Emma Bond

Towards a Trans-national Turn in Italian Studies?

As Paul Jay states in the opening to his 2010 volume Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies: ‘Since the rise of critical theory in the 1970s, nothing has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism’.1 What the present article sets out to do is examine to what extent this (rather bold) statement holds true in the Italian context, and to analyze three further things in particular: how the trans-national, as an interpretative lens, has been employed to date in Italian cultural and literary studies; what new approaches towards the trans-national are being enacted in this field; and, finally, what the Italian case might potentially bring that is new or innovative to trans-national enquiry as a global phenomenon. On this last point, it is interesting to note the deliberate juxtaposition of the terms ‘global’ and ‘transnational’ in the title of Jay’s book, and indeed, how much of his analysis necessarily engages with processes of — both economic and cultural — globalization. But as this article will go on to argue, there are significant nuances of the term trans-national, which should surely problematize such a conflation, since ‘global’ and ‘globalized’ mean very different things in cultural terms (and in different cultural contexts). And indeed, in the Italian field of literary and cultural studies, there has been a much greater use of the term ‘global’ (‘globale’, ‘mondiale’, or ‘mondo’), primarily along the lines of a Weltliteratur model of Goethian inspiratio n, than a sustained critical engagement with the real-life processes of trans-nationalism or globalization itself. A ‘world’ categorization of cultural production often assumes a perspective of broad overview, or distant reading of Morettian inspiration,2 that will also become evident within the brief survey of some recent volumes on the topic in Italian cultural and literary studies which is to follow.

‘Signing with a Scar’: Inscriptions, Narration, Identity

This chapter sheds new light on the skin’s capacity to translate and express bodily knowledge. The skin is a porous boundary which can store content from various points in time, and so can also record the corporeal shifts triggered by migration. Yet the transitional status of skin also causes slippages in our understanding, meaning that the inscriptions it bears may require new reading practices in order to be deciphered accurately. Dermal visibility functions here as a trap, collapsing witnessing into surveillance, and may run the risk of reducing the body to mere text. Yet the narratives analysed all display a sense of playful reticence that operates as a source of agency, suggesting that the subjects they depict might still choose themselves what (not) to narrate, through writing the skin.

Revolting Folds: Disordered and Disciplined Bodies

This chapter focuses on active processes of transformation that alter the external appearance of the body. Narratives of over/underconsumption, bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery are modes of impression management that allow the subject to bestow meaning on the body. The visible effects of such transmogrifications are read through the visible hardness or softness of the body and shed light on processes in which the disordered or disciplined body can form a site of deviation or rebellion to cultural norms. But assuming responsibility for one’s own body project can also have debilitating effects on identities already compromised by the toils of trans-national migration, and transformations risk sliding into assimilations. Postmodernist theory permits these becomings to be linked to (textual) practices of sampling and bricolage that point to the possibility for the repeated re-construction of the self through narrative.

Trans-national Mothering: Corporeal Trans-plantations of Care

This chapter explores episodes of transplantation, (in)tolerance and orientation towards the other in narratives of migrant motherhood. The maternal body is often seen to possess flexible or leaky borders, which allows it to evoke wider societal preoccupations around the porosity of national borders and the instability of trans-national identities. This framework requires new optics of motherwork, which challenge commonplace narratives of motherhood as resolution or redemption, and counter the objectification of the maternal body as mere container. This is achieved through taking mothering as a verb, an active state capable of voicing complex trans-national care-ways, and through seeing maternity as a bodily performance that can enact change. Maternity can be experienced in ‘aesthetic mode,’ providing the narratives in question with new possibilities for voicing bodily agency through diverse forms and practices of motherhood.

Irony as a way of life : Svevo, Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis

Abstract:Dejected by decades of commercial and critical failure, the Triestine author Italo Svevo found fresh inspiration for his final novel (La coscienza di Zeno, 1923) in the writings of Freud. Yet critics have always puzzled over his declared intransigence toward his new master, often attributing this ambivalence to a simple defense mechanism. But what if Svevo had been reading other works simultaneously, works that challenged and exposed the weaknesses of psychoanalytic authority? As this article argues, Svevo’s recently discovered reading of Kierkegaard’s “existential irony” sheds light on his conception of the power of both narrative and the analytical process itself.