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Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival

(Re)Constructed

Tommasina Gabriele

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed focuses on Dacia Maraini’s narrative from about 1984 to 2004 and makes substantive use of her interviews and essays. While acknowledging the importance and ongoing validity of feminist scholarship of Maraini’s work, this book seeks to take scholarship on Maraini beyond feminist readings by identifying a critical framework that cuts across gender and genre and thereby invites alternative readings. Using a method of close textual analysis, the author includes studies of men, children, animals, and imaginary characters in Maraini’s narrative, analyzes language, character, motifs, and symbols, and considers some of Maraini’s work in light of declining postmodern and emerging posthuman critical social theory.

This critical framework identifies the paradigm of reconstruction as narrative center, both strategy and theme, of many of Maraini’s works from this twenty-year-period and beyond. Reconstruction here signifies the strategies by which Maraini’s deep investment in survival, which has its roots in the life threatening conditions she experienced as a small child in a WWII Japanese concentration camp, is enacted in a narrative re-building and re-constructing of personal memory, of various personal, social and political histories, of motherhood and maternal discourses, of crime stories, of postmodern fragmentation, and even of the process of erasure itself. Maraini’s narrative is deeply attentive to the mechanisms that threaten survival of the body (and not just the woman’s body); psychological and aesthetic survival; the survival in the Italian canon of a woman author’s work, memory and legacy after her death; the survival of a drug-addicted and self-destructive younger generation; and by extension, collective and ecological survival. Never marked by nihilism or despair, Maraini’s narratives offer the ethos of reconstruction as a variation on the “begin again” that marks the end of many of her novels and, as we can see in Colomba, her own aesthetic process of renewal and regeneration.

This book focuses primarily on Il treno per Helsinki (1984), Isolina (1985), some of her short stories for children, La nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre (2001), Buio (Strega Literary Prize, 1999), and Colomba (2004).

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 186 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-61147-881-5 • Hardback • December 2015 • $91.00 • (£70.00)

978-1-61147-882-2 • eBook • December 2015 • $86.50 • (£67.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / Italian, Literary Criticism / Women Authors, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Women

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival

(Re)Constructed

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed focuses on Dacia Maraini’s narrative from about 1984 to 2004 and makes substantive use of her interviews and essays. While acknowledging the importance and ongoing validity of feminist scholarship of Maraini’s work, this book seeks to take scholarship on Maraini beyond feminist readings by identifying a critical framework that cuts across gender and genre and thereby invites alternative readings. Using a method of close textual analysis, the author includes studies of men, children, animals, and imaginary characters in Maraini’s narrative, analyzes language, character, motifs, and symbols, and considers some of Maraini’s work in light of declining postmodern and emerging posthuman critical social theory.

This critical framework identifies the paradigm of reconstruction as narrative center, both strategy and theme, of many of Maraini’s works from this twenty-year-period and beyond. Reconstruction here signifies the strategies by which Maraini’s deep investment in survival, which has its roots in the life threatening conditions she experienced as a small child in a WWII Japanese concentration camp, is enacted in a narrative re-building and re-constructing of personal memory, of various personal, social and political histories, of motherhood and maternal discourses, of crime stories, of postmodern fragmentation, and even of the process of erasure itself. Maraini’s narrative is deeply attentive to the mechanisms that threaten survival of the body (and not just the woman’s body); psychological and aesthetic survival; the survival in the Italian canon of a woman author’s work, memory and legacy after her death; the survival of a drug-addicted and self-destructive younger generation; and by extension, collective and ecological survival. Never marked by nihilism or despair, Maraini’s narratives offer the ethos of reconstruction as a variation on the “begin again” that marks the end of many of her novels and, as we can see in Colomba, her own aesthetic process of renewal and regeneration.

This book focuses primarily on Il treno per Helsinki (1984), Isolina (1985), some of her short stories for children, La nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre (2001), Buio (Strega Literary Prize, 1999), and Colomba (2004).

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 186 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-61147-881-5 • Hardback • December 2015 • $91.00 • (£70.00)

978-1-61147-882-2 • eBook • December 2015 • $86.50 • (£67.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / Italian, Literary Criticism / Women Authors, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Women

Author

Tommasina Gabriele is professor of Italian studies at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Stretching the Critical Framework
Chapter I. Too Sweet for the Sweet: Backwards and Downwards in Il Treno per Helsinki
Chapter II. Acts of Reconstruction: Isolina, la donna tagliata a pezzi
Chapter III. The Metaphor of Arrested Maternity and the Reconstruction of Maternal Desire: From Donna in Guerra to La nave per Kobe
Chapter IV. The Child Protagonist: Crossing Genres in Dolce per sé and Storie di cani per una bambina
Chapter V. The Reconstruction of Cronaca Nera: Buio
Chapter VI. Postmodern Reconstructions: Individual and Collective Survival in Colomba
Conclusion
Bibliography

Reviews

Gabriele performs an in-depth reading to determine the narrative strategies used to expose the forces and structures that mute voices and erase presences.... Drawing upon feminist and literary theory, and genre and memory studies, Gabriele’s timely monograph examines Maraini’s decades-long critique of the institutional and sociocultural victimization of women, children, and, just as important to the author’s opus and world-view, animals. Within this framework, it provides a compelling analysis of Maraini’s recurrent representation of the interplay between trauma, memory, and the self, issues that are increasingly an integral part of the Italian national discourse on rights.
— Modern Language Review

Tommasina Gabriele’s Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival: (Re)Constructed is a valuable contribution expanding the scholarship on the works of one of the most engaging and prolific contemporary Italian female authors.... Gabriele’s clear and straightforward prose aptly interprets Maraini’s inclination to put the literary text at the service of critical social issues.... The “re-construction” that Gabriele looks at in her book indeed leads towards Maraini’s much coveted awareness by turning the past into a memorial process that fosters acknowledgment of meaning and truth. And this is perhaps the most novel aspect of this book, making it a challenging and timely contribution to the current debate about Maraini’s work among researchers and scholars. But it also makes it an appealing read for teachers and the general public interested in exploring the social, cultural, and political activism underscoring Maraini’s writing.
— gender/sexuality/italy

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival

(Re)Constructed

Tommasina Gabriele

Dacia Maraini’s Narratives of Survival

(Re)Constructed

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