UCL, Department of Italian
School of European Languages, Culture and Society
Wednesday 10 February 2016, 6:00 p.m.
UCL, Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351
Cristina Savettieri
(University of Edinburgh)
Masculinities at Odds:
Notes on Gender and Nation in Italian Great War Literature
The interplay between nationalism and the construction of the male self has
been only recently tackled in studies focusing on Italian literature of the Great
War. An extraordinarily heterogeneous corpus in terms of genres, agents, and
ideological backgrounds, Italian literature of the Great War is not only a
compelling historical document but also a layered site of invention in which
nationalism and, more generally, patriotic faith underwent a powerful process
of re-writing and deconstruction. Becoming male is a crucial chapter of the
pedagogy of the nation and a main concern anxiously or euphorically expressed
in war writings by both male and female writers. From ultra-manly warrior
fantasies to the solace of brotherly comradeship, from the masculinizing of the
image of motherland to the defeated virility haunting the narrative of war
prisoners and veterans, war literature puts forth a broad range of conflicting
masculine discourses, too often flattened on the gendered culture and biopolitics
of the fascist Ventennio. This paper shall analyse and compare some specific
examples with a view to re-discussing the role literature played in staging and
renegotiating the way the imagined community of the nation conceived itself.
ALL WELCOME