrontation between Elena Ferrante and Anna Maria Ortese: The City of Naples, the Gateway, the Identity', Zibaldone: Estudios Italianos 4.2 (2016): 111-22).…”

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confidence: 99%

World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon: From Elena Ferrante to Natalia Ginzburg

Caserta

2019

Modern Languages Open

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Variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, World Literature has in the last two decades become a central subject in literary studies. The current debate around World Literature is certainly central to the present and the future of the discipline of Comparative Literature. At the same time, as I show in this paper, a redefinition of World Literature, which would include a deeper understanding of both its risks and its potential benefits, can push us towards a revision of the canon(s) of our national literary traditions. Moving from Tim Park's assertion that the popularity of Elena Ferrante's "dull global novel" would contribute to obscuring more deserving authors-among whom he cites Natalia Ginzburg-this paper argues that Ferrante's literary success could, on the contrary, pave the way for a rediscovery of past writers within the Italian literary tradition. Through a comparison of Ferrante's L'Amica Geniale and Ginzburg's La Strada che Va in Città, the article shows how both works are, in Pheng Cheah's terms, "literature that worlds and makes a world", insofar as they foreground a world that is open and unstable, crucially caught between tradition and modernity, as well as the local and the global. Ultimately, both works call for a conception of World Literature that does not need to imply the loss of the local, but that can rather promote what Florian Mussgnug calls "responsible and responsive local sensitivity". Introduction: What Literature? And what World? World literature can hardly be considered a new concept in literary criticism. The numerous recent scholarly discussions of world literature, and the multiple attempts at theorizing it from different perspectives, invariably link it back to Goethe's inaugural appraisal of Weltliteratur (1827) and to the equally celebratory remarks on the internationalization of literature that can be found in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848). And yet, it is impossible to deny that since the turn of the millennium, world literature, variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, has become a central subject in literary studies. Seminal works by Franco Moretti (2000), David Damrosch (2003), and Pascale Caserta: World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon Art. 18, page 2 of 18 Casanova (2004), in particular, have laid the foundations for what has now become a fertile area of scholarly inquiry and research. 1 Seen as a timely response to economic and cultural globalization, and as such praised as an attempt on the part of literary studies to cope with the global development of human and social sciences, world literature seems to be ideal for advocating literature's place and utility in the contemporary globalized world. 2 But how so? In its proclaimed worldliness, world literature argues at its outset for a significant widening of traditional literary boundaries and aims at including in its scope all the literature in the world. 3 Such an ambitious gesture has not been exem...

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A Multitude of Women

Cited by 17 publications

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Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Lia Levi: Jewish Italian women recapturing cities, families and national memories

Natalia Ginzburg, Clara Sereni and Lia Levi: Jewish Italian women recapturing cities, families and national memories

Ferrante Feud: The Italian Reception of the Neapolitan Novels before and after their International Success

World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon: From Elena Ferrante to Natalia Ginzburg

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