Bryn Mawr Faculty
Good Life
Immeasurable Weather
Jiny LAN and the Art of Subversion
by Qinna Shen, Associate Professor and Chair of German and German Studies
Losing the Plot
NEMLA Italian Studies: The Renaissance Dialogue
Edited by Roberta Ricci, Professor and Chair of Italian on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities
Although this special volume dedicated to the Renaissance includes only one essay on Ariosto, it aims at joining the many celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the first publication (1516) of his epic masterpiece, Orlando Furioso. Following this modern multi-thematic approach enticing micro-narratives with a mixture of “le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori, / le cortesie, l’audaci imprese,” declared ab principio by Ariosto as poetic theory in the opening lines of the epic (1.1-2), this project embraces such a vision of a multi plot within interdisciplinarity, now more than ever at the center of the intellectual (and pedagogical/didactic) debate in academia. Keeping in mind Ariosto’s modern epistemological approach to reality and knowledge by interlacing, embracing, connecting, and disconnecting themes, characters, levels of narrations, the goal here is to present the Renaissance as a continuous dialogue among many authors from various cultural milieus that includes the arts, language and literature, philosophy, and the sciences.
Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism
Poggio Bracciolini and the Re(dis)covery of Antiquity: Textual and Material Traditions
Edited by Roberta Ricci, Professor and Chair of Italian on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities
Proceedings of the Symposium Held at Bryn Mawr College on April 8-9, 2016
This collection draws strength from its cross-disciplinarity, featuring contributions by scholars who investigate Bracciolini's contribution to many fields of knowledge in the Western tradition, spanning across politics and historiography, material and print culture, philology and manuscript studies, calligraphy and palaeography. The essays touch upon intertwined aspects of early Renaissance in its recovery of the classical tradition where the concept of humanitas extends to the manuscript itself. “This distinguished collection of essays adds a wealth of scholarly detail to our understanding of the myriad-minded Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini. And, in doing so, it also managed to capture much of the range and flavour of this extraordinary figure: his learning, his passionate interest in antiquity, his civic pride, and his brilliance in calligraphic design, as well as his ceaseless self-promotion , his enmities, his taste for obscenity, and his penchant for moralizing. Poggio's startling energy and the energy of the whole period course through these pages" (Stephen Greenblatt)
Reimagining Nabokov
Edited by José Vergara - Assistant Professor of Russian
Reimagining Nabokov takes a holistic approach to the many stumbling blocks in teaching Nabokov today. Especially intriguing about this volume is that through its essays a fresh picture of Nabokov emerges, not as an authoritarian and paranoid world-creator (an image long entrenched in Nabokov scholarship), but as someone who is tentative, hopeful, socially conscious, compassionate, and traumatized by the experience of exile....Reimagining Nabokov models pedagogical concepts that can be applied to teaching any literary text with a social conscience.--Alisa Ballard Lin, Modern Language Review Contributions by Galya Diment, Tim Harte, Robyn Jensen, Sara Karpukhin, Yuri Leving, Roman Utkin, José Vergara, Meghan Vicks, Olga Voronina, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, and Matthew Walker.
River of No Return
Nick, however, is lost in time. Somehow he escaped certain death by leaping two hundred years forward to the present day where he finds himself in the care of a mysterious society - the Guild. Questioning the limits of the impossible, Nick is desperate to find a way back to the life he left behind. Yet with the future of time itself hanging in the balance, could it be that the girl who first captured his heart has had the answers all along? Can Nick find a way to return to her?
Scrittura, Riscrittura, Autoesegesi
by Roberta Ricci, Professor and Chair of Italian on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities
The idea of reflecting upon one’s own art is probably as old as literature itself and has its sense of participation in a wider literary tradition because it serves to overcome the medieval distinction between those who agunt de arte (the critics) and those who agunt per artem (the writers). Comments and marginalia written by authors as explanations of their own work add a new literary dimension to the richness of the text itself because this exegesis opens issues concerned with critical inquiry, questions of authorship and readership, and the complexity of reception. Such issues are especially relevant for the genre of the epic poem, which was authoritative and fertile through the centuries and yet also particularly problematic in the first centuries of the Italian language. This study examines the presence and connections of four different literary codes in two poems remarkable for their place within the cultural panorama of early-modern Italian literature: Boccaccio’s Teseida and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. In the history of the epics in Tuscan vernacular, Boccaccio’s public, prolix, and learned glosses written in the third person, on one hand, and Tasso’s private, complex, and ambivalent letters addressed to the intellectuals working at the Curia Romana, on the other, not only continue to raise philological, chronological, and theoretical issues connected to the genre par excellence, but also open a fruitful line of investigation on the authorial process of artistic invention and literary self-consciousness.