Chapters and articles by Stefania Porcelli
Against Love: Goliarda Sapienza's L'arte della gioia
Italica, 2024
In this article, I argue that Goliarda Sapienza's treatment of love in L'arte della gioia engages... more In this article, I argue that Goliarda Sapienza's treatment of love in L'arte della gioia engages in a polemic with love that anticipates the reasoning of both Laura Kipnis's Against Love: A Polemic and Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotions. According to Ahmed, “Th[e] separation of others into bodies that can be loved or hated is part of the work of emotions.” In other words, emotions do not respond the way they do because of the inherent characteristics of others. This is particularly true in L'arte della gioia, where people can appear beautiful or ugly, tall or short, loved or hated, according to the protagonist's particular emotional state. My contribution shows how Modesta, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, analyzes love as a “literary emotion” and as a means to oppress women by relegating them to the role of angels of the house and mothers. While it can be fluid and transitory, hatred is Modesta's more productive emotion, which allows her to become her own self and to subvert the traditional hierarchy that gives love the status of an absolute ideal.
Allegoria, 2024
Drawing from affect theory, philosophy, ecocriticism, and trauma studies, this article proposes a... more Drawing from affect theory, philosophy, ecocriticism, and trauma studies, this article proposes an original interpretation of the extended metaphor of the displaced Asian bird in Elsa Morante’s La Storia. This powerful yet unexplored image directly links Ida’s traumatic experience of the rape with the historical persecution of the Jews: the bird represents a terror that Ida directly inherits from her mother Nora as postmemory. Moreover, I argue that the image foregrounds the “pathos of migration” as a leitmotiv of the novel, while casting a postcolonial and ecocritical gaze upon history. The Asian bird’s experience of place and displacement foreshadows reflections on the emotional interconnections between humans, animals and places that in Morante’s time were still at the embryonic level.
Annali d’Italianistica 39, 2021
This paper analyzes Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono (2002) as an infernal journey: the p... more This paper analyzes Elena Ferrante’s I giorni dell’abbandono (2002) as an infernal journey: the protagonist Olga moves from the dependency and timidity of her role as wife and mother to a position that Ferrante herself calls sorveglianza, i.e., vigilance. Arguably, this word is a gendered term in Ferrante. There exists a masculine—repressive—vigilance and a sorveglianza that is made of the desire to be awake and aware. In order to become vigilant, Olga needs to reach the bottom of abandonment before starting her voyage back. The fall and difficult ascent toward a regenerated self is not new in the Western literary canon, but this tradition denies a final regeneration to the figure of the abandoned woman. My analysis of the imagery and the language of the novel highlights the influence from Dante’s Commedia, especially from Inferno, on Ferrante’s novel. I also seek, as a second goal, to consider the question of atonement and salvation in Ferrante by addressing the absence of a Virgil-like figure in her novel. Besides textual echoes of Dante’s Commedia on several levels (imagery, emotions, atmosphere, and lexicon) the most compelling parallel concerns the authoritative transformations achieved by Dante and Ferrante. Both poet and writer invent a “new “literature” based on the profound reworking of inherited models.
Close Encounters in War, 2018
In this paper, the episode of Ida’s rape in Elsa Morante’s La Storia is read as the intersection ... more In this paper, the episode of Ida’s rape in Elsa Morante’s La Storia is read as the intersection of three asymmetrical and intertwined conflicts – social, sexual, and racial – that permeates the entire novel. Ida’s fear and shame are inherited from her mother’s obsession with the racial laws and are inextricably linked to the disgust that knots Jewishness and nakedness. Ida’s emotional history shows that the power relations between her and Gunther pre-exist their encounter and is pre-determined by gender, class, and race. I argue that the sets of emotions the two characters experience in the scene under scrutiny depend on such hierarchy. While Ida is petrified by fear, Gunther wavers between the desire for love and anger, which in this scene appears as a one-sided emotion entailing an asymmetrical power, triggered by what he perceives as an offence from a subject that he considers inferior.
Territori di guerra : Elizabeth Bowen e Christa Wolf
in Asimmetrie Letterarie, ed. Donatella Montini, Rome, Edizioni Nuova Cultura, pp. 103-131, 2013
The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities, Delaware University Press, 2013
Conference Presentations by Stefania Porcelli
Realism, Invention and Amazement in Elsa Morante’s La Storia
AAIS/AATI conference, online, June 3, 2021
This paper focuses on the complex representation of the deportation of the Jews from Rome in La S... more This paper focuses on the complex representation of the deportation of the Jews from Rome in La Storia as one of the best examples of what Morante meant by “necessario realismo” of the novel (“Sul romanzo” 50). In the final endnote of La Storia the author specifies that the extant bibliography concerning WWII provided her with “spunti (reali) per alcuni episodi (inventati) del romanzo”; however, invention doesn’t mean untruth. First, I argue that a truthful source for Morante includes the representation of the emotions of the victim and a personal involvement of the narrative stance that treats the victims as singularities (Debenedetti’s 16 ottobre 1943 is a case in point). Second, I show how in the novel Morante juxtaposes the official reports about the roundabout heard on the radio and the scene witnessed by Ida and Useppe at the Tiburtina station. Finally, I claim that the emotion that unites the “truer” representations of the deportation is stupore, a notion that emerges in Holocaust literature. I conclude that in both her critical writings and in the novel, Morante foregrounds the work of the poetical imagination as closer to the truth that the historiographical representation and political propaganda.
Emotional Intensity and Narrative Form in L’amica geniale
Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), online, April 8-11, 2021
L’amica geniale has been deemed “ferocious,” “a death-defying linguistic tightrope act,” and a co... more L’amica geniale has been deemed “ferocious,” “a death-defying linguistic tightrope act,” and a combination of “dark and spiky emotions.” Taking the critical investment in the affective dimension of Ferrante’s work as a point of departure, this paper examines the representation of anger and pain in the first volume of the quartet. There is an unbalance, I claim, between the two emotions. If they don’t want to be considered insane (Melina is a case in point), the characters have to hide their pain: for example, when Lenù first experiences loss (the loss of her doll), and when Lila is thrown out of a window “like a thing.” By contrast, they are encouraged to continually exhibit their anger both within the family and in public spaces (Lenù’s father is forced to beat his daughter just to prove his manliness; Fernando beats his son Rino because he worked behind his back). Anger and vengeance prevail over grievance and empathy to the point that Ferrante uses the uncommon plural “rabbie” to underline the many forms of this emotion. In some of the most dramatically intense episodes of the novel, this unbalance between anger and pain turns the “structural violence” (a definition I borrow from Johan Galtung) of the Neapolitan society into direct violence. It is in these episodes that Ferrante’s “clarity of facts and low emotional reaction” yields to “a sort of storm of blood, of frenzied writing” as she explains in Frantumaglia. Thus, my paper also argues for the interconnectedness of emotional intensity and narrative form.
Intensity and Agency: Ida, Modesta, Lenù
NeMLA convention, Washington, DC, March 21-24, 2019
Maternal and Animal Knowledge in Elsa Morante’s La Storia
AAIS conference, Sorrento, Italy, 2018
Beasts Too Human: Animals and Emotions in Elsa Morante’s La Storia
Becoming Active: Emotions in Goliarda Sapienza’s L’Arte della Gioia
Exposed to poverty and sexual abuse as a child, the protagonist and narrator of Goliarda Sapienza... more Exposed to poverty and sexual abuse as a child, the protagonist and narrator of Goliarda Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia gradually succeeds in understanding her body, managing her emotions, and liberating herself from patriarchal oppression and from fear. By challenging conventional gender roles, fixed sexual identities, Fascism and political bigotry, Modesta achieves two main goals by the end of this Bildungsroman: she creates a community which is alternative to the normative family, and she attains joy. This paper explores the novel’s engagement with the body and the connection between emotions and agency by drawing on some relevant theories of affect and emotions. I would like to propose the category of becoming, or more specifically of becoming active, as the central element of the novel. Brian Massumi’s study on “The Autonomy of Affect,” from which I am borrowing the expression “becoming active”, seems a stimulating theoretical tool in dealing with a novel that hinges upon 1) emotions, especially joy, love and hatred, 2) the body and its autonomic response from cognitive perception, and 3) the dynamics between the inside and the outside, both as isolation or exclusion, and as contamination or vulnerability. However, rather than lingering in the precognitive sphere, in Modesta the affective reaction is always processed cognitively and linguistically. I argue that this non-repressive rationalization of the emotions is precisely Modesta’s most effective ethical and political tool.
Titus Andronicus: Shakespeare's Exceptional Violence
In this paper I explore the multifaceted relationship between violence, speech and power in the m... more In this paper I explore the multifaceted relationship between violence, speech and power in the most graphic of Shakespeare’s plays, Titus Andronicus. I take my cue from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on violence as opposed to power, and as something “incapable of speech,” but I read the play through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of sovereignty as the suspension of the law. I consider the dichotomy speech/muteness as an example not only of the dichotomy power/violence (Arendt) but also of the opposition between bios and zoe, that is the difference between a life worth to be included in the political realm and a life understood as the mere condition of being alive, a condition common to human beings and beasts (according to classical philosophy). In Titus Andronicus, I will argue, these distinctions are blurred, and zoe becomes fully exposed to the sovereign decision. The questions I would like to raise are: Does Lavinia lose her “self”, her bios, her citizenship, when she is ravished and mutilated? If the ability to communicate is what makes a living being a human with his/her own political identity, the violence committed on her also excludes her from the community of the polis. On the other hand, does she regain her political agency when she “speaks” again through the voice of literature? While the image of a mutilated body, in fact a mute body, cannot match Arendt’s idea of politics as the combination of speech and action bereft of violence, Agamben has developed the notion of a politics that renders life disposable, mute, bare, and can still be called politics or power, and precisely biopower. From this perspective, I argue, Lavinia and the other characters of Titus Andronicus are the embodiment of the concept of “bare life” as developed by Agamben, and Shakespeare’s Rome is a State of exception and of exceptional violence.
From the Margins with Joy: Goliarda Sapienza’s "L’arte della gioia"
Goliarda Sapienza’s posthumously published novel L’arte della gioia has recently attracted the cr... more Goliarda Sapienza’s posthumously published novel L’arte della gioia has recently attracted the critics’ interest, who have compared it to Il Gattopardo, probably because of its Sicilian setting and the way it intermingles fiction and history. Its very end, as I want to argue in this paper, seeks to situate the entire narration in the specific Sicilian environment: “non conoscevo la mia isola, il suo possente corpo fisico e segreto, il suo caldo fiato notturno”. Yet, I will advance the hypothesis that in the novel Sicily emerges as both a marginal and a privileged standpoint from which to look at national history “from a distance”, during a timespan that covers the 20th century up to the writing of the book. L’arte della gioia revolves around the life of Modesta – born on January 1, 1900 – from her poor and abused childhood to her development into a principessa and head of her own household, to her political commitment on the one hand and her motherhood on the other. Her Bildung, however, is not complete until she learns how to situate her personal development vis-à-vis Sicily, a place to leave behind sometimes, as well as a place to go back to. By focusing on the moments in which the narration conveys a sense of geographical dislocation and separation, my paper seeks to investigate the intermediate space between the local and the national in Modesta’s Bildungroman, and how that indefinite space contributes to creating the overarching mood of the novel – joy.
Resistant Mothers: Violence and History in Moravia’s La ciociara and Morante’s La Storia
The Art of Conversation and the Danger of Gossip: Dylan Thomas’s Meta-Rhetorical Discourse
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Chapters and articles by Stefania Porcelli
Conference Presentations by Stefania Porcelli