Naufragare per giardini

A Shipwreck in the Garden Estrangement and Confusion in Utopic Landscape in Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s Isle Felsenburg This essay analyses the description of the garden in the first volume of Isle Felsenburg (1731), a utopian novel by Johann Gottfried Schnabel. The paper aims to underline the central role of both ‘wonder’ and ‘estrangement’ in creating a utopian landscape by focusing on the garden of Albert Julius, patriarch of the community. While the beauty of the garden astonishes the narrator, it also results in estrangement, as it drives the reader away from the present into the creatural past of humankind, a lost Eden. Such estrangement is a form of displacement: the subject is incapable of finding its own place in nature.

Finzioni biografiche

Recensione di: Riccardo Castellana, Finzioni biografiche. Teoria e storia di un genere ibrido, Roma, Carocci, 2019, 215 p., ISBN 9788843096183, €21.

L’'amour fou' tra spaesamento e straniamento in due scrittrici siciliane: Rosina Muzio Salvo e Cettina Natoli

Amour fou between displacement and estrangement in two Sicilian writers of the Nineteenth Century Rosina Muzio Salvo and Cettina Natoli This research aims at investigating the topos of love as deep and extreme passion, in opposition to social stereotypes, in two novels by two Sicilian female writers of the Nineteenth Century, Adelina (1845) by Rosina Muzio Salvo (1815-1866) and Margherita Royn (1886) by Cettina Natoli (1867-1913). In Adelina amour fou is in conflict with the patriotic needs and the moralism of the newborn middle-class society; in Margherita Royn, an overliterary, different kind of love clashes with the materialism and commercialization which dominate in late Nineteenth century. Adelina’s displacement is highlighted by the structure of the polyphonic epistolary novel, in which the protagonist’s ‘reasons of the heart’ are opposed to the opinions of all the other characters; according to a process of Verghian estrangement (Luperini, 1974), they convey a distorted picture of her passion and consider it a weird, unacceptable fact. Margherita is able to see reality only through an overly literary lens of extreme sentimentality; her isolation is manifest in the depiction of her body, consumed by an adulterous passion which contrasts with her husband’s rough physicality; overcome by jealousy, he will end up killing her.

Straniamenti e spaesamenti a confronto nella letteratura italiana ed europea del XVIII e XIX secolo

Introduzione alla sezione tematica

Straniamenti e spaesamenti di Luigi Gualdo

Estrangement and Out-of-Placeness in the Works of Luigi Gualdo Characters and places between ideal and reality, cosmopolitanism and uprooting This paper focuses on the different forms of estrangement and out-of-placeness which can be found in Luigi Gualdo’s works. Gualdo (1844-1898) was a prominent writer whose works are influenced by French realism and Parnasse, Italian scapigliatura and the European decadence and estheticism. Moreover, he lived between France and Italy and he was one of the main passeurs between French and Italian literature of his time. This particular condition of the writer is reflected in his works and in particular in the portraiture of his characters, which are often rootless artists and mundane women with a strong component of cosmopolitism. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the characteristics and features of Gualdo’s characters according to the parameters of estrangement and out-of-placeness. In particular I will focus on the ambiguous nature of the relation between ideal world and reality, of artistic genius and its place in society and the normal world, as well as on more specific topics related to the subject, such as spleen, places described as theatrical decors, hotel rooms and feminine nomadic attitudes, cosmopolitism as both a challenge and an opportunity for the characters. I will conclude on a specific issue regarding the struggle between the estranged character, time, and aging.

Una ripetizione straniante

Repetition and estrangement The fixed idea in a tale of I. U. Tarchetti The article aims to investigate the process of estrangement through the tale La lettera U, by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti. By adopting the point of view of a madman, Tarchetti stages an estrangement that affects the entire discourse of the character. The fixed idea, a symptom of monomania (the psychiatric definition of this type of delirium at the time) gives rise to a narrative device with a strong alienating potential, able to highlight the differences between the notion of Šklovskij's ostranenie and estrangement as presented in fantastic literature.

Tracing Italianness

Review of: Charles Burdett, Loredana Polezzi and Barbara Spadaro (eds.), Transcultural Italies. Mobility, Memory and Translation, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020, 368 p., ISBN: 9781789622553, £95.00; ebook: 9781789622706, £95.00.

‘Coi libri o col mondo?’

‘With books or with the world?’ Alienation effects without disorientation in Viaggio e maravigliose avventure d’un veneziano by Francesco Contarini This paper investigates the forms and effects of displacement in Viaggio e maravigliose avventure d’un veneziano ch’esce per la prima volta dalle lagune e si reca a Padova e a Milano, published anonymously in Milan in 1818. According to Luigi Catucci, the author is Francesco Contarini, who translated many travel books for the editor Sonzogno between 1816 and 1817: this would explain the noticeable intertextual dialogue between the Viaggio and other travel writings, both fictional and non-fictional. Some allusions to Vasco de Gama’s and James Cook’s geographical explorations reveal the author’s interest in travel as an anthropological experience, while quotations from Swift and De Maistre suggest a familiarity with the literary conventions and the most recent renewal of the European novel. From a theoretical point of view, the essay examines the interaction between travel literature, (anti-)novel, récit excentrique, and parody, in order to show that literary contamination works as an estrangement device. At the same time, this theoretical interpretation is evaluated (from an analytical and interpretative point of view) in relation to the narrative techniques through which Contarini expresses the alienation-effect of the first-person dramatized narrator, prompting a strong sense of disorientation in the reader (but not in the main character).