Mujeres en fuga: de escrituras y lecturas

This essay discusses some female characters’ escape as a journey by looking at a series of writing variants belonging to a corpus of fiction by Julio Cortázar.

«L’anima altrove»: due scrittrici dell’esodo giuliano-dalmata

The paper focuses on two Italian writers who, after Second World War, lived the experience of Giulian-Dalmatian exodus. Anna Maria Mori, born in Pula in 1936, as a child left Istria with her family; Nelida Milani, born in Pula in 1939, remained in Istria. Several times in their works they told about that tragic experience, both individual and collective, sometimes even working together.

Aracoeli di Elsa Morante

I propose a close reading of Elsa Morante’s latest book, Aracoeli, drawing upon three key literary devices: escapism, metamorphosis and paradox, which I use in relation to both the principal characters in the book, Aracoeli and her son Emanuele. Moreover, my reading will also bring to light the author’s personal experience and how it is relevant to the novel particularly in relation to the literary device of escapism.

Maja Haderlap: la historia del Ángel del olvido

The latest novel in Slovenian wants to talk about previously ignored or inadequately presented historical issues. Among such topics is also the history of the Slovenians of Carinthia in Austria that throughout the twentieth century have gone through many individual and collective traumas. The writer Maja Haderlap has achieved international success with her novel Engel des Vergessens (The Angel of Oblivion), published in 2011 in German, in 2012 in Slovenian. With the gesture of forgiveness she tries to contribute to the improvement of Austrian-Slovenian coexistence. The novel is autofictional text of fragmented discourse that is part of the current postmodernist narrative tendency.

Mirar el exilio desde el exilio

The essay intends to act as a reading of the novel Mother tongue of the Argentinean author María Teresa Andruetto, based – as requested by the call – on the reflections of Edward Said. More specifically, I would like to consider the influence that, in the novel, the voluntary exile of the daughter has in the delayed look that she lays on the forced exile of the deceased mother. At the same time, I am interested in considering the impact on the narrative of the Patagonian geographical context, in which events take place, and the myth of the wild – salvific land that accompanies it.

Versi sovversivi

Women’s poetry of the First World War has long been neglected by historiography and literary criticism. In 1981 the anthology edited by Catherine Reilly gave a decisive impulse to research. Suffragists, pacifists, nurses, but also ordinary women wrote poems to express their sense of loss, to keep the memory of their loved ones alive, to give voice to a personal and universal pain, to denounce the true face of a war that was cruelly striking civilians. The essay offers a few examples of female poetic creations and dwells on poems written by Margaret Sackville and Henriette Sauret.

Zenoveva, una colona italiana in fuga (da se stessa)

This paper aims to analyze the comic strip character called Zenovena (or Genovena), created by the comedian Carlos Henrique Iotti, circulating in newspapers and periodicals in southern Brazil since 1983. Zenovena is a typical descendant of Italian immigrants in southern Brazil that was raised in the colony (countryside), but that has been transformed over the years. These changes promote inner conflicts that end up being a source of humor. She is married to Radicci, also a descendant of Italian immigrants and the mother of the young Guilhermino. He is a college student, an environmentalist, a surfer and an inventor, in contrast to the peasant logic of his parents. Zenovena becomes a woman in flight (of herself) whilst reviewing her values, models and patterns in a reflexive and dialogued way.

«Como nací pat’e perro»

The article deals with the multifaceted Chilean artist Violeta Parra (1917-1967), whose life and works are an example of a restless, nomadic and unconventional character. It traces her existential and aesthetic nomadism at the levels of biography and of artistic practice as well as in performance, which synthesizes the former aspects. It also focuses on the hybrid and cross-border nature of her artistic practice, assuming that her ability to escape from cultural, ethnic and social divisions – by stretching and reinventing categories like ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ – makes Parra’s legacy extremely relevant and appealing to the new generations.

Fuga ed esilio di Mayy Ziyāda

The life of Mayy Ziyāda, a complex – and still underestimated – intellectual figure at the time of the Nahḍa or Arab «renaissance», appears in many ways a gradual and necessary flight from the world and, at the same time, a progressive refinement of the sensibility. From her birth in Nazareth, her youth amid the nationalist and anti-British agitation in Cairo, a cosmopolitan and multicultural city, to her hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital in Beirut, then finally back to Cairo where she died in utter solitude, Mayy Ziyāda’s wide and varied literary production speaks for those who, fleeing from themselves and from the emotions of a world at once changing and resisting change, are foreigners everywhere, forever «in the wrong place».

Xiao Hong: corpi in fuga

Xiao Hong (1911-1942), original name Zhang Naiying, lived through the first half of the twentieth century, leaving behind the image of a socially engaged writer, sensitive to the issues connected to the people of her troubled homeland, in the North East of China. After an initial enthusiastic reception of her most representative novel, The Field of Life and Death (1935) in the literary arena, she was later neglected by Chinese critics, and excluded from the Maoist literary canon, as her fictional creatures and her works did not fit the optimistic spirit and the class consciousness requested to the intellectuals of the time. She was then re-discovered only in the 1980s, when both in China and the West her works have been re-read with a feminist or cultural studies approach. In this paper I explore the personal and literary forms of escape underpinning her figure and literary production. Exile, escape, uncertainty are the key words which can adequately describe Xiao Hong’s life and writing, in which, as Yan Haiping (2006, 136) states, one can find the sense of a ‘mobile violence’, due to her choices both as a woman (who revolted against her traditionally bound clan) and as a writer, who adopted a quite innovative, fragmented style combining personal memories and a crude and yet poetic realism. The literary practice which mainly expresses her constant escape from stereotypes, ignorance and conventional fetters is the representation of a dislocated female body subject to any kind of violence and humiliation: Xiao Hong’s ‘placeless bodies’ (Yan Haiping 2006, 146) are tangible marks of subjugation but also of resilience against a gendered destiny, which let her construct her literary and personal identity on a popular standpoint.