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Item La visión exculpatoria de la feminidad en Lágrimas de la nobleza de Luisa de Padilla(Michigan State University Press, 2018) Ibarreche, Xabier GranjaLa mayoría de los manuales de urbanidad y libros de conducta publicados en España entre los siglos XVI y XVII, escritos por varones considerados ilustres por su sabiduría o autoridad reli- giosa, tenían como fin educar a los jóvenes de la nobleza en las reglas de urbanidad, reglas que insistían en mantener las jerar- quías sociales tanto como la moral católica. Casi sin excepción, estos tratados veían en la mujer la causa de toda corrupción moral. Entre estas voces abierta o solapadamente misóginas, es casi única la voz de Luisa de Padilla, condesa de Aranda, autora de Nobleza virtuosa, un manual didáctico de comportamiento cívico y moral dirigido a la educación de la nobleza española y publicado en cuatro partes. Lágrimas de la nobleza, la tercera parte y la más comentada hasta el momento, trata de los vicios de la nobleza, uno de los cuales es la frecuente infidelidad del marido. Enfocándose en este aspecto del tratado, Granja obser- va que Padilla se aparta de la opinión de sus contemporáneos al elaborar una vehemente defensa de la mujer. En contra de la opinión general, la cual culpa a la mujer de ser innatamente inmoral e incapaz de controlar sus pasiones, Padilla acusa una y otra vez al esposo adúltero, culpándolo de los múltiples males que acosan los matrimonios. Al mismo tiempo, la autora acusa a las autoridades jurídicas y religiosas no solo de no castigar el adulterio masculino con la misma vehemencia que el femeni- no sino de considerar dicho comportamiento normal entre los hombres de la nobleza.Item Review of María Lorenza de los Ríos, Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar. Vida y obra de una escritora del siglo de las luces. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2019. 485 pp.(Michigan State University Press, 2021) Ibarreche, Xabier GranjaItem Global Citizenship Education in the UCLA Digital Humanities Classroom: In the Light of Early German Romantic Philosophy(Routledge, 2021) Fuchs, RenataThis chapter introduces a course model for Global Citizenship Education that merges literary research and contemporaneous pedagogy. I approach decolonizing literature and language courses through the Romantic concept of symphilosophy. Global Citizenship—as it refers to a sense of belonging to a broader community and common humanity—requires ultimately cooperation in terms of symphilosophizing; a notion that was fundamentally rooted in democratic thinking. I make an argument for Early German Romantic philosophy as a relevant and important tool for pedagogical interventions related to diversity and inclusivity; imagining the Romantic salon as a decolonizing space that can be re-envisioned through Digital Humanities and social media projects. Like the Romantic salon, online instruction can provide a learning environment for subjective and collective development (Bildung) while practicing contemporary forms of sociability and symphilosophy that focus on communication and collaboration.Item Intermediality in New/Romanticism: “Sonnabend abend Gegen sieben, hellster Mondschein in meine Stube hinein” — Rahel Levin Varnhagen Speaks Caspar David Friedrich(Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH Co. KG, 2022) Fuchs, RenataCentral to the development of modernity, salons shaped the reception of new cultural movements. Good company, lively talk, and a chance to reflect on new thinking in the arts, music, science, and social change, in other words, the salon atmosphere can be only fully evoked through text, sound, and image. This article reflects on the features of text and image (intertextuality) in the context of dialogue and letters of Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771—1833), who hosted the most prominent salon, a magnet for Romanticism in Berlin, where intellectuals met and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774—1840) were exhibited in the Academy of Arts. I position Levin Varnhagen’s salon as conceptual art where ideas and impact are more important than the quality of a finished work of art. Her letters—as an extension to salon conversations—are reflections on Romantic philosophy of sociability and symphilosophy and its emphasis on poeticizing and potentializing so that life becomes art and art life. Levin Varnhagen’s weather vignettes placed within letter header visualize a portrayal of landscape in a manner of Friedrich as they examine an instant of sublimity and constitute self-contained emotive subjects. Thus, this article contributes to the critical interest of intermediality from the perspective of Bakhtin’s dialogism and Kristeva’s intertextuality, as it centers on flow and passage rather than on the traditional text-to-text relationship of intertextuality. It also sheds light on artistic movements in the early nineteenth century and contemporary trends in art and art criticism. In German Romanticism, the interchange of medium among art, myth, mythology, and poetry stems from the concept of museum (exhibition), a medium of reflection and memory device useful for the future. Romantic intermediality includes a principle of art criticism that involves the change between the media of pictures and writing. Friedrich experimented with the mediation between literature, art, and religion, in short with intermediality—an alternative term for intertextuality. Since the concept evolved from the new digital technologies, it is then fitting to reflect on Levin Varnhagen’s vignettes evoking Friedrich’s work as GIF’s from around 1800.Item “Es war einmal ein Dorf, das hatte einen Brunnen und ein grünes Minarett”: Fairy Tales and the Image of Muslim Women in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Story Collection "Mutterzunge"(Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH Co. KG, 2014) Fuchs, RenataThis article examines all four stories from Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s story collection Mutterzunge. Erzählungen (1990). The stories are linked through the unconventional storytelling created out of secular and religious themes and motifs present in Oriental and Occidental narrative traditions. The author fuses the East and West through the linguistic signs and cultural themes. In order to rewrite the established practices and customs and ultimately the common literary canon, the author recasts popular fairy tales from both traditions. By depicting female characters as sexually progressive and autonomous, she forges a new model of multicultural society. Özdamar makes her female protagonists the focus of her stories emphasizing the role of Muslim women in the process of globalization leading through hybridization to the development of global common cultural discourse resulting in the new "translocal" or World Literature; thus, signaling a possible union of both traditions in the newly fashioned society.Item Women, Activism, and the Arts(The Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World Lebanese American University, 2009) Toman, Cheryl, ed.This special issue of al-Raida is devoted to women, activism, and the arts in the Arab world – a subject that was not chosen at random. Women and creativity has always been a topic of interest in the discipline of Women’s Studies, and this issue in particular has as its focus the ways in which women of the Arab diaspora channel their creativity in a positive way in order to develop tools of consciousness-raising and a means of actively participating in the history – past, present, and future – of their own communities and countries as well as of the world in general. The goal of such activism is to improve the lives of contemporary women and their families with the outcome having a direct impact on the quality of life in Arab societies and beyond. The arts are one of the few unifying forces for such activism since they enable all women to potentially find a common medium of communication regardless of social class, ethnic or religious background, or level of formal education.Item LE PLURILINGUISME DANS LES LITTÉRATURES ROMANES(Universidad de Murcia, 2023) Toman, Cheryl; Penalver, MirabelThis is the introduction to a special issue of Estudios Romanicos on Bilingualism in Romance Literatures.Item Feminism Makes History in Verona: The Response to the World Congress of Families(Dickinson, 2019-08-19) Montalbano, AlessandraThe last weekend of March 2019, Verona was at the center of media attention for having hosted the XIII World Congress of Families (WCF). However, the feminist response to this ultra-conservative and religious event became the true news. The transnational feminist movement Non Una Di Meno (NUDM) organized a three-day mobilization that included the biggest march in the history of Verona and had a strong impact on public opinion. This article offers an analysis of those days and the local politics that allowed them to take place. It argues that the WCF and NUDM are two opposite models of activism based on Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) and solidarity, respectively.Item Ransom kidnapping: the anonymous underworld of the Italian Republic(Cambridge University Press, 2016) Montalbano, AlessandraThis article offers a comparative analysis of the phenomenon of ransom kidnapping in Italy between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, a period in which hundreds of citizens were abducted and held by Sardinian banditry, the Sicilian Mafia, and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta. While ransom kidnapping far surpassed political kidnapping in the number of victims it produced, it has received only a fraction of the scholarly attention that has been given to political abductions during the anni di piombo. Tracing the different roots, periods, and development of ransom kidnapping, this article sheds light on the distinct uses that banditry, the Mafia, and the ’Ndrangheta made of this crime; highlights the impact that national economic transformations and the state had on the increase of this phenomenon; and demonstrates how for the Italian underworld, kidnapping was both a reaction to and a means of modernisation. It also argues that particularly in the case of the ’Ndrangheta, kidnapping became a veritable industry.Item La memoria privata degli anni di piombo(Oxford, United Kingdom: Peter Lang Verlag, 2018) Montalbano, AlessandraIn un articolo pubblicato sul Riformista nell'ottobre del 2008 dal titolo 'La vittima, la memoria, l'oblio: Christian Raimo interviene con toni allarmati nel dibattito apertosi a seguito del ruolo assunto dalle vittime nel ricordo del terrorismo in Italia, gettando luce da un lato su quello che egli stesso chiama il 'paradosso dell'attenzione alla vittima' e dall'altro su quella tendenza che egli definisce come 'memoria che si mangia la storia'. L'allarmismo di Raimo non è stato un episodio isolato nel panorama italiano, ma ha anzi trovato ampia eco in volumi di carattere storico e teoretico quali La Repubblica del dolore di Giovanni De Luna (20n) e Critica della vittima di Daniele Giglioli (2014). Attraverso l'analisi delle critiche mosse da questi tre autori alla memoria, alla testimonianza e alla figura della vittima-eroe, in quanto prospettive incapaci di restituire le motivazioni e le cause degli avvenimenti storici, questo capitolo esamina le origini di tali critiche e la loro tendenza ad essere un discorso generale in difesa di un'idea di storia come disciplina che rimane distante dalla rielaborazione degli anni Settanta in atto in Italia. Argomento centrale di questo studio è che contrappore dialetticamente storia e memoria preclude alle parole delle vittime una possibilità di ascolto e di dimensione pubblica. Esclusa dalla storia, la memoria delle vittime diventa privata nel senso di negata.Item Nadia Origo’s Aurore’s Journey: A Novel about Sustainable Development by a Gabonese Geographer(Cambridge Scholars Press, 2022) Toman, CherylThe uniqueness of a novel like Aurore’s Journey cannot be understated and in getting to know its author, Nadia Origo, one understands more about how this intriguing work came to be. It is indeed rare to find a work on sustainable development by an eloquent novelist and activist who holds a doctorate in geography with an emphasis on sustainable development, environment, and health. Identifying herself as an auteure engagée or an “activist author,” Origo blends her passion for presenting her native country of Gabon and its environment with an awareness of the science behind the realities she conveys. Origo’s novel emerged from her fieldwork conducted through a grassroots organization in Gabon known as Forest-Source. Origo’s way of infusing geography and ecology into a literary work makes for a purposeful approach to the promotion of sustainable development and most importantly, Origo casts an African perspective on the subject, privileging African solutions to African problems. Aurore’s Journey is not mere travel writing but a successful project that combines science and literature, making the work attractive to a wide audience.Item Item Immagine, fenomenologia e fotografia in Italo Calvino(John Hopkins University Press, 2023-01) Montalbano, AlessandraL’articolo analizza il ruolo dell’immagine nella scrittura di Italo Calvino e in particolare come l’immagine rappresenti per l’autore una distanza, ovvero un punto di vista fuori dall’intenzionalità del pensiero del soggetto conoscente. La prima parte del saggio esamina diversi testi nei quali Calvino pensa la distanza in termini di solitudine, tempo, novità e silenzio. Il saggio poi guarda alle potenzialità gnoseologiche che Calvino riconosce all’immagine fotografica e alla fotografia come tecnica attraverso l’analisi del racconto L’avventura di un fotografo (da Gli amori difficili), del libro La giornata d’uno scrutatore e dell’articolo “In memoria di Roland Barthes” uscito su La Repubblica in occasione della morte del filosofo. Quella che emerge da questo saggio è una vera e propria fenomenologia del visibile che Calvino sviluppa attraverso personaggi immaginari e riflessioni sue che lo avvicinano a filosofi quali Barthes e Walter Benjamin e anticipano ambiti di teoria critica contemporanea come, ad esempio, la affect theory (“teoria dell’affetto”).Item Snatched from the World: The Phenomenology of Captivity in Italian Ransom Kidnapping(John Hopkins University Press, 2017-01) Montalbano, AlessandraWhen we think about kidnapping in Italy, the first abduction that comes to mind is that of former prime minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1978 by the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization the Red Brigades. Yet that same year, forty-three private citizens were kidnapped for ransom by criminal organizations identified by the media under the general name of anonima sequestri (anonymous kidnapping), whose roots were Sardinian banditry, the Sicilian mafia, and the Calabrian 'ndrangheta. Unlike terrorists, these criminal syndicates never publicly claimed responsibility for their kidnappings. In 1977, before Moro's abduction, the number of ransom kidnappings reached its peak: seventy-five in a single year. 1 Political kidnapping was predominately linked to the Red Brigades, who between 1972 and 1982 abducted symbolic public figures in order to destabilize democratic institutions, the economic elite, and the media, and to "attack the heart of the state."2 This group was responsible for eighteen total abductions.3 In roughly the same period (1975-1984), the Sardinian banditry, the mafia, and the 'ndrangheta abducted 489 people-seventy percent of the ransom kidnapping victims in the history of the Italian Republic. If during the so-called Years of Lead (the years of political violence in Italy) the state was under attack by left-wing political terrorism, civil society was also threatened by the country's underworld and its terrifying crimes. In the wider period of 1969-1998, nearly 700 people were abducted for ransom in Italy.Item Estereotipos femeninos en el cine sobre la Transición: Cuerpos silenciados y objetos deseados(University Press of Zaragoza, 2022) Corbalán, AnaItem Masculinidades en crisis: Representación literaria de la violencia de género en España(Fundación General de la Universidad de Alcalá, 2020) Corbalán, AnaItem BITO Women's Museum(La Doxa, 2020) Toman, Cheryl; Kuoh-Moukoury, ThereseA catalog plus description and history of the paintings in the BITO Women's Museum in Douala, Cameroon.Item Aproximaciones a la metaficción nostálgica: exotismo y evasión en Niebla en Tánger(Albatros Ediciones, 2021) Corbalán, AnaItem The Ideological Construct of the 'Inferior Female'(Routledge, 2018) Tsakiropoulou-Summers, Tatiana; Kitsi-Mitakou, KaterinaWomen’s social and political status is a topic that has inspired many scholarly studies in the past few decades, but the question of the forces that have shaped it has yet to be considered in the context of its historical continuity from antiquity to the modern era. This volume attempts to address one of these forces, that is, the cumulative effect of the ideology of female inferiority over the past 2500 years, examining it as a phenomenon that has figured roughly continuously in this long period of time, notwithstanding the various breaks and permutations of its pattern along the way. Our effort aims at aligning classical scholarship with studies on women’s status in the Western world across a great expanse of time and space. Focusing on the constructs of femininity (and, at times, on masculinity), contributors interrogate the relationship between gender and political ideology across the spectrum of Western history, starting with antiquity. As Wagner-Hasel observes, studying women’s life and status in antiquity and, by extension, in the subsequent ages of Western civilization “is not only an attempt to reconstruct a bygone way of life, it is also a discourse over woman’s place in modern bourgeois society” (1989: 19). Making the connection between modern and ancient theorists is important for understanding the tenacity of modern conventions and biases regarding women; it is one thing to consider the idea of female inferiority to be four or so centuries old, but it is another to have the weight of a 2500-yearlong history behind it.Item Il femminismo fa la storia a Verona: la risposta al World Congress of Families(Malorarivista.it, 2020) Montalbano, Alessandra