Papers by Cinzia Scarpino
The Italianist, 2022
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
ACOMA, Letteratura americana tradotta, 2021
The article offers a brief survey of the history of the Italian reception and translation of 20th... more The article offers a brief survey of the history of the Italian reception and translation of 20th-century American literature, highlighting that this field of research has been, so far, only of tangential concern to either Italian “americanisti” or italianists/comparatists. The article also addresses some of the interdisciplinary challenges facing this field of research, in which diverse methodologies clash (e.g. Literary transfer theory and Polysystem theory).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
LETTERATURA E LETTERATURE 14 · 2020 PISA · ROMA FABRIZIO SERRA EDITORE MMXX, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Dalla parte di Avis. Il Tallone di Ferro. Sentimento, distopia e la rivoluzione non raccontata, 2020
https://www.oscarmondadori.it/libri/il-tallone-di-ferro-jack-london/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
ACOMA, RIVISTA DI STUDI NORDAMERICANI, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Iperstoria , 2019
American cinema and television have always been fascinated with prison stories, showing an
enduri... more American cinema and television have always been fascinated with prison stories, showing an
enduring penchant for narratives derived from texts written by actual convicts.
In the 1930’s, when the first prison movies were produced by Hollywood, the representation of the
correctional system was informed by two main discourses, namely the assertion of a national policing
power through a network of surveillance technologies under the newly-born FBI, and the historical
and geographical contiguity of plantation enslaved labor and prison farms and chain gangs. Catering
to white urban middle-class tastes for “lam stories” of fugitives, the most notable and successful
motion picture belonging to the prison movie category of Great Depression (along with a handful of
productions such as The Big House; 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Hell’s Highway) was Mervin Leroy’s
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). The film, which told the story of a white convict leased to
chain gangs in Georgia and of his two flights from prison, was based on Robert Elliott Burns’
autobiographical account I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang (1932).
This paper will explore the seminal significance of I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang in a
twofold analysis. On the one hand, it will show how by both exposing chain gangs as direct
descendants from plantations and by framing his narrative against the rule of American law through
the use of the slave narrative genre, Burns’ “true story” and its movie adaptation can be read as
straddling the racial divide within the U.S. penal system in the 1930’s. On the other, it will argue that I Am a Fugitive can be seen as initiating a lineage of prison narratives based on the autobiographical/memoiristic accounts of ex-convicts that would thrive well on the big screen throughout the 1970’s and 80’s (Escape from Alcatraz, 1979; Attica, 1980) and would then transition to quality Tv series beginning from the 1990’s.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
U.S.A., La trilogia, a cura di C. Scarpino e S. Sullam, 2019
https://www.oscarmondadori.it/libri/u-s-a-la-trilogia-john-dos-passos/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cahiers d'études romanes , 2019
Joan Didion’s «The White Album» – the key essay of the 1979 nonfiction book of the same name – of... more Joan Didion’s «The White Album» – the key essay of the 1979 nonfiction book of the same name – offers the reader a reflection on the ethical and aesthetic predicament of chronicling the countercultural Zeitgeist of 1960s California by imposing a narrative line on «stories without a narrative». To do so, Didion hones her authorial persona as survivor and witness to the end of a decade that finds its metaphorical climax in the Manson Murders. «The White Album» is therefore by all means a narrative of survival: Didion survives her life in «a senseless killing neighborhood» in L.A., the paranoia of her time, her own multiple sclerosis diagnosis, and her overexposed subjectivity. This essay looks at some of the stylistic devices through which Didion weaves her narrative by juxtaposing disparate and highly idiosyncratic images of that season.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
CoSMo Comparative Studies in Modernism n. 13 (Fall) , 2018
In 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans started a documentary reportage on white tenant farming in A... more In 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans started a documentary reportage on white tenant farming in Alabama on assignment for Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine. The 30,000-word article that was ultimately sent to Fortune—“Cotton Tenants. Three Families”—was rejected by the editors. Agee decided to expand his report into what would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 400-page “anti-documentary” book that was to shatter all the journalistic and literary conventions of the genre. Only in 2013, James Agee’s manuscript of the original 1936 piece rejected by Fortune was published by Melville House, thus offering a valuable insight into the evolution of Agee’s documentary aesthetics and, more generally, the short trajectory of the photo-essay book. This essay will therefore try to consider how Agee’s position vis-à-vis journalistic liberal corporatism and documentary New Dealism changes in the five years separating the two texts, particularly in relation to the bourgeois bias underlying the voyeuristic nature of the genre; how these changes affect the narrative modes devised to render the voices of the tenants by adjusting or disrupting the mold of the participant-observer method; and, finally, what implications do these changes have in terms of social inclusiveness of the subjects represented.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Mondi e modi della traduzione. Letteratura, cinema, teatro, televisione, editoria. A cura di S. Rosso, M.Dossena, 2018
Il saggio è dedicato alla fortunata vicenda editoriale italiana del Nobel americano Pearl S. Buck... more Il saggio è dedicato alla fortunata vicenda editoriale italiana del Nobel americano Pearl S. Buck, prolifica autrice di una serie di best-seller di ambientazione cinese dagli anni Trenta fino agli anni Sessanta. Grazie alla consultazione dei documenti conservati presso la Fondazione Mondadori di Milano (pareri di lettura, carteggi tra autrice e Presidente, tirature, bolle commerciali), il saggio descrive la parabola della ricezione italiana di Pearl Buck dagli anni Trenta – il “decennio delle traduzioni”, secondo la celebre definizione di Cesare Pavese – alla fine degli anni Cinquanta, analizzando i vari contesti storici, politici e culturali in cui si colloca la produzione dell’autrice all’interno della Mondadori. Degli anni Trenta sono così restituiti la relativa incolumità dei romanzi di Buck rispetto alla censura fascista e l’impronta indelebilmente “cinese” della sua produzione; del decennio successivo la difficoltà di fare i conti con i romanzi “americani” della stessa autrice; degli anni Cinquanta la breve “rinascita” grazie alla pubblicazione del romanzo storico Donna imperiale, ultimo suo grande successo. Comuni ai tre decenni tirature e dati di vendita altissimi che, unitamente ai moltissimi titoli in catalogo, fanno di Buck una delle autrici più commercialmente feconde della Mondadori degli anni Trenta e del dopoguerra. Quanto alle dinamiche intellettuali interne alla casa editrice milanese che emergono dallo spoglio dei pareri di lettura su Buck, il saggio fa notare tanto un pregiudizio di genere abbastanza scoperto nei confronti di un’opera informata dalla “struttura del sentimento” e quindi relegata a uno statuto letterario per così dire inferiore rispetto alle opere di altri autori americani contemporanei che proprio in quegli anni si vanno scoprendo in Italia (Faulkner, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck, per fare i nomi più noti) quanto una sorta di rimozione dell’“Americanness” dell’autrice a favore della dimensione orientale delle ambientazioni dei suoi romanzi più conosciuti.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Pearl Buck: una scrittrice americana in Cina, a cura di B. Mottura, C. Pagetti, 2018
From Pulitzer to “Medusa”. The Good Earth/La buona terra by Pearl S. Buck in the Italian publishi... more From Pulitzer to “Medusa”. The Good Earth/La buona terra by Pearl S. Buck in the Italian publishing market.
Published in the United States in 1931, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck became an instant success, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1932, and soon gained an international reputation as best- and long-seller. By the beginning of the same decade, the Italian publisher Mondadori was innovating its catalogue by introducing a new collection – “La Medusa” – devoted to foreign contemporary authors, and thus challenging Fascist autarchical censorship. Translated into Italian by the anti-fascist Gobettian intellectual Andrea Damiano as La buona terra, Buck’s Chinese saga – along with the rest of her prolific output – was to remain a constant and commercially profitable presence in Mondadori catalogue.
This paper will look at the editorial history of Buck’s Italian translations by using the archival findings of The Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori Foundation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Ácoma n. 13, Autunno-Inverno 2017, ISSN: 2421-423X, 2017
Farewell to the 1930s. Mari
Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods and the
Italian American Novel
Cinzia Scarp... more Farewell to the 1930s. Mari
Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods and the
Italian American Novel
Cinzia Scarpino
The article offers an account of how
Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods, a
novel written between 1941 and 1949,
overturns some of the central motifs
of the 1930s’ proletarian novel in
order to portray an Italian American
narrative reoriented toward a positive
outcome of cultural integration. Set in
Granitetown, the fictional counterpart
of Barre, Vermont (by then, “the largest
granite center in the world”), the noveltells the intergenerational story of an
Italian American family of stonecutters
and quarry workers but chooses to
silence political discourses of power
by suppressing or subverting historical
and cultural references to strikes – the
unifying chronotope of the “strike and
conversion novel” in the 1930s – and
the plight of silico-tubercolosis – a
recurring motif of the immigrant novels
or ghetto pastorals of the same decade.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Carocci , 2017
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Introduzione a Vietnam in guerra. Dispacci dal fronte di John Steinbeck,
traduzione italiana di S... more Introduzione a Vietnam in guerra. Dispacci dal fronte di John Steinbeck,
traduzione italiana di Steinbeck in Vietnam a cura di Thomas E. Barden.
Leg edizioni, Gorizia, 2017, pp. 9-18
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Carocci , Oct 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Come genere TV la sitcom - o situation comedy - appartiene alla serie episodica classica basata s... more Come genere TV la sitcom - o situation comedy - appartiene alla serie episodica classica basata su puntata autonome, un gurppo di personaggi limitato, e ambientazioni fisse (la casa, il luogo di lavoro), e una "formula" narrativa definita dalla propria ambientazione spazio-temporale. Genere tra i più longevi della storia televisiva, la sitcom (ri)fiorisce negli anni Settanta grazie alle sitcom "socialmente rilevanti" di Norman Lear - All in the Family e spinoff - e della MTM che portano a una riconfigurazione del genere in termini di volontà mimetica nella rappresentazione degli aspetti più controversi della contemporaneità culturale, sociale e politica (i diritti delle donne e dei gay, le leggi sul divorzio e sull'aborto). Con percentuali di ascolto formidabili, queste sitcom riescono a parlare ai loro tempi facendo perno sulla categoria spazio-temporale (o cronotopo) della quotidianità di unità familiari middle- e working-class.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cattivi. Cattivissimi. Cattivi? Sulle tracce di eroi criminali nelle narrazioni di genere. UK, USA, Italia., 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
he essay will analyze Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932),... more he essay will analyze Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939), in the light of the narrative and narratological interaction between the traditional chronotopes of law (the trial, the prison), the horizontal chronotopes of the barn, the ‘shuttered’ house and the river, and the vertical chronotopes of the fire and the flood. The essay argues that while the catalyst function of the vertical chronotopes to trigger a potential challenge to official law is always accelerated by two main kernels/nuclei deeply embedded in Southern obsession for miscegenation (the rape and murder of a white woman and the lynching of an alleged mulatto), the potentially overthrowing action of these chronotopes does not, in the end, bring about any real change in the course of human and legal justice. With the truth literally buried by fire and water, the characters’ quest is perpetually thrust back into the stasis of non-contemporaneity.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This article is an excerpt from the first chapter of Scarpino’s forthcoming book Anni Trenta alla... more This article is an excerpt from the first chapter of Scarpino’s forthcoming book Anni Trenta alla sbarra: giustizia e letteratura nella Grande Depressione, which investigates how the categories of law and social justice are represented in 1930s literature and culture. The excerpt combines thematic specificity (lynching and trials) with anthropological, philosophical and political concerns and benefits from studies in "Law and Literature" entailing interdisciplinary analyses of law in literature and law as literature that posit a residual, ancillary, factually vicarious but symbolically decisive function of literature in regard to law. In dealing with lynching, the article attempts to show how the interrelated work of law and literature helped enlarge the scope of citizenship in terms of racial inclusiveness. The part on trials draws a more literary analogy between New Deal law and literature focusing on the narrative pact between narrator and reader and on the unprecedented role of the reader as a juror who has to adjudicate cases of social injustice.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Postfazione a "I Nomadi" di John Steinbeck (prima trad. it. di "The Harvest Gypsies")
ilSaggiato... more Postfazione a "I Nomadi" di John Steinbeck (prima trad. it. di "The Harvest Gypsies")
ilSaggiatore, Milano 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Cinzia Scarpino
enduring penchant for narratives derived from texts written by actual convicts.
In the 1930’s, when the first prison movies were produced by Hollywood, the representation of the
correctional system was informed by two main discourses, namely the assertion of a national policing
power through a network of surveillance technologies under the newly-born FBI, and the historical
and geographical contiguity of plantation enslaved labor and prison farms and chain gangs. Catering
to white urban middle-class tastes for “lam stories” of fugitives, the most notable and successful
motion picture belonging to the prison movie category of Great Depression (along with a handful of
productions such as The Big House; 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Hell’s Highway) was Mervin Leroy’s
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). The film, which told the story of a white convict leased to
chain gangs in Georgia and of his two flights from prison, was based on Robert Elliott Burns’
autobiographical account I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang (1932).
This paper will explore the seminal significance of I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang in a
twofold analysis. On the one hand, it will show how by both exposing chain gangs as direct
descendants from plantations and by framing his narrative against the rule of American law through
the use of the slave narrative genre, Burns’ “true story” and its movie adaptation can be read as
straddling the racial divide within the U.S. penal system in the 1930’s. On the other, it will argue that I Am a Fugitive can be seen as initiating a lineage of prison narratives based on the autobiographical/memoiristic accounts of ex-convicts that would thrive well on the big screen throughout the 1970’s and 80’s (Escape from Alcatraz, 1979; Attica, 1980) and would then transition to quality Tv series beginning from the 1990’s.
Published in the United States in 1931, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck became an instant success, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1932, and soon gained an international reputation as best- and long-seller. By the beginning of the same decade, the Italian publisher Mondadori was innovating its catalogue by introducing a new collection – “La Medusa” – devoted to foreign contemporary authors, and thus challenging Fascist autarchical censorship. Translated into Italian by the anti-fascist Gobettian intellectual Andrea Damiano as La buona terra, Buck’s Chinese saga – along with the rest of her prolific output – was to remain a constant and commercially profitable presence in Mondadori catalogue.
This paper will look at the editorial history of Buck’s Italian translations by using the archival findings of The Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori Foundation.
Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods and the
Italian American Novel
Cinzia Scarpino
The article offers an account of how
Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods, a
novel written between 1941 and 1949,
overturns some of the central motifs
of the 1930s’ proletarian novel in
order to portray an Italian American
narrative reoriented toward a positive
outcome of cultural integration. Set in
Granitetown, the fictional counterpart
of Barre, Vermont (by then, “the largest
granite center in the world”), the noveltells the intergenerational story of an
Italian American family of stonecutters
and quarry workers but chooses to
silence political discourses of power
by suppressing or subverting historical
and cultural references to strikes – the
unifying chronotope of the “strike and
conversion novel” in the 1930s – and
the plight of silico-tubercolosis – a
recurring motif of the immigrant novels
or ghetto pastorals of the same decade.
traduzione italiana di Steinbeck in Vietnam a cura di Thomas E. Barden.
Leg edizioni, Gorizia, 2017, pp. 9-18
ilSaggiatore, Milano 2015
enduring penchant for narratives derived from texts written by actual convicts.
In the 1930’s, when the first prison movies were produced by Hollywood, the representation of the
correctional system was informed by two main discourses, namely the assertion of a national policing
power through a network of surveillance technologies under the newly-born FBI, and the historical
and geographical contiguity of plantation enslaved labor and prison farms and chain gangs. Catering
to white urban middle-class tastes for “lam stories” of fugitives, the most notable and successful
motion picture belonging to the prison movie category of Great Depression (along with a handful of
productions such as The Big House; 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Hell’s Highway) was Mervin Leroy’s
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). The film, which told the story of a white convict leased to
chain gangs in Georgia and of his two flights from prison, was based on Robert Elliott Burns’
autobiographical account I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang (1932).
This paper will explore the seminal significance of I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang in a
twofold analysis. On the one hand, it will show how by both exposing chain gangs as direct
descendants from plantations and by framing his narrative against the rule of American law through
the use of the slave narrative genre, Burns’ “true story” and its movie adaptation can be read as
straddling the racial divide within the U.S. penal system in the 1930’s. On the other, it will argue that I Am a Fugitive can be seen as initiating a lineage of prison narratives based on the autobiographical/memoiristic accounts of ex-convicts that would thrive well on the big screen throughout the 1970’s and 80’s (Escape from Alcatraz, 1979; Attica, 1980) and would then transition to quality Tv series beginning from the 1990’s.
Published in the United States in 1931, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck became an instant success, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1932, and soon gained an international reputation as best- and long-seller. By the beginning of the same decade, the Italian publisher Mondadori was innovating its catalogue by introducing a new collection – “La Medusa” – devoted to foreign contemporary authors, and thus challenging Fascist autarchical censorship. Translated into Italian by the anti-fascist Gobettian intellectual Andrea Damiano as La buona terra, Buck’s Chinese saga – along with the rest of her prolific output – was to remain a constant and commercially profitable presence in Mondadori catalogue.
This paper will look at the editorial history of Buck’s Italian translations by using the archival findings of The Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori Foundation.
Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods and the
Italian American Novel
Cinzia Scarpino
The article offers an account of how
Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods, a
novel written between 1941 and 1949,
overturns some of the central motifs
of the 1930s’ proletarian novel in
order to portray an Italian American
narrative reoriented toward a positive
outcome of cultural integration. Set in
Granitetown, the fictional counterpart
of Barre, Vermont (by then, “the largest
granite center in the world”), the noveltells the intergenerational story of an
Italian American family of stonecutters
and quarry workers but chooses to
silence political discourses of power
by suppressing or subverting historical
and cultural references to strikes – the
unifying chronotope of the “strike and
conversion novel” in the 1930s – and
the plight of silico-tubercolosis – a
recurring motif of the immigrant novels
or ghetto pastorals of the same decade.
traduzione italiana di Steinbeck in Vietnam a cura di Thomas E. Barden.
Leg edizioni, Gorizia, 2017, pp. 9-18
ilSaggiatore, Milano 2015
10 nov 2018
https://www.rsi.ch/rete-due/programmi/cultura/moby-dick/L%E2%80%99America-divisa-11075790.html