Conference Papers

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/23200

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Flying Saucers Landed in Lucca. Social Science Fiction and the Italian Graphic Novel (2000s-2010s)
(Department of French and Italian, Indiana University – Bloomington, 2019-06-17) Vacchelli, Carlotta
I need to start right away by clarifying the title of my presentation, which is a double quotation: in fact, the infamous sentence “flying saucers would never land in Lucca” was pronounced in the Sixties by Carlo Fruttero, who, together with Giorgio Monicelli, was one of the historical editors of Mondadori’s science fiction series of novels Urania, the first and most enduring SF series of novels in Italy. Urania, which, in the beginning, featured also a magazine of short stories, published both Italian and international science fiction. Fruttero’s sentence has been brought to the fore in the years 2000s, by Arielle Saiber, one of the foremost scholars of Italian science fiction. I start from this quotation, because I believe that this is a crucial idea, containing in nuce many of the aspects of the Italian science fiction yet to come, and therefore touching the evolution of this trend into comics. As Saiber recalls, Fruttero’s declaration was his answer to an interviewer, who had asked him why he would publish foreign, rather than Italian, science fiction. And here is how Fruttero argues his position: “A flying saucer lands, fishermen or farmers arrive. Whom do they warn? The FBI? No, they go to the police chief. Then, from there, they call the mayor. The mayor gets in his Seicento and runs to the Prefect, and one sees right away that the dramatic situation fails; it becomes a sketch of local life that might have some amusing aspects to it, maybe some quaint, folkloristic elements, but no dramatic force…”. There you go: a quick, humoristic but still very pointy auteur description focused on an inquest in the inadequacy of Italian institutions: a socio-political speculation through the metaphor of science fiction. This predisposition to SSF as opposed to adventurous, escapist SF seems to be confirmed by Italian Cinema of science fiction: as Carlo Pagetti points out, the costs involved with (possibly good and effective) special effects and post-production were too high for the Italian cinema to compete with Hollywood. Social science fiction, instead, was much less concerned with spectacularism, much more focused on the critical elaboration and speculation of a given social system, and it was practiced by a number of directors, including Elio Petri and Marco Ferreri.
Filling Future Generation Gap. The Italian Graphic Novel and Manuele Fior’s L’intervista
(Department of French and Italian, Indiana University – Bloomington, 2019-05-29) Vacchelli, Carlotta
Today I will discuss the intersection between the theme of generation gap and the social science fiction frame in an Italian graphic novel, L’intervista by Manuele Fior, published in 2013 by Coconino Press. More specifically, I will present L’intervista as a case study: I will argue that the graphic novel has become a privileged space in which to discuss the social outcomes of the constant changes caused primarily by technology, whose effects on society are often investigated, by sci-fi comics. I also believe that graphic novels perfectly adapt to the narration of generational gap, which is a frame that addresses a specific readership and that is often concerned with societal problems. In order to analyze the issues raised by a generational gap, which are represented by a type of narration that flourishes in non-institutional, flexible forms of expression, it is necessary to state right away that the graphic novel inherits its status of alternative, non-establishment art, from the tradition of comics. We know that comics have long been considered a light-hearted, entertaining-type of medium, although comics criticism has progressively expanded, establishing a solid scholarly tradition in the field of pop culture.
A Dull Boy: Stupidity and Affect
(Indiana University, 2018-10) Greiner, Rae
Given the Romantic-era fascination with the figure of the idiot—as evidenced, for instance, in Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad “The Idiot Boy” (1798), and, in fashion, the “idiot sleeve,” ostensibly so named for being designed after the straightjacket used in madhouses at the time—it is perhaps not entirely surprising to find in that period and the next a number of defenses of stupidity of one kind or another. Though a concept of stupidity had been around for a long time—from the Latin stupidus or stupēre, to be stupid meant to be stunned or benumbed, as in struck dumb by surprise or grief—the term was before the nineteenth century rarely in use. Although Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, whose four volumes were published between 1728- 1743, seems obviously to be about what we might now class as stupidity—we hear in the poem of dunces, ignorance, buffoonery, “Folly and “Dulness” (both personified), nonsense and absurdity, “Maggots” (essentially, bad ideas), “Emptiness,” coxcombs, asses, and jades, “monkey-mimics,” “a brain of feathers,” and—the most closely related terms—“stupefaction” and “stupefied” (one figure is “stupefied to stone”)—stupidity is mentioned by name only in footnotes, twice referring to critics, and once, more significantly, where it is a lesser evil as compared to Dulness. Here are the lines in the poem to which the note in question refers. The note reads: “Dulness here is not to be taken contractedly for mere stupidity, but in the enlarged sense of the word, for all slowness of apprehension, shortness of sight, or imperfect sense of things. It includes . . . labour, industry, and some degree of activity and boldness – a ruling principle not inert, but turning topsy-turvy the understanding, and inducing an anarchy or confused state of mind” (note 7 Book 1). Here “dulness” is an active force, industriously affecting body and mind, while stupidity is, by comparison, “inert”: less thoroughgoing and vigorous.
Subverting the “banlieue girl identity” through gender performance in Céline Sciamma’s Bandes de Filles
(Indiana University, Bloomington: Department of French and Italian, 2019-03) Munier, Evie
Bande de Filles – Girlhood, is the story of Marieme, a young black woman living in the banlieue, who meets Lady, Adiatou and Fily, and becomes a member of their girl gang – the direct translation of the French title. At home, Marieme lives with an absent mother, and two young sisters she feels obligated to protect from their violent older brother. At school, Marieme wants to continue on to high school, but the guidance counselor wants to direct her toward a vocational school. Marieme is 16 years old and this is her story: she is a stereotypical figure of the young banlieue girl, living in a challenging social environment dominated by a masculine figure, expected to take over parental responsibility, failing academically and marginalized by the academic institution. This is the identity that is prescribed to young banlieue women, constructed on social stigmas, thus establishing the banlieue girl as a social category. In Bande de Filles, French director Céline Sciamma portrays Marieme as the speaker of these young girls who are trying to subvert and emancipate themselves from these preexisting norms of femininity tied into their identity.
Heterosociality at the Crossways: Cultures of Conversational Exchange between Men and Women in the Fin de Siècle
(2019-05) Wojciechowski, Miranda
In her 1936 autobiography, The Sheltering Tree, fin-de-siècle and Edwardian writer Netta Syrett takes popular retrospectives of the late-Victorian era to task. Offering her account as a “counterblast” to the “picture” of “the terribly restricted life of women whose youth corresponded with” hers, and laughingly dismissing the separate spheres as a relic belonging only to “society with a capital S,” Syrett reclaims the 1880s and 1890s as a period of shocking modernity: one that afforded women relatively unconstrained mobility and opportunities for financial independence (5). Later on, however, she marks a clear shift between generations: whereas “nowadays damsels of eighteen . . . take part in the . . . discussions that I heard at the Grant Allens,” she writes, many “topics” of interest to the New Woman novelists “w[ere] not” items “for discussion in public” (46-67). For Syrett, measuring the progress of her present against the Victorian past, freedom of conversation in mixed company was the final frontier gained by the modern woman. Describing a “love of conversation” that “had never been thoroughly gratified” (43) in “ordinary society” (46), Syrett looks backwards to the eighteenth- century as well as forwards to the twentieth, tellingly lamenting that “I sometimes think I managed very badly in not arranging to be born in the age of the salon!” (43). The Victorian era, then, in Syrett’s narrative as in broader historical ones, lies suspended between the heterosocial glories of past salons and the heterosocial possibilities of subsequent modernity.

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