Da non perdere: Elsa Morante and the Italian Arts

Convegno, 25-27 ott. 2012: “Elsa Morante and the Italian Arts”

Academic Conference 25-27 October 2012

The Davy Carozza International Conference

“Elsa Morante and the Italian Arts”

Conference Organizer:
Stefania Lucamante, Professor of Italian, Catholic University of America
Organizing Committee:
Stefania Lucamante, Anna Chiafele, Valeria Garino, and Alberto Manai (Italian Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C.)

Proposals (c. 300 words with preliminary bibliography) are invited from both established and emerging scholars.  They should include institutional affiliation and full contact information, and should be sent to chiafele@cua.edu

The organizers are exploring publication options for a volume of selected conference papers.
Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2012.
Reply by June 1, 2012.
Registration Fee:  100 dollars

The Smiles of Rome

THE SMILES OF ROME:
A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers.
Edited by Susan Cahill, 332 pp.,  Ballantine Books, Paper, $14.95

ISBN: 978-0-345-43420-3

Susan Cahill offre un ritratto di Roma, città natale della Morante, nel The Smiles of Rome, che trovo una lettura piacevole...

D'accordo è Richard B. Woodward nella recensione dei New York Times:
"...Ms. Cahill does a fine job combining practical suggestions with writings by some of the usual suspects - Goethe, Hawthorne, Henry James and Eleanor Clark- and includes two Italians, Natalia Ginzburg and Elsa Morante, too little known outside their own country."

Trovo molto interessante la scelta di Cahill di citare qualche brano de La Storia che descrive il ghetto romano e il cosidetto Judenaktion del 16 ottobre 1943, passaggi del romanzo che sempre mi lasciano conmossa. E inoltre, visto che la Morante non si identifica come ebrea in modo chiaro e definitivo, questi passaggi implicherebbero a un lettore generale che ne fosse... Comunque, Cahill spiega bene la storia non solo del ghetto e del 16 ottobre 1943 ma anche degli altri quartieri nominati nelle citazioni de La Storia. Insomma, sono lieta di vedere la Morante in un antologia così ben curato e così adatta a lei, una romana di cuore!

Judaica Europeana e il patrimonio culturale ebraico in Europa, Roma, 27 febb. 2012

La conferenza internazionale di Judaica Europeana è uno degli eventi principali organizzati nel corso dei tre anni di attività del progetto. Il suo obiettivo principale è presentare i risultati dell’iniziativa: fornire a Europeana, il portale del patrimonio culturale digitale europeo, oltre 3 milioni di dati e rendere per la prima volta disponibili in formato digitale al grande pubblico le preziose collezioni ebraiche di molti archivi, biblioteche e musei europei. Il programma prevede inoltre tre intermezzi artistici su altrettanti aspetti culturali dell’ebraismo. L’evento è rivolto a un pubblico di esperti della digitalizzazione del patrimonio culturale, agli studiosi dell’ebraismo e a un pubblico più vasto di persone interessate ai temi trattati.

Ingresso libero (registrazione obbligatorio)

Traduzione simultanea

Ospitato dalla Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Roma, Sala Conferenze
Viale Castro Pretorio 105
00185 Roma

Come arrivare
Modulo di registrazione (obbligatorio)
Programma
Info: r.tucci@iccu.sbn.it
Per ulteriori informazioni: www.judaica-europeana.eu

Sessioni di Italian-Jewish Studies, al convegno dell' American Association of Italian Studies

Ecco il programma definitivo delle sessioni di Italian Jewish Studies, inclusi i due concerti. Ho indicato una presentazione che mi interessa-- ho scritto sull'Ozpetek e come rappresenta il ghetto romano... e anche sulle visione morantiane dell'Olocausto...

Giovedì, 3 maggio

Italian Jews in the Mediterranean World
Chair: Marco Di Giulio, Franklin & Marshall College

• Igor H. de Souza (University of Chicago): "Jewish Philosophy in 13th-Century Italy: Between Isolation and Collaboration"
• Vadim Putzu (Hebrew Union College, Franklin & Marshall College): "The Leviathan… may be digested through wine: Menachem Azariah of Fano’s Symbolism of Wine between Safed and Italy"
• Pamela J. Dorn Sezgin (Gainesville State College): "Los Frangos: Italian Jews as Agents of Modernity in the Late Ottoman Diaspora"

Jews in Italy between Pride and Prejudice 
Chair:Jonathan Druker, Illinois State University

• Marco Di Giulio (Franklin & Marshall College): "Reclaiming Hebrew Studies: Language and National Pride in Nineteenth-Century Italian Scholarship"
• Risa Sodi (Yale University): "Fascism and the Italian Roots of Racialism"
• L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College): "The Narrating Architecture of the Catholic-Jewish Relation"

Concert: “Voices of the Italian Holocaust”

Caroline Helton (University of Michigan), soprano

Kathryn Goodson (University of Michigan), pianist

Venerdì, 4 maggio

Musical Portraits of Jews in Fascist Italy 

Chair: Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan

Jesse Rosenberg (Northwestern University): "L'ebraismo sulla scena operistica in Italia nel ventennio fascista"

Aloma Bardi (University of Florence, Italy; Internazional Center for American Music): "Musical Exoticism of Jewish Folklore in Il dibuk by Renato Simoni and Lodovico Rocca (1934)"

The two papers will be followed by a panel discussion with the performers of the concerts.

Zionism, Judaism, and the Holocaust Survivors 

Chair: Risa Sodi, Yale University

• Giuseppe Prigiotti (Duke University): "Zionism in La Civiltà Cattolica during the Fascist Ventennio (1922-43)"
• Wiley Feinstein (Loyola University Chicago): “Alaska Rather Than Palestine: The Problem of Italian Jewish Aversion to-Zionism in Major Narratives of the Shoah”
• Jonathan Druker (Illinois State University): "On Levi’s Alterations to the Second Edition of Se questo è un uomo: Integrating Testimony and Commemoration"

Sabato, 5 maggio

Memory and Contemporaneity of Judaism 

Chair: L. Scott Lerner, Franklin & Marshall College

• Mattia Beghelli (University of Michigan): “La tragicità della sopravvivenza: da sopravvissuti a vittime”.
• Luca Peretti (Yale University): "Identità, memoria e spazio urbano nel Ghetto di Roma: dalla Morante e Özpetek fino a monumenti e targhe commemorative"
• Melissa Coburn (Virginia Tech): "Metaphors of Identification and of Otherness: Antisemitism and the Double in Umberto Eco's Il cimitero di Praga"

Lecture-Recital (as an additional session) - "Leaves of Grass: The Whitman Songs by Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco"

John Champagne (Bard College), lecturer

Salvatore Champagne (Oberlin College), tenor

Howard Lubin (Oberlin College), pianist

The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion.

Giornata della Memoria 2012

"La Comunità ebraica di Roma dalle leggi razziali alle deportazioni (1938-1945)": Una mostra per ricordare



26 gennaio - 26 febbraio 2012
Museo della Memoria Locale
Piazza Dante Desideri, 50500 Cerreto Guidi (FI)
Orario: martedì - sabato ore 9-13; mercoledì ore 15-18


26 febbraio 2012, ore 11: inaugurazione della mostra



Sezioni della mostra:

• Il fascismo e le leggi razziali, a cura di Manola Ida Venzo
• La Comunità ebraica di Roma, a cura di Silvia Haia Antonucci, Bice Migliau, Claudio Procaccia, Giancarlo Spizzichino
• Documenti d'archivio, a cura di Piera Ferarra
• Prodotti multimediali: Marco Visalberghi, DocLab
• Allestimento: Piera Ferrara, Marco Folin

Con la collaborazione di: Archivio di Stato di Roma, Archivio Storico della Comunità Ebraica di Roma, DocLab


Partecipano:
Silvia Haia Antonucci (Archivio Storico della Comunità Ebraica di Roma),
Gabriella Yael Franzone (Dipartimento per i Beni e le Attività Culturali della Comunità ebraica di Roma)
Archivio Storico della Comunità Ebraica di Roma (ASCER)
Lungotevere Cenci (Tempio), 00186 Roma, Tel/Fax 0668400663

Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Italian Women Authors and Depictions of Space in Contemporary Fiction

Ancora delle buone notizie... le mie ricerche 'morantiane' vanno bene nel 2012!!!

Italian Women Authors and Depictions of Space in Contemporary Fiction, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 

"The rationale behind the volume is to analyze changes over time, underlining how Italian women authors have conceptualized space and how it shapes or is shaped by their fiction."

• Deadline for the first draft: June 30th, 2012 
• Publication: Winter 2012-Spring 2013  

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Ecco il mio 'abstract' che è stato accettato!!!!

Italian Memory, Spanish Space: Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli

In her final novel, Aracoeli (1982), Elsa Morante departs from the pattern of her previous novels’ pattern of confined spaces, instead sending her protagonist Manuele on a quest to Francoist Spain to seek his Spanish mother Aracoeli’s birthplace in Andalusia. Manuele moves, in his words, “nella doppia direzione del passato e dello spazio.”¹ The novel’s theorization of memory as an occult dimension of space and time, a bodily property that is also oddly cinematic and mechanical, establishes the parameters of Manuele’s voyage to Spain. I find it striking that Morante chooses the final days of Franco’s regime—November 1975—for Manuele’s journey, thereby sending him to the one remaining fascist realm in Europe. Accordingly, I propose that with Aracoeli, Elsa Morante uses space to create a political critique, paralleling Italian and Spanish fascism through Manuele’s voyage—I see General Franco’s regime as a substitute for Mussolini’s. Thus Aracoeli could be considered a “novela del dictador”, to borrow the Latin American generical term, and uses space to explore the legacy of Italian fascism. 
In Aracoeli, Morante reinterprets and replots the iconic spaces of her earlier works—such as the island, the chamber, and the garden—for Manuele’s quest. Frequently appearing in the text and enriching its concepts of “space” are ineffable or otherworldly dimensions such as eternity, Eden, the womb, death, and heaven, dimensions all suggested by the heavenly name “Aracoeli.” This quest is often interrupted by the eruption of Manuele’s nostalgic childhood recollections of fascist Italy, and the appearance of flying, winged, or angelic creatures able to move among such dimensions.    


Intriguingly, in his quest for Aracoeli’s obscure Andalusian village, surrounded by the dry bones of dinosaurs, Manuele yearns to obliterate himself by returning to the womb: an impossible merging of genders, bodies, space, and time. Indeed, space for Manuele always evokes time and is entwined as well with memory, the body, even language; and such an extreme merging of space, corporeality, and time—sometimes labeled with terms evocative of physics such as “event horizon” in the novel—into a quite literally visceral “spacetime” culminates Morante’s repeated construction of novels since her first writings in the 1930s out of the upwelling of her characters’ memories. With Aracoeli Morante culminates as well her increasingly close engagement with Italy’s fascist past, yet in her last novel’s displacement of its protagonist from Italy to Spain, she seems to betray an anxiety concerning Italian history, echoed by Manuele’s desire for oblivion in the womb, which bears further examination as well. 

Il mio articolo apparirà nel Quaderni del Novecento nel 2012!

Eccovene il primo paragrafo del mio articolo per il giornale Quaderni del Novecento-- ora potete assaggiarne un po'...

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Elsa Morante’s L’isola di Arturo and Aracoeli:

Remembering and Reconciling with the Fascist Past

With her novels L’isola di Arturo (1957) and Aracoeli (1982), Elsa Morante grapples with the legacy of Italian Fascism, penning her only novels in which first-person narrators recall their childhoods during the Fascist era. This analysis aims to contrast these novels’ use of similar protagonists to chart Morante’s sustained interest in Italy’s Fascist past and how she ‘works through’ it. Morante’s writing supports Roberto Ventresca’s contention that «Italians have indeed known how to come to terms with their Fascist past, albeit in varied, contradictory and ambiguous ways».[1]

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[1] R. VENTRESCA, Debating the Meaning of Fascism in Contemporary Italy, «Modern Italy», XI, vol. 2, a. 2006, pp. 189-209: 190-191.