Instructor: Carmen Gallo (Sapienza Università di Roma) Title: ‘Reading Poetry from New Criticism to New Historicism’ Date: 2nd December 2022
December 2, 2022
This lecture was divided into two parts. The first part focused on the history of two literary theory movements of the 20th century, New Criticism (NC) and New Historicism (NH), and their influence on the American criticism of the poetical text. NC developed in the years between the two World Wars as a conservatory movement in opposition to urban capitalism. Professor Gallo explained how it advocated the creation of a new form of criticism, more scientific, precise, and systematic (Ransom, 1937). The development of this movement until the 1970s was taken into consideration, together with criticisms moved to it from other movements, e.g. Marxism. Subsequently, the point of view of NH was presented. This movement, which originated from the ‘Cultural Turn’ in the 1980s, considered the broader historical context in which a poetic text originated, in opposition to the more text-oriented approach of NC. In the second part of the lecture, Professor Gallo proposed to observe how three different critics – Brooks, Culler, and Marotti – used the poet ‘The Canonization’ by John Donne (1633) to express different ideas concerning the nature of poetry criticism.
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Instructor: Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign – Sapienza Fulbright) Title: ‘Budd Schulberg’s World War’ Date: 16th November 2022
November 16, 2022
Professor Hutner’s second lecture focused on Budd Schulberg’s documentary ‘The Nazi Plan’ (1945), the first cohesive account of the rise of the Nazis, compiled from German propagandistic footage – such as Leni Riefenstahl’s films –, newsreels, and sound recordings. During the first part of the seminar, Schulberg’s biography was recounted, starting from his first literary publications and his relationship with Hollywood as a young screenwriter, to his involvement with the Communist Party and the resulting political controversy that took place in the 1950s. The second part of the seminar was devoted to Schulberg’s military activity during World War II. While serving in the Navy, he worked with John Ford’s documentary unit, and was involved in collecting evidence against Nazi war criminals. With this objective in mind, ‘The Nazi Plan’ was compiled and, later on, admitted as legal evidence during the Nuremberg Trials. Professor Hutner particularly highlighted the methodology of his research, which consisted in first-hand archival research of film reels and personal autobiographical documents, such as diaries and letters.
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Instructor: Rosanna Camerlingo (Università di Perugia) Title: ‘Giudici e Imputati nei Tribunali di Shakespeare’ Date: 15th November 2022
November 15, 2022
Professor Camerlingo’s lecture focused on the theme of justice in the Renaissance era and the language associated with it in Shakespeare’s work. In particular, the lecture considered three plays, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, and Hamlet, showing how different characters represent and propose different declinations of morality and justice. Religious schisms led to the questioning of Catholic conceptualizations of law and morality, bringing them to the centre of debate, and of the stage, during the Renaissance. The analysis of three excerpts, one from each work, was accompanied by historical, cultural, and religious explanations in order to clarify what were the main theoretical bases supporting the character and arguments of the dramatis personae analysed.
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Instructor: Jane Desmond (University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign) Title: ‘Beyond Humanism and Anthropocentrism’ Date: 12th November 2022
November 12, 2022
This lecture provided an introduction to multispecies ethnography, a genre of writing and research method emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, whose main focus is the investigation of other-than-human life forms in their interaction with human society. Professor Desmond shared a research work which stands at the intersection of multispecies ethnography and literary studies. In particular, she explored the role of poetry as multispecies ethnography, namely a cultural activity of trans-species translation for the articulation of human/non-human relationships beyond anthropocentrism. To this end, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’ (1946), Anne Phillips’ ‘Two Cows’ (2018), Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ (1891) and Linda Hogan’s ‘Song for the Turtles in the Gulf’ (2014) were presented as case studies.
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Instructor: Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign - Sapienza Fulbright) Title: ‘Publish or perish! How to publish on an academic journal’ Date: 2nd November 2022
November 2, 2022
Professor Hutner’s first lecture focused on how to publish an article on an academic journal. Starting from his personal experience – both as an academic writer and as a reviewer – Professor Hutner explained the various steps towards publication, highlighting the possible mistakes which can occur in every phase and how to avoid them. Part of his lecture analysed how elements of a major research can be useful for possible publications in side-fields. Moreover, suggestions on how to set up a possible article keeping in mind the aim, the audience, and the context of publication were given. Throughout his lecture, Professor Hutner emphasized how fundamental it is to find the proper academic journal where to submit a work.
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Title: ‘Shakespeare, Austen and Audiovisual Translation: The Classics Translated on Screen’ Dates: 30th June, 1st and 2nd July 2022 Programme: https://web.uniroma1.it/seai/?q=it/node/403
June 30-July 2, 2022
While adaptation and intersemiotic studies about the classics on screen have been
flourishing, audiovisual translation has comparatively neglected adapted classics,
arguably preferring to focus on TV series, video games and films of all times not
necessarily referred to an illustrious hypotext. This three-day international conference
thus attracted contributions which analysed adapted literature in various media from
the point of view of audiovisual translation. Audiovisual texts inspired by the works of
a variety of writers (including the most adapted authors such as Shakespeare and
Austen), their adaptations and their translations into a number of languages were
discussed.
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Title: ‘Imagining Poetry Today: Responses to P. B. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1821)’ Date: 23th May 2022 Programme: https://web.uniroma1.it/seai/sites/default/files/allegati_notizie/Locandina_Shelley.pdf
May 23, 2022
This conference was divided into two sessions. In the first session, Professor Lilla
Crisafulli, Professor Michael Rossington and Professor Paolo Bugliani historicised
Shelley’s Defence of Poetry by looking at its context of publication and its English and
US reception in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the second session,
which took the form of a roundtable discussion in Italian, Franco Buffoni, Laura Pugno
and Guido Mazzoni shared their views on Shelley’s essay, followed by readings of
Shelley’s as well as their own poetry.
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Title: ‘Translation through History and History through Translation’ Date: 27th April 2022 Programme: https://web.uniroma1.it/seai/sites/default/files/allegati_notizie/2022%20TraducibilitàIntraducibilità.pd
April 27, 2022
This seminar consisted of two talks, by Professor Christopher Rundle (University of
Bologna) and by Professor Serenella Zanotti (Roma Tre University) respectively,
which explored the crossroads of translation and history. Entitled ‘History through the
Lens of Translation: A Case Study of Four Fascist Regimes’ and situated at the
intersection of translation studies and fascist studies, Professor Rundle’s talk
addressed the issue of hostility towards translation in four fascist and para-fascist
regimes (Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal).
In her talk entitled ‘Translating the Untranslatable: An Archival Perspective’, Professor
Zanotti adopted an archival perspective to investigate the role that Joyce played in the
translation of Ulysses into French.
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Instructor: Alice Balestrino (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) Title: ‘From the Dissertation to the First-Book Project’ Date: 31st May 2022
May, 31 2022
The seminar aimed to advise students (especially third-year students) on how to have
one’s dissertation published as a book after graduation. The first part looked at the
differences between dissertations and books, focussing on the following aspects:
purpose; length; audience; scope; literature review and methodology section; use of
images and citations. In order to frame dissertations and books as two different genres,
the instructor took several defended dissertations turned into published books
(including her own) as examples. In the last part of the seminar, she provided students
with practical advice on how to write a book proposal, also based on her very recent
first-hand experience.
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Instructor: Alice Balestrino (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) Title: ‘“History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark”: Philip Roth and the Holocaust’ Date: 24th May 2022
May 24, 2022
The lecture focused on Philip Roth’s interest in the Holocaust as part of, and
corresponding to the narrative of Holocaust reception in the United States. It
concerned specifically the so-called ‘Zuckerman novels’ – such as The Ghost Writer
and The Anatomy Lesson, featuring Nathan Zuckerman, an alter ego of the author, as
a character and narrator – and ‘Roth books’ – such as Patrimony and The Plot against
America, featuring Roth himself as a character and narrator. The lecture illustrated
how these novels try to fill in the ‘unbridgeable distance’ between the Holocaust and
American life and to explore the inauthenticity of most attempts to lessen that distance.
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Instructor: Ugo Rubeo (Sapienza University of Rome) Title: ‘Afro-American Poetry’ Date: 12th May 2022
May 12, 2022
The seminar provided doctoral students with a comprehensive and wide-ranging
introduction to the Harlem Renaissance. It began with a discussion of Gertrude Stein’s
early stylistic experiments with repetition, pattern and rhythm, as well as her deep
engagement with innovations in the visual arts. Professor Rubeo then presented a
series of key figures from the Renaissance, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay,
Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown. The seminar usefully emphasised the
diverse and heterogenous nature of the Harlem scene, including debates between
writers and intellectuals of the time, whilst also considering its roots and resonances
in American culture.
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Instructor: Martina Pfeiler (University of Vienna) Title: ‘Contemporary American Poetry’ Date: 11th May 202
May, 11, 2022
The seminar was divided into two sessions. In the first part, Professor Pfeiler provided
doctoral students with an overview of performance-centred and cross- or inter-media
American poetry of the late-twentieth and twenty-first century. She discussed how
these traditions and innovations relate to historic and ongoing debates about the
relationship of the poem to subjectivity, political and cultural contexts, and the material
conditions of its production. The following workshop involved group discussions of
texts in performance by Gil Scott-Heron, Maya Angelou, Patricia Smith and Daniel
Beaty.
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Instructor: Massimo Bacigalupo (University of Genoa) Title: ‘Modernist American Poetry’ Date: 10th May 2022
May, 10, 2022
The lecture focused on the notion of ‘late style’ across a range of twentieth-century
American poets. Professor Bacigalupo began by discussing Robert Frost’s preface to
his Collected Poems (1939), ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’, and William Carlos Williams’
prologue to Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), which both address the plight of
modernity and its relation to poetics and the task of the writer. Professor Bacigalupo
then led doctoral students through readings of poems by Frost, Wallace Stevens,
Elizabeth Bishop and Ezra Pound, considering the implications of each text for wider
questions about style, the modern and tradition.
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Instructor: Vicky Angelaki (Mid Sweden University) Title: ‘A Theory of Contemporary Drama + Workshop’ Dates: 20th and 21st April 2022
April, 20-21, 2022
The seminar was divided over two days. The first session drew attention to current
debates about connections between ecocritical perspectives and contemporary British
theatre, as well as reflecting on how past theatrical traditions may carry with them
latent ecological concerns and preoccupations. In particular, Professor Angelaki
provided doctoral students with a detailed reading of Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh’s
introductory essay, ‘Greening the Absurd’, to Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd:
Ecology, the Environment, and the Greening of the Modern Stage. The second day
involved an open discussion of a number of recent theatre productions which explicitly
or implicitly sought to engage audiences with questions of environment, ecology and
the Anthropocene.
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Instructor: Rory Loughnane (University of Kent) Title: ‘Re-Editing Shakespeare + Editing Early Modern Drama in Practice’ Dates: 16th and 17th April 2022
April, 16-17, 2022
Different editions of most of Shakespeare’s works have been printed since his lifetime,
which has caused small variations – if not printing mistakes – to exist in the different
editions of the same play. Various attempts at re-editing Shakespeare have thus been
made over the centuries, with the aim of producing versions of his works that resemble
as closely as possible what he originally wrote. As shown by this two-day seminar,
new technologies allow searchers to spot printing mistakes more efficiently, but indepth knowledge of the plays as well as of Early Modern English is necessary to grasp
all the subtleties of this exercise.
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Instructor: Patrick Zabalbeascoa (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) Title: ‘Aspects of Humour in Literary, Audiovisual and Translated texts: Multilingualism and Codeswitching: Theories and Methodologies + Analysing Multilingual Audiovisual texts’ Dates: 16th and 17th March 2022
March, 16-17, 2022
Translating humour requires an adaptation to the culture of the target countries.
Conveying humour does not consist only in translating a text, but also in understanding
the spirit of the author. Otherwise, a comic situation may be lost in translation. Things
arguably get even more complicated when it comes to translating multilingual texts.
After a review of the main translation theories, extracts from Tom Woolf’s and Kazuo
Ishiguro’s works were analysed together with their Spanish translation during this twoday seminar, revealing that misunderstood humour can be inadequately translated.
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Instructor: Marina Dossena (University of Bergamo) Title: ‘Tools and Methods for Explorations in the Histories of English: What Are the Options Today? + Focus on Networks and Coalitions in Late Modern Times’ Dates: 24th and 25th February 2022
February, 24-25, 2022
The seminar was divided into two days. During the first one, Professor Dossena
discussed research options becoming increasingly available to historical linguists for
the study of language use in the past through corpora and digital resources. During
the second session, emphasis was laid on the analysis of social networks and
coalitions in historical sociolinguistics, with particular attention to Late Modern English
materials and documents. After being given a list of online resources from which to
draw information, the doctoral students had the opportunity to work in groups in order
to familiarise themselves with this kind of research. Then they presented their
considerations on their findings and received feedback from the professor.
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nstructor: Gabriella Mazzon (University of Innsbruck) Title: ‘The Diachronic Study of Dialogue: A Pragmatic Perspective + Workshop’ Dates: 7 th and 8th February 2022
February 7-8, 2022
Linguists are interested in fictional dialogues for a variety of reasons. Whether the
dialogues are from Shakespeare’s plays or from TV series, a pragmatic perspective
aims to understand how people construct meaning together, according to interiorised
sociolinguistics rules. From Jane Austen’s classics to US sitcom Big Bang Theory,
including the smart detectives Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, this two-day
seminar analysed different fictional dialogues from a pragmatic perspective, focusing
on their construction, interaction and ironical aspects.
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Instructor: Stefania Sini (University of Eastern Piedmont) Title: ‘Postclassical Narratologies: Paths, Foundations, Tools’ Date: 24th January 2022
24/1/2022
The lecture was part of a three-day seminar focusing on aspects related to literary
theory and new developments in contemporary critical methodologies. The first part of
this session discussed the differences and continuities between classical and
postclassical narratologies. The second part looked at a variety of topics through the
lens of postclassical narratology. These include: communication and mediation;
character and plot; embodied simulation; enactivism; natural and unnatural;
storyworld.
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