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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE ART OF INDETERMINACY IN THE PROSE WORKS OF GOLIARDA SAPIENZA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES BY ELANA STEPHENSON KRANZ CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2016 COPYRIGHT 2016 ELANA STEPHENSON KRANZ For my family TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE SAPIENZA’S CICLO AUTOBIOGRAFICO: MULTIPLE, RELATIONAL AND FUSED/FUSING SELVES ................................................................. 14 CHAPTER TWO THE INFLUENCE OF THEATER IN SAPIENZA’S PROSE WORKS..................................................... 52 CHAPTER THREE CONFINEMENT AS LIBERATION: FEMALE SPACES IN SAPIENZA’S PROSE WORKS ................ 88 CHAPTER FOUR NARRATING TRANSGRESSION; OR, WHY MODESTA KILLS ....................................................... 125 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................... 164 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................... 170 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Rebecca West. Her steady and continuous support throughout this project has been its sustaining factor, and without her, I would have never happened upon Goliarda Sapienza in the first place. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee members Lisa Ruddick and Rocco Rubini. Lisa’s refreshing talk entitled “New Spaces for the Human in Literary Studies” at a conference where I presented inspired me at just the right moment in my graduate education. Rocco’s positive encouragement has been essential throughout the project and I appreciate his connecting me with Angelo Pellegrino. I am also very grateful for the education and support I have received from the faculty in Italian at the University of Chicago: Elissa Weaver, the first scholar I spoke with as I began my path to graduate school; Armando Maggi, whose dedication to his students’ improvement is unparalleled; Justin Steinberg, who encouraged me from the very first course I took in graduate school; and Maria Anna Mariani, who has been a delight to get to know in my final years as a student. I am also grateful for having had the opportunity to study under the tutelage of eminent visiting professors Francesco Bruni, Laura Barile, and Gianluigi Simonetti, all of whom I remember fondly and with whom I hope I cross paths again in the future. I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the help of my fellow graduate students from whom I learned so much and relied on so heavily for support, empathy, and camaraderie over the years. Liz Porretto (my “cohort”) has been my rock and friend and v without her those early years would have been nearly impossible. The support she gave me, particularly through our years of examinations, was indispensable. Cynthia Hillman has been an exceedingly supportive friend and an insightful, objective, and practical voice of reason and clarity during the writing process, and my model in perseverance and professionality as I have worked on my dissertation. James Fortney helped add levity to many evenings of serious study in the Regenstein library during the formative stages of my dissertation proposal, and showed me what a tireless work ethic really is. Chiara Montanari has been an exceptional sounding board and idea generator. The connection that I share with all my fellow students—particularly Miriam Aloisio, Beth Anderson, Karolina Bandurski, Sarah Christopher Faggioli, Elizabeth Fiedler, James Fortney, Cynthia Hillman, Maggie Fritz-Morkin, Chiara Montanari, Raffaello Palumbo Mosca, Liz Porretto, and Michael Subialka during those memorable years of coursework—will never be forgotten. Much gratitude also goes to my dear friends outside of graduate school who cheered me and stood by me along the way. Staying a supportive friend of someone who is often entirely preoccupied with their own project can be difficult, and I credit my friends’ tenacity and extraordinary personalities for keeping our bond, our sisterhood, unbroken. Finally, I would like to thank my family. My mother’s own journey to her Ph.D. when I was a child and my father’s intellectual interest in creative writing as a poet certainly inspired this lofty goal in me. Last, but not least, I am extremely grateful for the support, empathy, love and kindness of Sébastien, who was there every day through the thick and thin of a very long project, and our children, who are a motivation and an inspiration every day. vi INTRODUCTION Even setting aside her accomplishments as a stage and film actress and prolific writer, Goliarda Sapienza’s very name could have marked her for distinction, if not infamy. Far from a conventional Italian Catholic name, “Goliarda” derives from the Latin “goliard,” the term bestowed upon a group of renegade clerics and scholars in the Middle Ages who wandered throughout Europe writing ribald anti-clerical satirical verses and living lives of carnal indulgence. In Italian, the adjective “goliardico” implies an irreverent or carefree quality, while “Sapienza” means “knowledge” or “erudition.” In the words of the author Dacia Maraini, Sapienza “certainly bears resemblance to her name, which married a daring boldness with sweet wisdom. This is how Goliarda was: warrior-like and pacifist, aggressive and mild-mannered.”1 Born in Catania, Sicily in 1924, Sapienza authored roughly a dozen literary works, including prose, poetry, and theatrical pieces, throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, despite her artistic output, Sapienza found it difficult to publish in Italy during her lifetime and only in recent years has started to receive critical attention. Notwithstanding this indifferent reception when she was alive, posthumous interest in Sapienza’s literary work is now growing apace. In the early 2000s, television producer Manuela 1 “Goliarda Sapienza certamente assomigliava al suo nome che sposa una ardita temerarietà con una dolce saggezza. Così era Goliarda: guerresca e pacifica, aggressiva e mite.” Pellegrino quoted in the introduction to Goliarda Sapienza, Lettera aperta (Palermo: Sellerio editore, 1997), 9. According to this autobiographical novel, she was named after a deceased elder brother, Goliardo. She also mentions Goliardo in Goliarda Sapienza, Il vizio di parlare a me stessa: taccuini (1976-1989) (Torino: Einaudi, 2011). 1 Vigorita and Loredana Rotondo, then director of television production company Rai Educational, featured Sapienza as the first subject in a documentary television series about little known Italians called “Vuoti di memoria” (“Memory Gaps” or “Memory Lapses”). They presented the video in various parts of Italy and interest in Sapienza caught on; for example, in 2002 Daniela Unghetta, a professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” devoted a full course to Sapienza.2 Since then, a handful of conferences have been held on her, a biography was published in 2010, and three collections of essays entirely devoted to Sapienza have been published in the past few years with at least one other study forthcoming.3 However, despite this recent attention, she is still largely absent from anthologies of Italian women writers of the twentieth century; there are only a handful of critical studies on Sapienza’s work; and perhaps most surprisingly, considering that Sapienza wrote six autobiographical works, she is neglected in the scholarship on Italian women’s autobiography.4 2 See article by Manuela Vigorita in Monica Farnetti, ed., Appassionata Sapienza (Milano: La Tartaruga edizioni, 2011), 22-23. The French version of L’arte della gioia was published in 2005, receiving a positive review on the front page of Le Monde. The first English translation of Sapienza, The Art of Joy, was released in 2013, which shows growing interest in Sapienza in the Anglophone world as well. 3 A conference titled, "Appassionata Sapienza: Giornata di Studi e Formazione su Goliarda Sapienza” (“Impassioned Sapienza/Knowledge: A Day of Study and Education on Goliarda Sapienza”) was held at the Sala Agnelli Ariostea Library in Ferrara, Italy on March 21, 2009, out of which came the above-mentioned collection of essays edited by Monica Farnetti, Appassionata Sapienza. The first conference in English devoted to Sapienza, "Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Culture,” was held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of London on June 1, 2013. Writing for Freedom: Body, Identity and Power in Goliarda Sapienza’s Narrative by Alberica Bazzoni will be published as part of Peter Lang International Academic Publishers Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing series in 2017. 4 There is one sentence on Sapienza in Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, A History of Women’s Writing in Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 235. There is an entry on Sapienza in Neria De Giovanni, E dicono che siamo poche...Scrittrici italiane dell’ultimo Novecento (Roma: Commissione Nazionale per la Parità e le Pari Opportunità tra Uomo e Donna, 2003), 51-52. The three