Rebecca West

University of Chicago, Romance Languages and Literatures, Emerita

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Roma

A Companion to Federico Fellini

8. Giulia Niccolai: A Wide-Angle Portrait

'Neoavanguardia', 2010

Come One, Come All: Luigi Malerba's Diffuse Fictions

The Lion and the Unicorn, 1986

A strict division between adult and children's literature is basically alien to Italian cultu... more A strict division between adult and children's literature is basically alien to Italian culture. For centuries oral folk traditions and a strong classical education were very much part and parcel of shared experience by those Italians privileged enough to have an education, and young and mature Italian readers shared narratives and poetry that drew heavily on these sources. The almost universally shared Catholic Church also acquainted children with certain kinds of devotional literature and gave them a familiarity with Biblical events and figures and with ritual that often inform Italian lay literature. Conversely, because of the strength of the oral tradition, adults were accustomed to the pleasures of the "good story" and unashamed of their enthusiasm for rousing and humorous tales, as the popularity of early collections of tales like Boccaccio's and those of chivalric literature attests.1 It was not until the nineteenth century that books written primarily or exclusively for children proliferated, acknowledging certain differences between the two readerships. The emergence of the category of children's literature in the nineteenth century is not, of course, confined to Italy. In the Western world generally, as the notion of the child changed and as children's particular needs and status were addressed through educational reforms, so too did books reflect this new perspective. In Italian letters, however, even the most didactic "child-oriented" children's literature continued to assume a familiarity with classical and Church history, with complex narrative techniques, and with sophisticated language, blurring the borderline between adult and children's texts. To give but one example: Pinocchio, that best-known of modern Italian children's books, relies heavily on both the Tuscan novella or short-story tradition to which Boccaccio belongs, and on classical sources, Homeric, Dantesque, and other. As Glauco Cambon writes: "Storytelling is a folk art in the Tuscan countryside, and has been for centuries. . . . Pinocchio's relentless variety of narrative incident, its alertness to social types, its tongue-in-cheek wisdom are of a piece with that illustrious tradition. . ." (53). Further, Cambon points out the importance of the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedy to the structure and style of Pinocchio and concludes: "In a place like Italy, the cultural background would insure a deep response to this

Storia della letteratura italiana

World Literature Today, 1992

Gianni Celati. The Craft of Everyday Storytelling

The Modern Language Review, 2001

... In an entirely different context and to different critical ends, Lauren Berlant notes that &a... more ... In an entirely different context and to different critical ends, Lauren Berlant notes that &#x27;experience&#x27; can be understood as &#x27;some-thing ... was subtitled &#x27;A Report on Knowledge&#x27; [emphasis added].) Writers such as Carlo Emilio Gadda, Umberto Eco, Leonardo Sciascia, and Luigi ...

Desire, Displacement, Digression: Rhetorical Ramification in Giorgio Manganelli’s Amore and Tutti gli errori

Medieval Literature and its Afterlife. Essays in Honor of John Freccero, 2000

Narrative Structures and Literary History

Critical Inquiry, 1976

Assuming synchrony as its basis, structuralism continues to present itself under the false guise ... more Assuming synchrony as its basis, structuralism continues to present itself under the false guise of antihistoricity. And yet it is well known, since the appearance of Jakobson&amp;#x27;s famous article&amp;quot; Principes de phonologie historique&amp;quot;(1931), that structural description not only ...