• Transmissions and transformations of medieval Italian literary culture (Guyda Armstrong: : armstrongg@cf.ac.uk; Rhiannon Daniels: r.j.daniels@leeds.ac.uk)

The aim of this session(s) is to bring together scholars working in the broad fields of Italian medieval and Renaissance studies in order to consider the processes by which literary culture has been transmitted, received and reused in different linguistic and geographical contexts, historical periods, or media. We particularly invite interdisciplinary and extra-literary approaches to the topic.

Themes may include but are not limited to:

- translation and reception (e.g., translation between Latin and vernacular cultures; translation between different vernacular cultures; translation between oral, written, and/or visual cultures)
- influence and intertextual relations (e.g., uses and transformations of themes, characters, motifs, texts, genre)
- manuscript and print history
- history of reading
- historiography of literature

• Terrorism, Italian Style (Ruth Glynn: r.s.glynn@bris.ac.uk)

This session addresses the prominent role played by cinema in articulating the ongoing impact of the anni di piombo, and explores how a range of cinematic texts, from the 1970s to the present day, seek to define, represent and remember the political violence of the those years.

Speakers:
• Ruth Glynn, University of Bristol, ‘Screening the Wound: The Madwoman of Italian Terrorism’
• Alan O’Leary, University of Leeds, ‘“Qui siamo in pieno fumetto”: Bertolucci, the commedia all’italiana and the Representation of Terrorism’
• Mary Wood, Birkbeck College, University of London, ‘Navigating the Labyrinth: Cinematic Representations of Right-Wing Terrorism’

• Figuring Hysteria (Kate Mitchell: K.H.Mitchell@warwick.ac.uk)

This session invites papers on opera, theatre, film, literature and photography from unification to the present to explore how representations of hysteria have informed, and have been informed by, medical and other discourses outside the arts. Topics might include, although are not limited to: gender and the representations of hysteria; the hysteric as image; language and hysteria.

• Il Giallo come nuovo romanzo sociale (Nicoletta Di Ciolla McGowan: N.McGowan@mmu.ac.uk)

It can be argued that for the past 15-20 years crime fiction has been Italy’s most popular type of literature, both in itsb“pulp”, popular format, and in its more “highbrow” formulations. Not only has the work of many authors achieved best-seller status in Italy, and has been translated into several languages, but, perhaps more significantly, for the first time in its history the genre has begun to enjoy critical as well as popular success, and its social function acknowledged.

In this panel we aim to consider:

1. The way in which Italian writers have appropriated the structures and formats of the crime and noir genres to portray and analyse issues of a political, social and cultural nature.

2. The multimedial nature of the genre - Italian giallo and noir authors are often involved with other media and genres: radio, television, cinema, graphic novels. What is the interaction between these different codes and how do they contribute to the definition of the genre?

3. The socio-historical references - the subgenre noir, in particular, seems to be inspired by the current social, geographical and cultural context. To what extent is the Italian giallo characterized by these features and therefore limited in its relevance to the Italian context and the present time?

4. The fragmented truth: codes, rules and transgressions - giallo and noir present opposite views of the notion of "truth". If in the giallo there is a teleological aim which is, with few exceptions, adhered to, the noir presents a kaleidoscope of points of view and of possible outcomes. To the unquestionable, solid truth foregrounded, and usually attained, by the giallo, there is the fragmented one signalled in noirs, which often embrace the so called "punto di vista di Caino".

5. "verità e giustizia": what is the meaning of "sociale"? What alternative society does crime fiction propose, and is it conceivable within or without the boundaries of the official institutions? Are we faced again with rivisitations of the opposition paese reale-paese legale?

Speakers: Nicoletta McGowan; Mark Chu; Monica Jansen, Luca Somigli

• Representing the Other (Silvia Ross: s.ross@ucc.ie)

Proposals sought which address questions of alterity in Italian culture or the representation of Italians as 'others' in literatures/cultures from outside Italy. Cultural production examined could include any of the following: novels, short stories, poetry, travel writing, the media, film, art, etc.

• Writing and Reading Lyric Verse in the Cinquecento (Erika Milburn: erikamilburn@libero.it)

This session will focus on the composition, transmission and reception of lyric poetry during the Cinquecento. Possible topics for discussion include: forms of transmission (manuscript, print, oral); the canzoniere; lyric anthologies; verse as a form of social communication; poetic commentaries and self-commentaries; musical settings of verse; theoretical treatments of the lyric.

• The Macro and the Micro: Europe and the Province (Rossella Riccobono: rmr8@st-andrews.ac.uk)

This panel will look at writers and film directors of the last thirty years who perceive themselves and their social, geographical, cultural and literary reality as regional, and therefore as marginal. Nevertheless in their work the province is often turned into a micro symbol of the larger culturally overpowering European tradition. How do these artists express their marginal self in terms of centrality? How is the representation of the micro narrated as significant in relation to the macro? Issues of identity, nomadism, voluntary exile (both linguistic, cultural, and geographical), and travel will be explored.

• Neorealismo/i e neo-neorealismo/i (Laura Leonardo: l.leonardo@mmu.ac.uk)

• Renaissance Keywords (Ita Mac Carthy: ita.maccarthy@durham.ac.uk)

By 'Renaissance Keywords', I mean those words which are central to understanding the literature, art, politics and philosophy of the period; words like 'virtu', 'fortuna', 'ingegno', 'occasio', 'grazia' and so on. The session welcomes papers interested in doing justice to the semantic versatility of these key terms. Rather than seeking catchall definitions, in other words, it will focus on issues like word histories, context-specific variations, semantic evolutions, and after-lives. By tracing their movement across disciplines and over time and by observing their changeable behaviour in different contexts, the session hopes to offer new understandings of the meanings of these crucial words, yield insights into the interdisciplinary transactions they make possible and give some account of their contribution to those making of Italian Renaissance thought and culture.

• The others: la questione linguistica delle 'culture altre' nella letteratura italiana (Emanuela Patti: emanuela_patti@hotmail.com)

This session aims at examining the "questione della lingua" in relation to the representation of "otherness" in Italian literature. The organizer is particularly interested in receiving proposals on both theoretical issues involving language and ideology and examples of experimentalism and plurilingualism.

• Space, place and landscape in contemporary Italian fiction and the visual arts (Marina Spunta: m.spunta@le.ac.uk)

This session addresses the question of space, place and landscape in contemporary Italian fiction, as well as the visual arts - in particular cinema and photography. Its aim is to reassess the changing role of space and place in contemporary Italian culture, and investigate the renewed dialogue between fiction, cinema and photography on the question of representing space.

• Aspects of Language Teaching (Anna Proudfoot: a.proudfoot@open.ac.uk or annaproudfoot@mac.com)

The organizer is particularly interested in the following aspects of language teaching: new online tools (blogs, wikis etc.), translation and distance learning. However, other aspects will also be considered.

• Influence and Intertextuality (Adalgisa Giorgio: a.giorgio@bath.ac.uk)

After Julia Kristeva introduced the concept in 1966, intertexuality gained enormous ground as a critical and interpretive tool for postmodern processes of cultural production. In an era which upholds a view of the world as text and of texts as part of a complex web of connections between texts that leaves little space for authorial intentions and agency, intertextuality supplanted influence and source studies, an approach to literature that searches for direct influences between texts and authors.
As a consequence of recent intellectual shifts brought about by, among other things, cultural studies, gender criticism and postcolonial theory, the study of influence appears to be in need of a positive reinterpretation. According to Mary Orr, influence is highly relevant for the study of texts as well as contexts, ‘whether relations of person to person, place or time’ and capable of challenging the idea of both text and context as stable and closed systems. Such a re-interpretation of influence brings back, for example, the study of manuscripts and gives new meaning to the authors (and translators) as agents of (inter)cultural dissemination and transformation (Intertextuality. Debates and Contexts, 2003: 171, 181).
Papers are invited which consider influence, alongside intertextuality and such cognate concepts as imitation and quotation, as a catalyst for cultural understanding and dialogue, in relation to Italian texts.

My own proposed paper for this session: ‘The Legacy of Elsa Morante: Influence and Intertextuality in Mariateresa Di Lascia and Fabrizia Ramondino’.

Adalgisa Giorgio
University of Bath
21st January 2007
Tel. 01225 386171
Fax 01225 386099
Email: a.giorgio@bath.ac.uk

• Women and Italian Cinema (Patrizia Sambuco: ps31@st-andrews.ac.uk)

This panel will examine representations of women as social subjects in Italian cinema, since the post-war period. It may include analyses of narratives of female agency, of audience perception of women on the screen, and of the constructions of star images.

• The Ethics of Pleasure (Jennifer Burns:j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk)

This session will address the ethical dimension of the relationship between reading and pleasure. Discussions of ethics and literature (or cinema) generally focus on the ‘serious’ expression of the rights and responsibilities attached to reading and interpretation, of the moral values communicated and perhaps promoted by the text, and of the moral impact on the reader of interaction with the text. The pleasure a reader might derive from interaction with the text tends to be regarded as contingent, intensely self-centred and implicitly irresponsible. Papers in this session will explore and perhaps challenge such assumptions, considering whether and in what conditions pleasure in the text can be understood to express or create a sense of morality, responsibility, altruism.

Papers related to literature, cinema and the visual arts of any period will be included.