In this essay, which serves as an introduction to the set of six new translations included in this same volume of the journal, the author examines briefly the life and works of Matilde Serao, one of Italy's leading women writers of the post-Unification period, with particular attention to her early writings on Naples. The essay explores Serao's essentially hybrid prose writing in these texts, which blend together traits of narrative and essay, literary and oral traditions, and concludes with some remarks on the particular problems posed by Serao's style for an English-language translator.

In the course of its existence, California Italian Studies has published essays by living Italian philosophers who were luminaries in the field, including Umberto Eco and Franco Cassano (now both deceased). Somehow, however, the pages of this journal never until now have hosted any contribution by Gianni Vattimo, the great Italian philosopher who passed away in September 2023 at age 87. Vattimo was a beloved teacher, a mentor, and a friend to several of the founding members of CIS, myself included, so it seems particularly appropriate for us to offer a posthumous homage to him in this open-theme issue of volume 13. I will offer just a few personal reminiscences here, as both Maurizio Ferraris and Simonetta Moro address in their respective essays the core tenets of Vattimo’s philosophy. Vattimo’s brief 1985 essay on myth and truth is included here because it so succinctly summarizes and illustrates the strand of his work for which he is most remembered today, namely il pensiero debole or “weak thought.”

Translated by Jon R. Snyder and Megan Williamson

*This text originally appeared in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetic no. 9 (Spring 1985): 29–95. It is reprinted in California Italian Studies 13, no. 2 by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

This dissertation focuses on the representation of feminine figures in fairy tales from the seventeenth century to the present day. Using a narratological and feminist critical approach, I consider textual variations of three canonical fairy tales: "The Three Fruits," "Bluebeard," and "The Old Woman Who Was Skinned." Each of these fairy tales can be tracked down across multiple cultural moments, with each fresh re-telling of the tale at once a renewal and a revision of its core narrative elements. I specifically compare Italian fairy tales in literature, cinema, and theater with British and French texts that recount the same tale. Authors considered range from Giambattista Basile and Carlo Gozzi to Italo Calvino, Laura Gonzenbach, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Angela Carter, together with (among others) writer-directors Matteo Garrone and Emma Dante. My dissertation’s aim is to explain the intertextuality of seemingly inexhaustible fairy-tale narratives in relation to specific cultural modes of artistic production and reproduction and, in particular, pertaining to gender roles and the feminine sphere. I argue that the transformations into fairy-tale texts and the feminine sphere—their metamorphoses, in one word—are textual expressions of the inexhaustibility of fairy tales. By “feminine sphere,” I mean the female fairy-tale characters as well as the domestic and family domains associated with women. Furthermore, I claim that the feminine sphere is modified according to the author’s socio-cultural milieu. In representing and problematizing this sphere, fairy-tale texts express and critique deep-seated anxieties pertaining to the role of gender in the societies in which fairy tales originated. I contend that, by employing feminine metamorphoses in their fairy-tale rewritings, these texts work to counteract cultural fears and oppressive patriarchal tropes embedded in Western European societies, such as those of Italy, France, and the United Kingdom.

This dissertation has three main goals. The first is to provide a textual analysis of a body of texts rarely studied in this light. My second goal is to identify and define the practice of fairy-tale revisionism. I borrow the term “revisionism” from the philosopher Adriana Cavarero and critic Lucia Re, who have identified mythic revisionism in women’s literary appropriations of many classical myths. My dissertation applies mythic revisionism to fairy tales in light of the structural similarities between myths and fairy tales, which are both foundational narratives supporting key societal values. Fairy-tale revisionism—I claim—is a fairy-tale specific mode of intertextual renovation and feminist understanding of fairy tales, involving the author’s own take on the fairy tale’s significance in a precise historical moment and requiring a critical analysis of the narrative strategies employed to generate a fresh version of a pre-existing story. My dissertation’s third goal is to define a new intersectional role for femininity in fairy tales. While female characters such as Mother Goose and other archetypal motherly or grandmotherly storytellers traditionally represent the fairy tales’ narrative voice and the stories’ source, I study the presence in these tales of a feminine metamorphic figure that, by recurring in each text as well as by occurring in different ways throughout the fairy-tale web of representations, questions not only gender norms but also ethnic identification and discrimination, ageism, and corporal or psychological violence against marginalized members of society.

Introduction to CIS 5.1.

The authors consider the role of the sacred in Italy from the Middle Ages to the present day, particularly in relation to religion (above all Catholicism) as well as to the currents of modern critical thought.

The rediscovery of the Baroque at the turn of the twentieth century revolutionized Italian culture, and the Italian Novecento has been called a “new Baroque.” The present study, "The Fold & the Limit: Baroque Revival & Anti-Fascist Resistance in Modern Italian Literature," investigates how and why three major Italian writers—Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970), Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), and Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998)—reimagined the baroque aesthetic. Engaging with an array of early modern art and architecture, these key modernist writers, I argue, made recourse to a version of what Gilles Deleuze has identified as an essential trait of the Baroque: “the fold.” Building on the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Deleuze conceives of the baroque fold as linking together all of space and matter in difference; the baroque universe extends seamlessly and flexibly, bending and twisting into countless folds like a piece of cloth. As this “fabric” folds and unfolds, it continuously generates new figures and perspectives without ever fixing limits or borders, or tearing apart into fragments. Through their dialogue with the baroque visual field, and by deploying versions of the differential fold in their texts, the writers examined in my dissertation reinvent the baroque model specifically in opposition to the limits violently imposed by the fascist regime on sex gender, class, race, and even on urban space. More broadly, thanks to their folded visions of the real, which subvert all normative boundaries of perception and representation, these authors come to expose and resist the oppression and violence of the modern logic of the limit.

This dissertation is motivated by three main objectives. While there is much excellent work on the neo-Baroque in Italian literature, studies to date have largely treated the topic in terms of shared forms, themes, and tropes. My first objective, therefore, is to understand whether, beyond these concerns, there is a broadly shared approach to artistic and literary representation that prompted the authors studied herein to return to the Baroque. Through careful analysis of Gadda’s, Ungaretti’s, and Ortese’s writings on baroque artists and artworks, I show that they each came to conceive of the real and all it comprises as a fold that is essentially incommensurate with the finitude of representation. Second, I aim to understand how these authors—in various ways—revised and incorporated this fold into their practice of literary writing or in their articulations of their respective approaches to literature. Finally, with this study, I will probe why the visual art of the Baroque in particular appealed to the three modernists under examination. Against the prevailing stereotype of the Baroque as an aesthetic of power, these authors identified in barocchismo a kind of representational freedom and an aesthetic strategy for exposing and critiquing the purported “triumph” of a limiting, striating, and hierarchizing vision in modernity.