Il ritorno a casa secondo Primo Levi

Primo Levi recounts two journeys: a real one in La Tregua, and a fictitious one in Se non ora, quando? In both cases he has to deal with the romance’s structure and its stereotypes, which tend to negate realism. For this reason the writer adopts proceedings to defuse romance and happy ending

Speaking “as a” and Speaking “for”: Multiple Appartenenze in the Autobiographical Macrotexts of Aldo Zargani and Clara Sereni

Clara Sereni (Rome, 1946) and Aldo Zargani (Turin, 1933) share a number of appartenenze, the word used in contemporary Italian discourses on ‘identity’ to denote conscious belonging to one or more ethnic groups, religious faiths, regional origins, political allegiances. Both are non-practicing Jews and left-wing public intellectuals. Both have written autobiographical books, essays, articles, lectures and stories: cumulatively, they constitute two macrotexts, where each text positions itself against the background of the previous texts and is linked to them by numerous cross-references. Zargani, who lived through the Shoah as a child, writes mainly in order to explain to his – mostly non-Jewish – readers issues connected with the problmatic notion of ‘Jewish identity’. Sereni, whose formative years were the late Sixties and early Seventies, places herself at the intersection of four appartenenze: as a Jew, a woman, a ‘handicapped mother’ and a political utopian. Drawing on Nancy K. Miller’s distinction between ‘speaking as a ...’ (as an individual who identifies specifically as one thing in a specific context) and ‘speaking for’ (representing a group and speaking on its behalf), I examine aspects of both macrotexts with a particular focus on the connections between self-representation, public contexts and Jewishness. I also, drawing mainly on Linda Hutcheon (1994), look at the way Sereni and Zargani use irony – particularly self-deprecating irony – to emphasize their unfulfilled political expectations and their status as insiders or outsiders according to whom and in which public situations they speak ‘as’ and ‘for’

Narratives of Murder and Knowledge: Pellegrino Artusi and Dante Alighieri as Sleuths

Using McHale’s notions of “epistemological” and “ontological” dominants, this article analyzes three historical crime novels that have real historical characters as their protagonist: Marco Malvaldi’s Odore di chiuso (2011), featuring Pellegrino Artusi as the detective, and Giulio Leoni’s I delitti del mosaico (2004) and La crociata delle tenebre (2007), with Dante Alighieri as the sleuth. The article shows how the hybridization of crime fiction, history, and biography may be a fertile ground for the representation of the different ways of “knowing” in their respective historical periods and the construction of a dialogue between past and present constructed around depictions of social and political diversity, language issues, and ideas of “Italy.

Parole esportate e lettori (im)perfetti: echi di altre lingue nei testi di Levi

Le osservazioni di questo lavoro si aggiungono alle esistenti analisi della complessità e varietà della lingua di Levi e riguardano l’uso e le funzioni che espressioni e citazioni letterarie in altre lingue hanno nei suoi testi

Diasporic dialogues: Primo Levi in Australia

Primo Levi’s works of testimony, from If This Is a Man to The Drowned and the Saved, seek not only to connect history and memory but also to provide general social and political perspectives relevant to the end of the twentieth century. The voice of this diaspora Jew has had echoes in a country which has recently begun to acknowledge its historical responsibilities. Levi’s thoughts on shame, on violence and on the need to face collective responsibilities have been applied by Australian intellectuals to two specifically Australian issues. The first is a literary hoax which triggered a major cultural controversy in 1995, now widely known as the ‘Demidenko affair’. The second is the relationship between Australian identity and the ‘stolen generations’ of Aboriginal children and young adults forcibly taken from their families between 1910 and 1970 and compelled to grow up isolated from their culture. The aftermath of the forced removals has produced widespread debates about national responsibility and the need to offer a public apology to Aboriginal Australians for this and other wrongs. I attempt to show how dialogue with Levi’s reflections expands the ethical and political dimensions of Australian self‐examination, particularly in some works by the philosopher Raimond Gaita (who comes from a Romanian‐German background) and the political scientist Robert Manne (son and grandson of Holocaust survivors)

Differences, deceits and desires: murder and mayhem in Italian crime fiction

Italian crime fiction (known as gialli in Italy) has developed from a popular genre to a fully-fledged literary genre; and in the past thirty years it has gradually become the focus of growing interest from literary critics as well as the reading public. This collection of twelve essays is the first one in English to deal exclusively with Italian crime fiction. The essays are scholarly yet accessible contributions to the growing research in this field. They analyze texts by well-known authors (such as Umberto Eco, Leonardo Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri) as well as works by younger writers. They bring together four of the most significant strands of Italian gialli: the way gialli develop or subvert the tradition and conventions of the crime genre; regional specificity within Italian crime fiction; gialli by and about women, lesbians and gay men; and representations of Italy in gialli written by English-speaking writers

Translating idiolects: Natalia Ginzburg's Lessico famigliare

We look at the two English translations of Natalia Ginzburg's autobiographical narrative Lessico famigliare (1963) with a focus on the literary function of idiolects, and the challenges of translating them, particularly code-mixing between standard Italian, dialects and other languages. We draw on Bassnett-McGuire (who notes a tendency for translators to "fail to consider the way in which individual sentences form part of the total structure") (1980:115), Berman (who argues that source text markers, such as idiolects, form part of an "underlying network of signification within the text as a whole") (2000:292-3) and Gutt (who maintains that a successful translation will recognise and address the relevancy of the role played by idiolects in the text) (2000). We agree with Eco (2003) when he argues that losses and gains are inevitable in any translation process and problems must be negotiated individually. We would suggest that an effective strategy for translators may be to negotiate solutions from their specific places within what Pym (1998) calls 'intercultures', points of cultural overlap between source and target texts

La memoria rubata di Felice Schragenheim. Un testo controverso nella memorialistica della Shoa'

Il romanzo-intervista di Erica Fischer Aimée & Jaguar. Eine Liebesgeschichte. Berlin 1943, pubblicato nel 1994 e dedicato alla storia dell’amore tra una “tedesca” e un’ebrea nella capitale del Reich rappresenta un caso letterario controverso. A livello narrativo, il libro nasce dalla collaborazione tra l’unica sopravvissuta della coppia e una letterata ebrea che raccoglie e ordina i suoi ricordi con un atteggiamento empatico e intersoggettivo che finisce per mettere in luce gli aspetti problematici di una «intervista sulle memorie». A livello storico, tocca temi di genere ma sfiorando appena le questioni cruciali dell’identità e della resistenza