Inaug.-. Diss.--Cologne. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 508-520.

Inaug.-Diss.--Munich. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 310-323.

Thesis (doctoral)--Justus Liebig-Universität Giessen. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-117).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-180).

In the last twenty years, Italian female literature has been characterized by a tendency to resort to a transgressive code for creating its fictional discourse. The transgression consists of desecrating those themes that Italians intimately continue to honor as taboo: menstruation, female ugliness, eating disorders problems, the refusal of maternity–or better its degradation to a mere biological fact–and homosexuality. Those issues go beyond what Italians recognize as normal and reassuring. Transgressing them is as a powerful and creative act able to awaken women, and promote their emancipation. These authoresses’ goal is to create a new dynasty of women different from their mothers–examples of women considered models of obedience and submission to the rules of patriarchy. Their aim is to have women conquer the right to talk about topics that have always been invisible and unspeakable. The meaning of transgression, taboos and the “the uncanny” is outlined upfront. The most representative transgressive authoresses in the Italian literary scene are analyzed: Elena Ferrante (L’amore molesto and I giorni dell’abbandono), Mariapia Veladiano (La vita accanto), Alessandra Amitrano (Broken Barbie), Valeria Parrella (Lo spazio bianco) and Elena Stancanelli (Benzina). Each chapter focuses on an author and her work. Historical, cultural, and social background of taboo is offered. An analysis of the text is provided to explain the violation of the taboo, while offering an interpretation of the transgression. The conclusion alludes to the way in which Italian literary criticism still struggles not to condemn works that are inconsistent with what it is determined to be the norm. / Romance Languages and Literatures

No description available.

The following study examines the artistic strategies of the Italian Baroque painter Mattia Preti (1613-99) in conjunction with their early reception in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy. In addition to studying the first descriptions of the painter's art and his early biographers' characterization of his style, Bernardo De Dominici's comprehensive "Vita del Cavalier Fra' Mattia Preti" is analyzed in order to establish Preti's place in the history of Neapolitan Baroque painting. In so doing, descriptions of the painter's art are compared and contrasted with those of his contemporaries. Following the investigation of the early sources and biographies, the painter's strategies are studied through selected paintings executed between circa 1650 and 1680. These include such works as the Aquila 'Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew', the London 'Wedding at Cana', the Naples 'Feast of Absalom', and the Siena 'Canonization of St. Catherine'. The case studies highlight a number of practices the artist used to distinguish himself from his peers. In sum, this study argues that the early biographical accounts, while only partially conveying the breadth of the painter's art, function as a point of departure for accessing and comprehensively examining his representational strategies. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that Preti was an artist who actively and continuously experimented with a range of pictorial possibilities. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-29 18:26:13.056

The Italian literature which came to life in the Eighties broke with the tradition of the preceding period during which fiction was but a fertile ground for social criticism. Furthermore, the new literary scene came to be dominated mainly by unknown young writers, who had come of age in a decisively new and modern social setting in Italy. / This thesis aims at presenting the writers that make up most of the "Giovane Narrativa" of the Eighties. It also presents the main aspects of the social and economic development in Italy after the war and their relevance to this generation of young writers.

This dissertation investigates intra-clausal relations, namely, the relations that obtain between the elements in a clause. This investigation is based on a detailed study of copular sentences in Russian and Italian. In particular, three types of intra-clausal relations are investigated here: phrase-structural relations, thematic relations, and case relations. / With respect to phrase-structural relations, it is argued that not all syntactic structures are asymmetrical. Rather, it is proposed that under certain conditions---when the two input phrases have the same features---Merge will result in a symmetrical structure. This requirement for matching features leads to a more parsimonious analysis of equative sentences where the interpretation derives directly from the syntactic structure, without postulating a special "identity copula". / As for thematic relations, it is claimed that there is no one-to-one correspondence between thematic positions and structural positions (contra the strong version of UTAH, Baker 1988). Instead, a more flexible theory of thematic relations is proposed. It is also proposed that theta-assignment is not a necessary condition for DP interpretation. Rather, a DP can be interpreted if it establishes a certain relationship with another theta-marked DP. This analysis extends to Left Dislocation, Pronoun Doubling and sound like -construction. / Finally, case relations are said to be tied to thematic relations. A version of the Visibility Condition is thus argued for. It is maintained that non-argument DPs---namely, those that are merged as neither complements nor specifiers of a lexical head---need not be case-marked in syntax at all and appear with the morphological default (i.e., nominative) marking. The alternative "agreement in case" analysis of NOM-NOM sentences is argued against; various conceptual and empirical problems for this analysis are identified and discussed. / The analysis developed in this dissertation accounts for a number of properties of copular sentences, including their interpretation, case-marking patterns, and such syntactic properties as extraction, inversion, binding possibilities and unaccusativity diagnostics.

No description available.