Critical Theory & Poetics

People with expertise in this area
Research interests

Chiara Battisti: Associate Professor
Yvonne Bezrucka: Full Professor
Daniela Carpi: Research Assistants
Sidia Fiorato: Associate Professor

Annalisa Pes: Associate Professor
Angelo Righetti: Research Assistants
Carla Sassi: Associate Professor
Susanna Zinato: Full Professor

Research interests
Topic	People	Description
Law and the Body	Chiara Battisti Yvonne Bezrucka Daniela Carpi Sidia Fiorato	The body is the focus of the social, legal, and cultural imagination and the privileged metaphor for specific cultural discourses and political practices. The Renaissance literature particularly echoes these topics.
Ecocriticism and British Literature/culture	Chiara Battisti Carla Sassi	Ecocriticism deals with the ecological approach to literary studies. It aims at bringing a transformation of literary studies by linking literary criticism and theory with the ecological issues at large. Ecocriticism is directly concerned with both nature (natural landscape) and the environment (landscape both natural and urban)as described in literary texts .
Equity: literary and juridical intersections	Chiara Battisti Yvonne Bezrucka Daniela Carpi Sidia Fiorato Carla Sassi	Equity is a protean concept that covers the fields of law, philosophy of law, and morality. In the history of human ideas the problem of equity has been inseparable from that of justice. This theme is re-echoed throughout English literature in particular in Shakespeare's plays.
Estetica e letteratura	Yvonne Bezrucka
English Literature and Anglophone Literatures	Susanna Zinato	Starting from a diacronic view respectful of the phenomenology of literary history (in which to safely place the analysis of the specifics of the literary language of the texts being studied) and of the contextual (i.e.cultural, philosophical, political) dynamics underlying its production, the general area of competence of Susanna Zinato is English Literature (including English Theatre) and Anglophone Literature (South African literature,in particular). Among her privileged subject areas: V. Woolf’s late-modernist fiction, the Restoration theatre, rhetoric and libertine culture in early-modern England, the stylistics and rhetoric of the roman fou, madness in postcolonial anglophone literature, comparative readings of Italian and anglophone texts, the translation of Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature, shame in postcolonial Anglophone literature. Authors privileged in her research: V. Woolf, John Vanbrugh,J. Wilmot earl of Rochester, Janet Frame, Bessie Head, J.M. Coetzee. Her strongly hermeneutical and textual approach relies on the tools provided by rhetoric and literary theory,as well as by Postcolonial Theory when dealing with postcolonial literatures.
Postcolonial literature	Annalisa Pes	Postcolonial theories and studies
Madness in postcolonial fiction in English	Annalisa Pes Susanna Zinato	A study of the postcolonial narrative in English having madness as its thematic core. When perceived through the experience of madness, the alienation and psychopathology always entailed in the the ideology and practice of colonialism is magnified and charged with a destabilizing force of questioning that lays bare political, as well as existential and moral, urgencies
Rhetoric and libertinism in the theatre and culture of Restoration England	Susanna Zinato	A study of the links between rhetoric, theatre, and libertine culture in England,in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English	Annalisa Pes Angelo Righetti Susanna Zinato	A study of a the theme of shame that, due to the in-human staged in the colonial theatre and perpetrated till nowadays in new versions after decolonization, has been running through decades of colonial/postcolonial literature in English.The study, which avails itself of contributions from international scholars,involves reflections both on 'white' shame, i.e. the shame of the masters/colonizers and their 'tainted' descendants,as well of the shame of the colonized, originating in the power politics exerted on their bodies and minds. The relationship between shame and literary writing is a parallel theme that demands reflection. No need to underline the urgency of this theme, as witnessed every day by the refugees and asylum-seekers running for their bare lives to Europe- a 'boomerang invasion'.
Walter Scott's Historical Novel	Carla Sassi	Walter Scott's approach to history and its narrativisation, his re-invention of national identities (Scottish and British), his 'new historicist' stance, his impact on the shaping a the literary genre in Britain and beyond.