Friday 4 November, 10.30am
Pinocchio e il corpo meccanico (Pinocchio and the Mechanical Body)
We are pleased to share the news of this conference by ICI London Director Katia Pizzi, with Laura Tosi and Massimo Stella, both from the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia – Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati (Department of Linguistic and Cultural Comparative Studies) which will take place at Ca’ Foscari in Venice. This is part of the project Ease and Disease of the Body: Language Emotions and the Theatre, run by the Department Diversita’ Linguistica e Culturale (Linguistic and Cultural Diversity), within Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia.
This project may be described by two key expressions: body trouble and dramatic language. It focuses on the linguistic expression of the diseased body, and especially on how this expression is involved in the game of theatre and of theatrical dialogism. What is meant here by ‘body’ is not merely the physical body, but the psycho-physical body or the embodied mind. From this perspective, it is essential to view theatrical language not only as a discourse, but as an interplay of corporeal and psychic signs – or symptoms – of inner experience. The first step of the approach proposed by the project is to look at literature and literary texts as the reshaping, through language, of a corporeal experience involving the emotional life of the mind. The second and decisive one is to consider language and emotions as bodily expressions informed by the permanent conflict between normativity, on the one hand, and instability, precariousness, intermittency, lability, distress, on the other.
More info here
Laura Tosi is a Lecturer of English Literature at the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia where she is deputy director of the Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati and supervisor of two Horizon Marie Curie Fellowships. Her research work focuses on the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline theatre, as well as English children’s literature. Among her publications Comunicazione e aggressione (Milano 1998), La memoria del testo (Pisa, 2001), Guida a Macbeth (2021), La fiaba letteraria inglese (2007), Raccontare Shakespeare ai bambini, in 2014 and most recently The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring Their Parallel Worlds (McFarland, USA, 2018), winner of the l’AIA Book Prize 2020 and of the International Prize “Elisa Frauenfelder”.
Massimo Stella is a researcher and Lecturer of Letterature Comparate e Teoria della Letteratura at the Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati of the Università Ca’ Foscari Venice. Among his most recent publications Madreparola. Risorgenze della Musa tra antichità classica e Modernismo europeo (Milano, Mimesis 2018); Il romanzo della Regina. Shakespeare e la scrittura della sovranità (Roma, Bulzoni 2014); Sofocle, Edipo re, traduzione, introduzione, commento e nota metrica, Roma, Carocci, 2010.
Katia Pizzi is the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London and a Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her most recent publications are Trieste. Una frontiera letteraria (Trieste: Vita Activa, 2019), and Italian Futurism and the Machine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). She has also edited the volume Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity. The Mechanical Body (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).