Papers by Silvia Caporale Bizzini
From the "Personal to the Political" seeks to analyze the autobiographical perspective ... more From the "Personal to the Political" seeks to analyze the autobiographical perspective of mothering and motherhood not purely as their inner, emotional and private narratives. The collection aims at evidentiating how autobiographical writing gives voice to the historically determined experience of mothering and makes visible the importance of mothers as resilient and political agents. The volume is divided into two sections. The first focuses on what may be termed 'autobiographical theory'. The contributors in this section use their life stories to theorize upon a social maternal perspective such as that as single mothers, mothers of children with disabilities, mothers of older children, and mothers of bi-racial children. The focus of the second section is on autobiographical narratives and includes readings of memoirs, slave narratives, poetry, and fiction. The essays in this volume position autobiography, in both theory and fiction, as a profoundly cultural and p...
During the 1970s and the 1980s, Italian Canadian Literature in English represented a thriving fie... more During the 1970s and the 1980s, Italian Canadian Literature in English represented a thriving field of literary expression in Canadian culture. The first generation of writers narrated the trauma of displacement while shaping the cultural basis of Italian Canadiana and its place within contemporary Canadian literature. In the last twenty years, the new generations of writers of Italian origin have reinterpreted and questioned the label of ethnic literature; the constellations of literary tropes and attachments that represented the first wave of Italian Canadian literature is a spectral presence to be reinterpreted within contemporary Canadian fiction. Miche!le Alfano, Ucia Canton and Terry Favro reinterpret Italian Canadiana in transcultural terms by retaining the spectral presence of the ancestral culture. I argue that the transcultural spaces of their narratives write a dialogue between the past and the present through spectrality and affects; it also shows how they have overcome the h•auma of dislocation and it evidentiates their identification with Canadian culture.
Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2003
Feroza Jussawalla's Chiffon Saris is a precious gift. In this beautifully constructed collection ... more Feroza Jussawalla's Chiffon Saris is a precious gift. In this beautifully constructed collection of poems, the reader comes to know and understand, page after page, how Jussawalla writes herself and her world(s). While writing on life, illness and death, Jussawalla bravely declares in "The Life and Death of a Death Mask": "Surrounded by a tin halo, embellished with a/marital till, my eyebrows affi.rmations,/ I am that I am. Om bhur buh svaha/" (35; my emphasis). This not a quest for identity, it is a firm, intensely poetic and.fiercely committed declaration of identity. The climax of her highly Romantic claim "I am a poet" ("Rainbow", 89), is the last in a book that transmits with great emotional strength the complex net of interlocking knots weaving Jussawalla' s self-portrait. In her book Sexing the Self, a study on the relation between theory and practice in the definition of selves, Elspeth
Miscelanea a Journal of English and American Studies, 1995
The aim of this paper is to carry out a reading of Fay Weldon's novel The Cloning of Joanna M... more The aim of this paper is to carry out a reading of Fay Weldon's novel The Cloning of Joanna May. This work is the ironic answer Weldon gives to a culture that uses the negation of difference as a means to contain the feminine subject within the limits of the normative identity that the Cartesian ontology has assigned to women. In The Cloning of Joanna May, the discourse on gender is closely related to the discourse on the construction of identity. Weldon not only proposes a revision of the histories of women that belong to different social classes and educational backgrounds: she relates these histories to issues that explore the relation which exists between the feminine identity and social structures.
Anglia, 2016
The purpose of this essay is to analyze the English writing of five Canadian authors of Italian o... more The purpose of this essay is to analyze the English writing of five Canadian authors of Italian origin-Darlene Madott, Maria Ardizzi, Licia Canton, Rosanna Battigelli and Dorina Michelutti-in terms of how they represent personal and inner spaces as a meaningful focal point for interpreting and reflecting on the dislocated subject's quest for identity. I will show how they use the idea of compensatory spaces as a literary strategy to portray personal, private or inner spaces to articulate their characters' processes of accepting or resisting cultural hybridity and multiplicity. The works of fiction I consider here embody the shifting perception of inner or personal spaces in the characters' lives, and how this defines their spatial relationships with the new country in different terms and at different stages of the migrant's process of accepting his or her new country. My reading is based on Homi Bhabha's notions of third space and cultural translation and Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopic spaces; I define these as compensatory spaces, an idea also rooted in Foucault's view that heterotopies of compensation represent differences that transcend dichotomies and are open to fluidity. In this paper, the idea of third space addresses the process of cultural translationunderstood not only as the positive and dialogic creation of a hybridized subject, but also as a narrative of conflicting personal spaces that gives voice to experiences of cultural dislocation.
La teoría de la represión [...] está históricamente ligada a la difusión del dispositivo de sexua... more La teoría de la represión [...] está históricamente ligada a la difusión del dispositivo de sexualidad. Por un lado, va a justificar su extensión autoritaria y coercitiva formulando el principio de que toda sexualidad debe estar sometida a la ley o, mejor aún. que no es sexualidad sino por el efecto de la ley: no s610 debe uno someter su sexualidad a la ley, sino que Únicamente tendrá una sexualidad si se sujeta a la ley Michel Foucault Perhaps more than any other conternporary figure, Foucault has come to epitomize rhe pleanires and dangers that a certain understanding of poststnicturalisrn poses to a certain undersranding of feminism. Elsperh Probyn 1. Poder y sexualidad La relación que las ideas del filósofo francés Michel Foucault mantienen con ' Véase Historia de la seacolidad. Vol. 1. pags. 54 y 57.
This paper is the result of research conducted at Pittsburgh University. The project was funded b... more This paper is the result of research conducted at Pittsburgh University. The project was funded by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education (M.E. y C.).
liu.se. Publications. ...
Women: A Cultural Review, 1996
La Historica Critica de Novela Inglesa Escrita por Mujeres que proponemos al lector hispanohablan... more La Historica Critica de Novela Inglesa Escrita por Mujeres que proponemos al lector hispanohablante pretende centrarse de una manera algo mas profunda en el trabajo de autores que desde diferentes perspectivas han forjado la traduccion literaria femenina britanica. Con el volumen que presentamos queremos, ademas, llenar un vacio presente en los manuales de historia de la literatura inglesa ya que, hasta la fecha, en el ambito del Estado Espanol no existe un estudio sistematico y ordenado cronologicamente del argumento que nos ocupa. Por ello, la idea que subyace a la publicacion de esta Historia critica se origina en la investigacion feminista de los estudios literarios, su consiguiente cuestionamiento de la nocion de canon y en la necesidad de sistematizar este trabajo en relacion con la novela inglesa escrita por mujeres. Se ha intentado presentar al publico el trabajo de escritoras cuya obra ha sido silenciada hasta hace unos pocos anos y que, sin embargo, en su epoca fueron representativas de las diferentes sensibilidades que siempre coexisten en el transcurrir del devenir del proceso historico. Aun asi, algunas de las autoras que presentamos pertenecen al canon literario britanico. Es impensable confeccionar una historia de la novela inglesa escrita por mujeres sin hacer referencia a las grandes escritoras decimononicas o a Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, etc. El analisis de la relacion entre genero y literatura no puede prescindir de su obra y de la interpretacion, o reinterpretacion, que todas ellas dan en sus novelas de la sociedad en la que vivieron. La presencia de las autores tradicionalmente admitidas en los manuales de Literatura Inglesa nos proporciona la posibilidad de volver a releer los grandes textos canonicos desde la perspectiva de las culturas y de los individuos silenciados. Por otro lado, tambien es cierto que muchas oteas voces femeninas acabaron siendo silenciadas a lo largo de los siglos y, como resultado, desaparecieron o nunca encontraron un lugar en los libros de texto. Es en este sentido que la recuperacion del trabajo de dichas intelectuales se recoge en nuestro volumen, poniendose de relieve como, gracias al esfuerzo de la investigacion que se ha llegado a convertirse en piezas importantes de la tradicion literaria britanica. Siguiendo esos parametros de actuacion, y un metodo de trabajo libre de esencialismos, en algunos de los capitulos del volumen comparten protagonismo las autoras mas conocidas junto con otras que la literatura del canon no ha llegado a considerar representativas de su tiempo. La presencia y el analisis de todas estas escritoras, desde las mas conservadoras hasta las mas innovadoras, tiene como proposito dar a conocer la gran riqueza, la variedad de perspectivas y de posicionamientos frente la relacion saber/poder que se materializan en la narrativa femenina de los tres ultimos siglos. Claro esta que la presente seleccion, debida mas bien a cuestaciones de espacio, implica la exclusion. Aun asi creemos que esta Historias Critica cumple con su funcion: proporcionar al publico lector el mapa conceptual de una tradicion literaria que ha tenido una gran dificultad para convertirse en una presencia reconocida y aceptada en el ambito de los estudios literarios.
International Studies in Philosophy, 1998
English Studies, 2020
The purpose of this article is to analyse Monica Ali's In the Kitchen (2009) and John Lanchester'... more The purpose of this article is to analyse Monica Ali's In the Kitchen (2009) and John Lanchester's Capital (2012). I draw on the notion of disposability (Evans and Giroux, Standing, and Bauman) to delve into the concepts of neoliberal subjectivity and exclusion for the analysis of the characters that in the novels embody subjectivities shaped by the logic of finance (economic migrants or asylum seekers). I argue that both works narrate different personifications of disposability resulting from neoliberal violence. In In the Kitchen and Capital, both Ali and Lanchester map a dark cartography of neoliberal British society. Both novels picture a society that is either indifferent to the violence provoked by neoliberalism, or unable to fight it back; the two works map a journey that slides from an apparently multicultural and opulent society down into a kind of dantesque social Inferno.
Women: A Cultural Review, 1996
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Papers by Silvia Caporale Bizzini