The dissertation centres on representations of disobedience in four defining Venetian novels published between 1753 and 1769: La filosofessa italiana; L’avventuriere, L’omicida irreprensibile and I zingani. The research sees disobedience as embodying cultural changes that occurred in Venetian society during the eighteenth century, in particular among the élite. Disobedience is understood as any behaviour demonstrated against figures of secular authority (as in the parent-child relationship). It is, however, instrumental to interpretation of the text at multiple levels. First, it functions as a narratological device that triggers the development of the plot; second, it informs the didactic aims of the novel, by giving examples of behaviour performed by figures of authority, or subordinates. Third, it embodies changes experienced by readers in their contemporary life, offering a way to mediate conflicts through fiction. The dissertation investigates this function in relation to the élite, a heterogeneous group of high-income individuals from different classes. This group is identified as a privileged addressee of the novel. The dissertation investigates the centrality of Venetian élites from two different angles. In the first part, the analysis focuses on publishing activities, cultural consumption, and the development of the Venetian book market. It shows how the emergence of the novel is closely related to the economic transformation of the market, and the role played by the urban élite, that had become a target audience for new cultural products such as the novel. The relationship between literary representation and Venetian élites is further demonstrated through the analysis of the four novels. Alongside the analysis of disobedience from a literary perspective, the thesis adopts the topos to highlight cultural and social issues involving Venetian élites, such as the clash between generations; the reshaping of education; and the shift in social attitudes which transfers value from status to to wealth. The research argues that, through the representation of disobedience, novels set limits of acceptable behaviours, mediating between individual needs and social requirements, and suggesting possible solutions to existing conflicts. The dissertation stands at the crossroads of history (in particular Venetian history), literary criticism, and history of the book. This interdisciplinary approach makes an original contribution to the literary debate on the eighteenth century Italian novel and offers an innovative perspective from which to look at the emergence and development of this genre in the eighteenth century.

No description available.

What do Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Val del Omar, Alejandro Jodorowski, Néstor Perlongher, Clarice Lispector, and Octavio Paz have in common? To the naked eye, they seem to feature more differences than similarities: besides the fact that all of them are Ibero-American artists, filmmakers and writers, their birthplaces, origins, generations, styles, and artistic disciplines are quite dissimilar. But there is at least one thing they share: their output was a perfect vehicle to reflect how they were all enthralled by ecstasy, epiphany, illumination, rapture, grace. In Psychology, these events are categorized as “Modified States of Consciousness”, a melting pot that comprises heteroclite mental states like medium trances, ritual possessions, REM states, effects of hallucinogenic substances, orgasm, and so on. The common factor is that in all those cases subjects experience a new way to perceive the world and their self, far away from the one provided by the ordinary state of consciousness. Also, most of them seem to take place in a dimension where rationality is mostly an obstacle. Friedrich Nietzsche certainly believed so, as he associated these irrational events with Dionysus, the god of wine and ritual madness in the classic Greek civilization. The Dionysian cult involved rupturing the bounds of the participants’ self and the collective communion between them as well as with the cosmos. On the other hand, one criterion to distinguish between the experiences that are confusedly grouped in that psychological miscellany is to examine where does it drive us to. There are events that can potentially change our ordinary state of conscience into another that could be described as an illuminated state and could be associated to perceptions of happiness, harmony, and mindfulness. These positive sensations would help explain why, since the dawn of civilization, human beings have used various techniques (such as yoga, ritual dance, the use of narcotics, etc.) in an attempt to recreate the mystical manifestations they previously had lived solely as spontaneous experiences. It must be recognized, though, that ecstatic experiences can be associated not only to a positive dimension, but also to a negative one. Following Nietzschean thesis, Néstor Perlongher (an Argentinean writer who is central to my dissertation) points out that Dionysian experiences can be self-destructive and dangerous, as well as illuminating and liberating. Nietzsche, and Perlongher, contemplate art as the necessary complement of ecstasy, a discipline which can help avoid the negative consequences of these experiences. Salvador Dalí and Octavio Paz (another two authors studied in my dissertation) also link art to ecstasy. Dalí believes in the power of pictorial images to provoke the non-ordinary mental state associated with ecstasy. Nevertheless, Octavio Paz considers poetics one of the best artistic vehicles to express the “instant”, through which a poem breaks the linearity of time while it also creates an “eternal present”. What I exposed above could be considered a sample of what I am doing in my dissertation. I aim to establish a dialogue between diverse “texts” (in the wide sense) and authors in order to delimitate the meaning of the ecstatic phenomenon, as well as their characteristics and particularities. / Romance Languages and Literatures

In my dissertation, I explore the relationship between the material aspects of an editorial artifact and their literary implications for the texts it contains. I show how the interpretation of a text needs to be accompanied by an inquiry into the material conditions of its production, circulation and reception. This study is intended as both an investigation of the material foundations of institutions of literary study and a reflection on some often neglected sides of contemporary theorizations concerning textuality, writing, and media. My purpose is to show a paradigmatic example of the basic coincidence of textual datum and material unit, content and medium, verbal-visual message and physical support. The dissertation is articulated in a theoretical chapter followed by three case studies. In the theoretical introduction, I provide critical reflection on and expressive response to the complex, non-deterministic interplay between cultural constructs and the media within which they are formalized and by which they are formed in the context of medieval Italian literature. First, I briefly outline the theoretical coordinates within which to consider the materiality of textual supports (óstraka, papyry, codices) as a key element for the adequate interpretation of the texts that they preserve. Next, I offer examples of the interdependence between the strictly textual and material characteristics of a literary product. I sketch out the interpretive implications of these connections from the points of view of composition, circulation, and reception. I purposely draw the examples from different textual cultures, mainly classical (Greek and Latin) and medieval (Occitanic and Italian), in order to test the general plausibility of my methodology of inquiry. The first case study is conceived as a thematological inquiry. It offers a catalogue raisonné of the metaphors of the book and book production in the Dantean corpus. It studies, therefore, the description of the materiality of the book at the level of the enunciation. Books are a recursive figure in Dante’s macrotext. The reference to the “libro della mente” in the early canzone “E m’incresce di me sì duramente” prefigures the “libro della memoria” in the incipit of the Vita nova. Moreover, the book is the metaphor for the revelation of the cosmos held together by bond of love (“legato con amore in un volume”) at the climax of Dante’s mystical vision in Paradiso 33. Dante’s entire literary production is inscribed within the metaphorics of the book, which is disseminated in poetically and hermeneutically significant places. In this chapter, I begin by charting Dante’s images of and references to books in his corpus. Basing my analysis on Ernst Robert Curtius’ historical study of the book as symbol, and Hans Blumenberg’s gnoseological articulation of the metaphor of the legibility of the world, I then outline the various semantic realms that the metaphorics of the book entails. On one hand, the hints at the book structure serve as meta-textual elements that guide interpretation, since they convey information on the book format, the typology of expected readership, and the expository order of the text. In sum, these metaphors of books and book production are chiefly concerned with the text’s dramatizing its own problematic creation. For instance, the material elements implied in the address to the reader in Paradiso 10, 22 (“Or ti riman, lettor, sovra ’l tuo banco”) underscore a precise choice of book format (the “libro da banco universitario”) and a specific readership (scholars). On the other hand, the metaphorology of the book (and of the Commedia qua book) entails a more radical cognitive experience, since it signifies the reductio ad unum of scattered entities due to its nature as all-compassing semiotic vehicle. The final step of my analysis is to compare the interpretive indications inferred from references to the materiality of the book embedded in the text with actual renditions of some early witnesses of the Vita nova and Commedia. In the second case study, I explore the editorial and intertextual relations between Giovanni Boccaccio’s autograph of the Teseida and two exemplars of the poem (a manuscript and an incunabulum, both produced in Ferrara in the 1470s and kept at Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA). First, I delineate the complex system of authorial personae that Boccaccio impersonates in the manuscript. Then, I describe how visual and verbal elements in the autograph cooperate to engage the reader in a multi-sensorial aesthetic experience. Next, I investigate to what extent the material configuration of the Ferrara exemplars comply with the hermeneutic guidelines materially embedded by Boccaccio into his autograph as a means of managing the reception and controlling the interpretation of the poem. I outline how these two exemplars reveal the importance of Boccaccio’s editorial project in successfully inscribing his literary production within the canon of authoritative texts. In fact, the rich paratextual apparatus with which Boccaccio furnishes his autograph is the foundation upon which the Teseida grew into a classic and sprouted the proliferation of comments and accretions that surrounded the text of the poem. The third case study focuses on Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Petrarca’s songbook has been a privileged object of analysis for material philology since the publication of the fac-simile of the manuscript that preserves the autograph of the collection (ms. Vat. lat. 3195). The study of the autograph shows Petrarca’s editorial project of associating the poet’s activity with the scribe’s in an ideal coincidence of literary expression and script, text and book, composition and folio. Basing my inquiry on the fac-simile, I argue that the autograph should be considered as an organized form of visual poetry. In fact, this exemplar can be thought of as an entity that systematically conjugates a linguistic/verbal message with an iconic formation. The two are not simply juxtaposed, but rather they coexist in a sort of hypostasis, in which the iconic element affects the linguistic substance. On one hand, the verbal text brings about meanings that are of a linguistic type. On the other hand, it is structured as a medium that conveys meanings that are generally portrayed by the other order of representation (the visual). Therefore, the autograph delineates a project of integration between graphical and linguistic elements, in compliance with the classical and medieval tradition of visual poetry (from Simias’ taechnopagnia and Optatianus’ carmina figurata to the calligraphic production of the Schola Palatina). In the case of Petrarca’s songbook, the iconic element does not imply an apparatus of images, given the extreme essentialism of his editorial endeavors. Instead, it is chiefly limited to the graphic execution of the linguistic sign: its system of majuscules and minuscules, its layout, the regulation of written lines and blank spaces, and the relation between verse and line. I will therefore indicate how the iconic character of the autograph can be interpreted as a series of logical relations between the poetic language and its graphic rendition through writing. My purpose is to show that this series of relations conveys a specific set of visual guidelines that lead the reader through the decoding and interpretation of the text. / Romance Languages and Literatures

How does the book-object in early modernity participate in the representation of scientific knowledge? How was the reader meant to approach the book and to comprehend its contents? This project starts from the contention that scientific knowledge is not a product simply to be deposited into unmarked containers and transmitted unproblematically. On the contrary, the book, whether literary or scientific, actively shapes and invents objects of scientific knowledge. Sensory, affective and cognitive ways in which the reader is expected to approach the book and its contents are implicit in its formatting of text and image, not to mention margins, presentational material and indices. This project draws from literary and natural scientific traditions of the French and Italian Renaissance in order to study how the early-modern book forms and performs scientific knowledge in various ways. Compelling the reader to interrupt his or her reading and to explore the book’s text and images as if they were objects in their own right, the book-object strives to imitate the experience and method of scientific discovery for the early-modern reader. To this end, touch, appetition, and bodily awareness become as important as sight and critical reasoning in a procedural approach and apprehension of knowledge in and of the book-object. An “aesthetics of discovery”, formed by the book and performed by the reader, is implicit in the book’s careful articulations of text and image. / Romance Languages and Literatures

The scientific discoveries and inventions of the early seventeenth century, which include Johannes Kepler’s inverted retinal image, the refinement of lenses, and the invention of the telescope, transformed the status of vision in the acquisition of knowledge, thus modifying the nature of what is known and even challenging how things are known. Rather than focus on philosophical oppositions between seeing and looking, or on artistic practices such as linear perspective or anamorphosis in literature’s engagement with vision, this study privileges instead a dialogue with early modern optics. Deriving a theoretical framework from the scientific debates about vision and its instruments, which brings attention to the historically charged concepts of mediated perception, the visible and the invisible, and natural and mechanical sight, I examine how French and Italian authors in the early seventeenth century engaged with ocular and optical motifs to question the sense of sight and its authority. My corpus describes vision as indispensable to the observation and knowledge of the world, although the texts also expose the vulnerability of the sense of sight to error because of natural limitations or an inability to recognize the true form behind deceitful appearances. As such, they elucidate a crisis of knowledge and representation that characterizes the earlier decades of the seventeenth century. Based on the dynamics between the eye and visual aids as they appear in the scientific community, I identify two distinct visual modes in the literary texts, which correspond to the natural eye and the instrumentalized one, assisted and enhanced by a lens. The authors considered here, which include Béroalde de Verville, Traiano Boccalini, Agrippa d’Aubigné, and the writers involved in the polemics around Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone and Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, present the two visual modes as existing in tension, which I define as “baroque vision.” The analyses of the literary texts demonstrate how the integration of lenses, be it through explicit references to optical devices or through more abstract portrayals that parallel the operations of the eye and the instrument, becomes emblematic of other concerns, from debates regarding discontent about dissimulation to discussions of poetic practice. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines colonial legacies and transnational identities in the works of four francophone writers from Algeria: Hélène Cixous, Zahia Rahmani, Nina Bouraoui, and Boualem Sansal. Their autobiographical and fictional texts focus respectively on the history and memory of a particular minority identity singled out by French colonialism: the Jews of Algeria, the Harkis (indigenous Algerians who fought in the French Army during the War of Independence), the “métis” (mixed-race) individuals, and the “pieds-noirs” (European settlers). The memory of these historical minorities still continue to shape identities in contemporary Algerian and French societies, beset by “wars of memory” about the colonial past and the War of Independence. The writers’ texts confront the official memory and national narratives of both France and Algeria. By employing literature as a tribunal for history and by constructing a memorial discourse dissonant with official historical narratives, these writers not only disrupt the public understanding of Franco-Algerian history, but also blame the French and Algerian governments for their personal or collective tragedies. The political charge is carried within the texts’ particular stories of exile and loss. The four narrators in their respective texts are like orphans of Algeria displaced in France mourning the double loss of the Algerian land and their father, who embodies the country of origin. / Romance Languages and Literatures

No description available.

No description available.

French émigré literature is both under-explored and under-valued by scholars. This thesis aims to rehabilitate the female émigré novel within its nineteenth-century landscape, putting to the fore its originality and pertinent contribution to contemporary movements such as Romanticism and the realist novel. Recent work has unearthed the émigré-specific way of narrating the Revolution; yet no clear definition has yet been established. This thesis defines what the émigré novel is based on the dichotomy for novelists of having experienced the exile first-hand or not. The memoirs and novels of three émigré noblewomen, Madame de Boigne, de Souza and de Duras, who all spent a decade in London during the 1790s, are scrutinized for this purpose. Three angles of research frame this comparative analysis: the search for the genre of the émigré novel, or how several genres intertwine in this ‘sub-genre’; trauma of the emigration as the core characteristic of the novels; and gender questions, or how the émigrée is using her stay in Britain as inspiration to convey more genuine relationships for post-revolutionary French society. This thesis goes against the idea that to interpret a novel based on the life of the author is reductive: instead it rediscovers the creative potential of the autobiographical which the émigrées chose to inject in their fiction works. Likewise, it establishes that the trauma of the Revolution and exile is visible in the selected émigré novels in the way it is camouflaged, enhanced and fictionalised, which constitutes their originality and distinguishes them from non-authentic émigré fictions. Finally this thesis considers the gender modernisation asked for in the plots, based on the fact that the selected novelists had enjoyed more freedom of action, uprooted from French social etiquette and within British society.