The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini

by Ada Testaferri, Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld

Overview

One of contemporary Italy's best-known writers, Dacia Maraini has often been a figure of controversy as author and as cultural critic. Though she is recipient of numerous literary awards, Maraini's work has not received the sustained critical attention commensurable with its stature. Working and creating "dalla parte delle donne" (on the side of women), she had been effectively excluded from the Italian critical canon. The Pleasure of Writing is opened with Maraini's own analysis of women's writing. There follow 14 essays by an international group of Italianists, utilizing a wide spectrum of interpretive perspectives, form semiotics to psychoanalysis, to treat the full range of Maraini's production as novelist, playwright, poet, and filmmaker.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557531971
Publisher:	Purdue University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2000
Series:	Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures , #20
Pages:	287
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ada Testaferri completed her doctorate in modern languages and literatures in Italy and obtained her Ph.D. in Italian medieval literature at the University of Toronto. She has edited Donne: Women in Italian Culture and co-edited Feminism in the Cinema and has published articles on Boccaccio and on women issues.

Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld is the author of Born Illiterate: Gender and Representation in Gadda's Pasticciaccio. She has published articles on Marco Risi, Lina Wertmuller, and Gianni Amelio. Currently, she is working on the politics of cultural repression of the Balkans in European cinemas and on the politics of cultural repression in Italian cinema.

Table of Contents

	Editors' Preface	vii
	Acknowledgments	ix
Part 1	Preliminaries
	Introduction	3
	Reflections on the Logical and Illogical Bodies of My Sexual Compatriots	21
Part 2	Demythicizing Genre: Issues of Representation and Language
	De-tecting Voci	41
	Spatialized Gender and the Poetry of Dacia Maraini	61
	Ecriture Feminine as Consciousness of the Condition of Women in Dacia Maraini's Early Narrative	77
Part 3	Poetics and Practices of Liberation
	Symbolic Mediation and Female Community in Dacia Maraini's Fiction	103
	Variations on a Theme: Violence against Women in the Writings of Dacia Maraini	121
	Dacia Maraini's "Barricade Theater"	135
Part 4	Historiographies
	A memoria: Charting a Cultural Map for Women's Transition from Preistoria to Storia	149
	La lunga vita di Marianna Ucria: A Feminist Revisiting of the Eighteenth Century	165
	Vocal Marginality: Dacia Maraini's Veronica Franco	179
Part 5	Reclaiming the Body in the Construction of Subjectivity
	Body as Will: Incarnate Voice in Dacia Maraini	195
	Remembering What the Closed Eye Sees: Some Notes on Dacia Maraini's Postmodern Oresteia	215
	Revolution in the Laundry	232
	Toward a Poor Feminist Cinema: The Experimental Films of Dacia Maraini	246
	List of Contributors	265
	Index	269