Critical Theory & Poetics

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.

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