Dr. Aileen A. Feng was elected to a five-year term on the Forum Executive Committee for Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

A newspaper article was published about the invited talk Dr. Beppe Cavatorta gave at Colby College on November 3rd.  Terrance O'Connor, Author of "Neo-avant-garde explored" in The Colby Echo says "The talk was ultimately a fascinating look at the movement in this context, as well as being a movement that became international."

Read the full article in The Colby Echo here: http://colbyechonews.com/neo-avant-garde-explored/

Italian courses 101, 102, 201 and 202 will be offered during the Winter 2015 Session.

Invited Lecture, Colby College

Beppe Cavatorta

November 3rd

http://www.colby.edu/humannature/events/

Throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century, and especially in the 60s and 70s, Italian poets have attempted a radical renovation of the literary institutions and conventions they had received from tradition. Their efforts gave birth to what critics have called the neo-avantgarde. What had begun as an effort to reconsider literature, soon turned into a political experiment aimed at re-writing the world itself. These intellectuals formulated a sharp criticism of traditional power structures and the excesses of capitalism by unmasking its linguistic strategies. This new kind of “realism” did not aim at describing the world but rather at changing it. This lecture will reconstruct the interesting path these writers followed, looking at the way in which the natural world is presented in their poems.

Cavatorta is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His research interests are varied, with scholarly publications on Renaissance authors such as Machiavelli, Savonarola, and Tasso as well as contemporary writers like Alberto Savinio, Antonio Delfini, Tahar Lamri and Adriano Spatola. Among his other interests are Italian Futurism, the neo-avant-garde of Sixties, and the Partisan War as depicted in literature and film. His essays have appeared in several journals.

Despite the fact that Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) has been recognized as one of the greatest and most creative poets and musicians of the Italian Renaissance, scholarship on her work has been surprisingly scarce and uncoordinated. In recent years, critical attention towards her work has increased, but until now there have been no anthologies dedicated solely to Stampa. Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry aims to set a foundation for further Stampa studies by accounting for her contributions to literature, music history, gender studies, the history of ideas, philosophy, and other areas of critical thought.

This volume brings together an international group of interdisciplinary scholars who employ varied methodologies to explore multiple aspects of Stampa’s work in dialogue with the most recent scholarship in the field. The chapters emphasize the many ways in which Stampa’s poetry engages with multiple cultural movements of early modern Italy and Europe, including: Ficinian and Renaissance Neoplatonism, male-authored writing about women, Longinus’s theory of the sublime, the formation of writing communities, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings, and the reimagined relation between human and natural worlds.

Taken as a whole, this volume presents a rich introduction to, and interdisciplinary investigation of, Gaspara Stampa’s impact on Renaissance culture.

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=978147242…​