Academic articles and book chapters by Olivia Santovetti
MLO Modern Languages Open, 2024
This article brings into dialogue the nineteenth-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and the... more This article brings into dialogue the nineteenth-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and the twenty-first-century Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. As well as sharing thematic similarities in their fiction, such as poverty, violence and social disorder, Dostoevsky and Ferrante both place significant emphasis on the role of the writer, through their fictional narrators and in autobiographical writings. Drawing on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, we analyse the way in which Dostoevsky and Ferrante use polyphonic techniques to address their shared preoccupation with the artifice of narrative and their concern for authentic writing. We ask the following questions: How do Dostoevsky and Ferrante approach the paradox inherent in the creation of a narrative—an artificial construct—for the purpose of communicating a truth? What kind of writing do they consider authentic, and what is the nature of the human experience that authentic writing should expose? Given that Ferrante’s novels prioritise female protagonists, how does her use of polyphony compare to that of Dostoevsky, a writer who has at times been criticised for his portrayal of women and for the violence enacted against them in his fiction? Beginning with examples drawn from across the oeuvre of both authors, our analysis will culminate in a parallel reading of Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent and Ferrante’s latest novel The Lying Life of Adults.
Vita dell'infanzia. Rivista mensile dell'Opera Nazionale Montessori, 2023
'La lettera ritrovata. 1976: scrivemmo a Primo Levi'
di Manuela De Luca, Docente di Lettere Scuo... more 'La lettera ritrovata. 1976: scrivemmo a Primo Levi'
di Manuela De Luca, Docente di Lettere Scuola secondaria di primo e secondo grado. Nei primi anni Settanta partecipò alla sperimentazione nella Scuola media Montessori di Villa Ada a Roma.
Intervista di Olivia Santovetti, Associate professor of Italian Literature, Leeds University, U.K.
Lettrici italiane tra arte e letteratura. Dall'Ottocento al modernismo, Roma, Campisano Editore, 2021
«La figura della lettrice è attiva, in quanto soggetto che si misura con un testo? Oppure è “pa... more «La figura della lettrice è attiva, in quanto soggetto che si misura con un testo? Oppure è “passiva” nella misura in cui è assoggettata a un’attività non creativa, ma ricreativa?» (Del Puppo qui a p. 21). Intorno a questa domanda si muovono i contributi di questo volume, dedicato alla figura della donna che legge, un tema alla moda nella letteratura e nell'iconografia dell’Europa ottocentesca. A partire dalle piste di indagine aperte negli ultimi trenta anni, il libro ricostruisce la presenza della lettrice nell’Italia dell’Ottocento nella prospettiva incrociata di letteratura e pittura, sviluppando al contempo alcune possibili connessioni con altri campi artistici, tra cui la scultura, il melodramma, il teatro, il cinema. La figura della lettrice – la liseuse, the Woman Reader, die Leserin – è rassicurante quando presenta la lettura come il nuovo passatempo borghese, da svolgersi in famiglia e da alternare ad altre attività femminili e domestiche come il cucito, il ricamo, l’istruzione dei figli; è inquietante invece quando allude ad un’attività privata, non sorvegliabile, legata all’immaginazione, ai desideri, ad una soggettività indipendente. Il volume mette in luce questa polarità e, rileggendo casi esemplari, casi poco studiati (o non studiati), casi curiosi ma anche casi volutamente polemici, ne esplora l’ambivalenza. Due allora sono i punti di partenza condivisi dagli autori dei saggi qui raccolti: la natura polisemica della lettrice e l’importanza del dialogo tra letteratura e arti visive. Tanti, infine, sono i fili che legano i contributi tra loro: la lettura come assorbimento, la metanarrazione e l’autoriflessione, l’identificazione letteraria e il tema del romanzo corruttore, il fenomeno della rivoluzione della lettura, l’esigenza di creare una coscienza nazionale e il topos del ‘fare gli italiani’, la crisi di fine secolo, la donna e la modernità, il male gaze e gli stereotipi di genere, la lettrice che diventa scrittrice, l’oggetto libro come prop scenico o come canale tra pubblico e privato, tra immaginazione e realtà. Contributi di Ann Hallamore Caesar, Jessica Calipari, Giovanna Capitelli, Stefano Cracolici, Raffaele De Berti, Alessandro Del Puppo, Ilenia Falbo, Ursula Fanning, Ombretta Frau, Edwige Comoy Fusaro, Davide Lacagnina, Annick Paternoster, Laura Lucia Rossi, Maria Saveria Ruga, Olivia Santovetti, Marco Sirtori, Anna Villari. Campisano Editore, Roma, 2021 - https://cutt.ly/aYhXuoV
Elena Ferrante in a Global Context, special issue of MLN, 136.1, 2021
Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Realism in Global Comparative Perspective, vol. 1: Mapping Realism, edited by Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat, Robert Weninger (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), pp.531-49, 2021
https://benjamins.com/catalog/chlel.xxxii.20san
The final thirty years of the nineteenth century... more https://benjamins.com/catalog/chlel.xxxii.20san
The final thirty years of the nineteenth century – which coincide with the first decades of the unified Italy – are the golden age of the Italian novel: for the first time ‘Italian’ and ‘novel’ combined to produce an authentically Italian novel” (Asor Rosa). This extremely rich period
is characterized by lively debates and great experimentation as well as by two main elements: the adoption, almost universally, of the realist mode, and the reference to French literature as a model. This chapter looks, first, at Franco-Italian cultural transfer; then it analyzes the influence
that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had in Italian literary practice and in the rise of Italian realism. I pay special attention to four realist novels which reworked the bovarystic theme and explored the ‘dangers’ of novel-reading. I argue that in the age of realism the woman reader
character becomes a self-reflexive device which enables the novel to reflect critically on its status, fictional and illusory, on its function and its readership, real and implied. My case studies offer a sample of the forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century Italian novel and address the following questions: the issue of morality in the novel (Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra, 1881), the ambivalent power of fiction (Matilde Serao’s Fantasia, 1884), the difficult legacy of romanticism (Federico De Roberto’s L’illusione, 1891), and the adoption of realist poetics (Marco
Praga, La biondina, 1893).
Delos, Vol. 36 No. 1 , 2021
http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/delos/article/view/1443
Modern Language Review, 2018
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels are characterized by a fusion of high and low art. This articl... more Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels are characterized by a fusion of high and low art. This article explores the sources of Ferrante’s narrative, considering the ‘low’ sources in the light of Peter Brooks’s definition of the melodramatic mode and identifying the ‘high’ component in the self-reflexive, metafictional strategies of the antinovel tradition. Particular attention is given to reflection on the act of writing. The Neapolitan Novels are presented as self-reflexive texts: ‘postmodern’ novels of formation by a writer who while narrating thinks about the writerly process and what it means to be a writer, particularly a woman writer today.
in The Formation of a National Audience: Readers and Spectators in Italy, 1750-1890 edited by Gabriella Romano and Jennifer Burns (Madison, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017), pp.193-212, 2017
in C'è un lettore in questo testo? Rappresentazioni letterarie della lettura in Italia, edited by Giovanna Rizzarelli and Cristina Savettieri (Bologna: il Mulino, 2016), pp.183-202.
The article explores the theme of reading and writing in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. The... more The article explores the theme of reading and writing in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. The fictional character of Elena, the writer, will be analysed in its relationship with Lila, the non-writer. In the symbiotic relationship between the two friends reading and writing appear as something more complex than simply a way of redeeming themselves from their oppressive reality.
The Italianist, 2015
This article examines a passage from Alessandro Manzoni's Fermo e Lucia (1821-23), the so-called ... more This article examines a passage from Alessandro Manzoni's Fermo e Lucia (1821-23), the so-called digression on 'romanzi d'amore', where Manzoni pondered the appropriateness of writing of love in novels. By analysing Manzoni's argument closely, in particular his statement that the danger lies in letting the readers identify with the feelings of the character and therefore confusing their world with that of fiction, the article aims to underline Manzoni's perspicacity in realising, first, that the dynamic of identification is at the heart of the novel and, secondly, that the new mode of reading introduced by the novel and based on empathic identification was going to throw into crisis the pedagogical and moralistic conception of art, of Platonic origin, in which he believed. Hence, the article looks at the digression on 'romanzi d'amore' as the first manifestation of Manzoni's rejection of the novel as a genre; not simply a formulaic repetition of the leitmotif of the novel as a corruptive genre but the beginning of a meditation that anticipated by almost 30 years the impasse declared by Manzoni in the essay Del romanzo storico (1850): a reflection on the novel within the novel which makes Manzoni's workintended in its complexity from Fermo e Lucia to I promessi sposinot only one of the best examples of self-reflexive novels but also an antinovel in the most radical sense of the word, that is a novel that disavows itself.
The object of these essays is to explore and examine the range, function and nature of self-refle... more The object of these essays is to explore and examine the range, function and nature of self-reflexive devices and techniques in Italian narrative fiction from the Middle Ages to the contemporary. By self-reflection we mean any text that incorporates reflection on and/or comment about its composition, reception and/or existence as a work of literature. 1 Most broadly, self-reflection has been defined as an umbrella term encompassing both metanarration and metafiction. 2 Metanarration is defined as the narrator's reflections on the act of narrating, while metafiction concerns the fictionality (that is, the artifice) of narrative. Metafictionwhich may refer to specific techniques including digression, metalepsis, mise-en-abyme, parody, intertextuality, metaphors, narrative embedding, authorial alter egos, dialogue with the reader, or representations of reading and writinghighlights the constructed nature of narrative, undermining its realism, and can therefore be conceived as 'fiction about fiction'. (Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, which starts, 'You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller', is a typical example.) In contradistinction, metanarration may even reinforce the narrative's illusion of authenticity and includes devices such as introductions and conclusions to storytelling (frame narratives) in which the narrator comments on the circumstances of the composition of the narrative, its content and/or reception (the metanarrative comments on the art of storytelling in Boccaccio's Decameron fall into this category).
Italian Studies, 2013
This article analyses how Fogazzaro's own elaboration of the theory of the evolution of species (... more This article analyses how Fogazzaro's own elaboration of the theory of the evolution of species (as a mystical and ascensional vision of the world) influenced his theory of the novel and had an impact on his activity as writer. In particular, the article concentrates on the innovative elements of Malombra, Fogazzaro's first and highly successful novel. It argues that Fogazzaro used the cliché of the woman reader to postulate an affinity between the experience of reading (and more in general the aesthetic experience) and the mystical rapture: a totalizing experience, detached from reality and beyond rational thinking in which the self dissolves its boundaries and experiences a sense of fusion and identity loss. The importance given to the act of reading and writing as aesthetic and mystical experiences is seen as the ground in which Fogazzaro's literary experimentation, which is here anticipating modernist approaches, meets and is enriched by his theological Modernism.
Digression in European Literature. From Cervantes to Sebald, edited by Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp.169-180.
Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression, edited by Rhian Atkin (Oxford; Bern: Legenda, 2011), pp.47-63.
The Printed Media in Fin-de-siècle Italy. Publishers, Writers, and Readers, ed. by Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani, and Jennifer Burns (Oxford; Bern: Legenda, 2011), pp.49-63.
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Academic articles and book chapters by Olivia Santovetti
di Manuela De Luca, Docente di Lettere Scuola secondaria di primo e secondo grado. Nei primi anni Settanta partecipò alla sperimentazione nella Scuola media Montessori di Villa Ada a Roma.
Intervista di Olivia Santovetti, Associate professor of Italian Literature, Leeds University, U.K.
The final thirty years of the nineteenth century – which coincide with the first decades of the unified Italy – are the golden age of the Italian novel: for the first time ‘Italian’ and ‘novel’ combined to produce an authentically Italian novel” (Asor Rosa). This extremely rich period
is characterized by lively debates and great experimentation as well as by two main elements: the adoption, almost universally, of the realist mode, and the reference to French literature as a model. This chapter looks, first, at Franco-Italian cultural transfer; then it analyzes the influence
that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had in Italian literary practice and in the rise of Italian realism. I pay special attention to four realist novels which reworked the bovarystic theme and explored the ‘dangers’ of novel-reading. I argue that in the age of realism the woman reader
character becomes a self-reflexive device which enables the novel to reflect critically on its status, fictional and illusory, on its function and its readership, real and implied. My case studies offer a sample of the forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century Italian novel and address the following questions: the issue of morality in the novel (Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra, 1881), the ambivalent power of fiction (Matilde Serao’s Fantasia, 1884), the difficult legacy of romanticism (Federico De Roberto’s L’illusione, 1891), and the adoption of realist poetics (Marco
Praga, La biondina, 1893).
di Manuela De Luca, Docente di Lettere Scuola secondaria di primo e secondo grado. Nei primi anni Settanta partecipò alla sperimentazione nella Scuola media Montessori di Villa Ada a Roma.
Intervista di Olivia Santovetti, Associate professor of Italian Literature, Leeds University, U.K.
The final thirty years of the nineteenth century – which coincide with the first decades of the unified Italy – are the golden age of the Italian novel: for the first time ‘Italian’ and ‘novel’ combined to produce an authentically Italian novel” (Asor Rosa). This extremely rich period
is characterized by lively debates and great experimentation as well as by two main elements: the adoption, almost universally, of the realist mode, and the reference to French literature as a model. This chapter looks, first, at Franco-Italian cultural transfer; then it analyzes the influence
that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had in Italian literary practice and in the rise of Italian realism. I pay special attention to four realist novels which reworked the bovarystic theme and explored the ‘dangers’ of novel-reading. I argue that in the age of realism the woman reader
character becomes a self-reflexive device which enables the novel to reflect critically on its status, fictional and illusory, on its function and its readership, real and implied. My case studies offer a sample of the forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century Italian novel and address the following questions: the issue of morality in the novel (Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra, 1881), the ambivalent power of fiction (Matilde Serao’s Fantasia, 1884), the difficult legacy of romanticism (Federico De Roberto’s L’illusione, 1891), and the adoption of realist poetics (Marco
Praga, La biondina, 1893).
The event is both in person or on-line. All welcome! Please register at this link:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=qO3qvR3IzkWGPlIypTW3y082492XTJhEmlIneuSP90tUNEtGMklINzY4SUs2OFVKNE9MNkpTOEc3Uy4u
5 aprile 2022 - Largo di Torre Argentina 11, Roma
Introduzione: Caterina De Mata
Interventi di: Daniela Brogi, Raffaella Morselli
Elena Ferrante is one of the most critically acclaimed and popular novelists on the global stage today. Her works offer reflections on the nature of good and evil, explore issues of poverty and sexual violence and contemplate the role of the writer. These concerns are common in the works of the 19th century Russian author Dostoevsky, a writer to whom Ferrante herself has acknowledged a debt.
This event brings together in conversation Dr Sarah Hudspith, a scholar of Dostoevsky, and Dr Olivia Santovetti, an expert on Ferrante, both members of the University of Leeds Centre for World Literature. They will discuss the resonances between Ferrante’s and Dostoevsky’s novels, read and comment on selected passages.
This event will feature a live audience Q&A session.
04.11-05.11.2019 Internationaler Workshop zum Thema: Elena Ferrante: Genealogie e archeologie del ventesimo secolo / Elena Ferrante – Genealogien und Archäologien des 20. Jahrhunderts
https://home.uni-leipzig.de/cici/2019/10/11/04-11-06-11-2019-internationale-fachtagung-zum-thema-elena-ferrante-genealogie-und-archaeologie-des-20-jahrhunderts/
Il seminario del 1 giugno sviluppa la dimensione metariflessiva latente nella figura della lettrice. La premessa è che l'autoriflessione messa in atto nei romanzi dal personaggio della lettrice corrisponda ad un'altro motivo iconografico della pittura di fine ottocento: ossia, al motivo dello spettatore e del pubblico delle mostre d'arte. Chiamando in causa i destinatari del loro messaggio – che siano lettori o spettatori – queste opere li coinvolgono nel dibattito sullo stato e sulla funzione dell'arte, marginalizzati e messi in discussione nella società positivista di fine ottocento. Questi motivi introducono nell'arte di fine secolo una riflessione che anticipa la metariflessione del modernismo e delle avanguardie.
Conference Auditorium 2
University of Leeds (Clarendon Way, Leeds LS2 9JT)
FREE but tickets must be booked in advance at:
http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/events/161-ferrante-fever-in-leeds
Elena Ferrante’s bestselling Neapolitan Quartet has become a worldwide phenomenon, published in 39 countries, but its Italian author remains anonymous. This evening a distinguished international panel discuss Ferrante’s work and its impact. Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s acclaimed translator; Daniela Petracco, director of Europa Editions, UK; Ferrante’s UK publisher; Thea Lenarduzzi, Times Literary Supplement commissioning editor and author of the blog ‘Ferrante Fever’ and Tiziana de Rogatis, Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the Università per Stranieri di Siena, author of articles on Ferrante and her global success. The evening ends with a Q&A discussion with the audience.
Event organised by University of Leeds (Italian, LivItaly, International Writers at Leeds, the Centre for World Literatures and the Centre for Translation Studies of the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) in conjunction with Ilkley Literature Festival; Leeds City Council; Italian Cultural Institute of London; The Times Literary Supplement; and The Italianist. Funded by: University of Leeds (SRDF, School of Languages Cultures and Societies) and Leeds Inspire.
For more information visit website (www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/ferrante) or contact the organiser: Olivia Santovetti (o.santovetti@leeds.ac.uk)
The Workshop is to explore the self-reflexive dimension highlighted by the character of the woman reader. The premise is that the same act of self-reflection is to be found in a popular iconography of nineteenth century painting: the viewer and public of art exhibitions, the visitor in the atelier. By addressing the receivers of their message – be those readers or viewers – these works involve them in the debate on the status and function of art which was under attack in the positivist society of the period. This introduced an investigation in the fin-de-siècle art which can be seen anticipating the meta-reflection of Modernism. Possible topics for papers include, but are not limited to:
• The reader in the novel, the viewer in the painting: self-reflexive representations
• Self-reflection in other artistic media (theatre, early cinema)
• The fin-de-siècle debate on the status and function of art
• Art as mimesis of reality vs art as creation of an independent reality (l'art pour l'art)
Submissions containing 250-300 word abstracts, with a brief author bio of 150 words, are invited for 20 minute papers (in English or Italian). Please send an email with the title 'The woman reader' to Olivia Santovetti (o.santovetti@leeds.ac.uk) and Giovanna Capitelli (giovannacapitelli@gmail.com) by 1 November 2016.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/languages/newsandevents/italianstudiesconference
In the Neapolitan Novels, Naples is seen as a city of "rooted cosmopolitanism". Naples is not a normal European city, but it is definitely a European city; Naples is a unique place but its uniqueness is not a stereotype. The narrative form of the Neapolitan Novels is a retelling of the archaic, is a rewriting of the archaic in a modern context. In the NN, Naples is a world in which the archaic and the contemporary coexist and blend into one another, complicating and diluting linear chronology, pulverizing the compactness of characters, of history and its major events.
Venerdì 7 aprile, alle ore 15, in Aula Piovani (Università di Napoli, Via Porta di Massa, 1) si terrà il primo seminario partenopeo ed internazionale dedicato ad Elena Ferrante e al suo legame con la città di Napoli. Il seminario, organizzato da Tiziana de Rogatis e Mariella Muscariello, si svolgerà in italiano e sarà introdotto da Ann Goldstein, la traduttrice americana dell'opera di Elena Ferrante.
Elena Ferrante è in questo momento l’emblema della cultura italiana nel mondo. Napoli - da sempre al centro dei suoi romanzi, in particolare del ciclo dell’Amica geniale - è diventata per i lettori di tutto il mondo la città italiana per eccellenza, con veri e propri pellegrinaggi dei lettori nei luoghi simbolo della vicenda romanzesca. Questo Seminario di studi intende riflettere sul legame che unisce la città e la scrittrice, riconoscendolo come una tappa importante del «cosmopolitismo radicato» della metropoli partenopea: una città unica e definita nel suo specifico profilo mediterraneo ma al tempo stesso rappresentativa di una complessa dimensione europea.
Al centro del Seminario di studi, infatti, ci sarà un’ospite di eccezione: la traduttrice americana Ann Goldstein, promotrice con la sua mediazione linguistica del successo cosmopolita di Ferrante. Ad ulteriore conferma del discorso cosmopolita della Napoli ferrantiana, Goldstein verrà affiancata da studiose e studiosi che in Italia e all’estero stanno promuovendo l’immaginario di questa scrittrice e della città.