Explore the vast range of titles available.

After accounting for wrath in Purgatory 16, Dante deals with how wrath relates to the poetic imagination in the first 45 lines of the next canto. His examples are the story of Procne and Philomela from Ovid's Metamorphosis, the story of Esther and Haman from the Old Testament, as retold by Brunetto Latini, and the story of Amata, the Queen of the Latins, from Virgil's Aeneid. At issue is how these stories, but Virgil's in particular, make use of the imagination to represent wrath. As I show in the paper, this is Dante's way of condemning the poetic imagination which, instead of resolving the problem of wrath, as Dante does in Purgatory 16, displaces it or misrepresents it.

Among La Marchesa Colombi's admirable accomplishments in Un matrimonio in provincia is her ability to evoke a convincing experience of female adolescence when the significance of this developmental stage was not yet completely understood. In fact, Colombi offers the seeds of what Sibilla Aleramo would call for some twenty years later in her landmark Una donna — modern women's stories in their own voices rather than imitations of men's texts. This article studies the female protagonists in Un matrimonio in provincia and Una donna in the context of their adolesce development. It posits that Denza is believable in part because of her youthful willfulness. In this way, Colombi not only anticipates Aleramo's plea for more authentic female writing but also foresees a character like Aleramo's protagonist whose early resolve resurfaces in adulthood allowing her to live with integrity. Through their resilient characters, these authors strive for new definitions of womanhood.

This essay focuses on Francesco Guccini's nocturnal poetry and its connections with the tradition of poetry about the night, from Novalis to Baudelaire.

This article is a description of a second-semester elementary Italian course that utilized task-based language teaching (TBLT) as the teaching and learning methodology. The same course was taught to two different sections over the course of one year, both sections had 30 students. This case study has two priorities: 1) to share a contextually feasible model of TBLT as a foreign language that is supported by relevant research and 2) to share the reflections of both the learners and the teacher involved. A qualitative analysis of the students’ impressions demonstrates that the students believed the course was effective and enjoyable and met the overall goal of TBLT: What they learned in the classroom could be put to practical usage in the outside world.

The trend in declining enrollments in world language courses demands investigation into likely causes and thoughtful solutions to resolve the crisis. We explore common negative attitudes form the general public toward world language study, and conclude that frustration stems from speaking proficiency as the perceived sole measure of success – a skill that takes time to achieve and may be lost without consistent practice. We propose new messaging that highlights the development of intercultural competency that evolves by interacting in full-immersion language courses and through explicit instruction in the attitudes and qualities of the interculturally competent global citizen. Suggestions for implementation at the course, program, university and community levels are provided.

The three objectives of this corpus study are first to describe how the gender of inanimate nouns is morphologically expressed in Italian, then determine the extent and reliability of contextual cues to Italian gender by analyzing 5,038 contextualized determiner phrases (DPs) drawn from 40 current newspaper and magazine articles and finally, consider learnability implications for Anglophone learners of Italian as a second language. A detailed descriptive account of gender morphology characterized by vocalic endings as portmanteau morphemes reveals several idiosyncrasies and complexities while the results of the written corpus showing that 33.4% of ambiguous feminine nouns and 31.0% of ambiguous masculine nouns are not gender-marked at all are argued to present significant difficulties for second language learners particularly for those who have a low tolerance for ambiguity.

This linguistic study investigates the usage of the Sicilian language in three generations of Sicilians living in Sicily and abroad. Findings conclude that sociological factors such as age, sex and context affect situational usage. A family case study reveals that linguistic attitude affects language usage outside of Sicily. Based on the results confirming Sicilian language disuse in Italy and abroad, several recommendations are included on preserving the Sicilian language in future generations.

More than twenty years after the release of the film, scholarly debate still addresses whether or not Roberto Benigni's La vita è bella made light of the Holocaust. In this study, Viktor Frankl's ontological assertions in Man's Search for Meaning, provide a platform to grasp how even concentration life can be experienced as beautiful despite unimaginable horror. As such, the filmmaker's presentation of Nazi abuses as a game need not denigrate the memory of the millions who suffered. A few scholarly studies have linked Frankl and Benigni but not primarily at the level of how humans assign meaning. While focusing on Frankl, this inquiry also considers the ethical dimension of representing the Holocaust through humor.

In this data-driven article, we present and discuss the results of a survey conducted in June and July 2020 to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the teaching and learning of Italian language and culture in high schools and universities in North America. The article explains the process we followed to create and disseminate the survey, and analyzes both its quantitative and qualitative results, drawing parallels and highlighting meaningful data correlations and trends. Through this study, we achieve a better understanding of how instructors and students adapted to a sudden shift in teaching and learning modalities, and this helps us create a path to move forward in a changed pedagogical environment.

This article discusses an analysis of Italian comprehension levels among students enrolled in first- and second-semester Italian language courses at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). It presents the first detailed examination of the students’ language background, their initial comprehension levels of Italian, their linguistic and metalinguistic skills in their native language, and their exit levels in Italian in order to: (1) determine the extent to which prior knowledge of Spanish facilitates the comprehension of Italian; (2) create a database to monitor the learning pathways of students enrolled in Italian for Speakers of English and Spanish courses; (3) improve instruction in these multilingual courses. Our thorough analysis, based on empirical evidence, of the varying competencies of these students of Italian (N = 55) has provided us with food for thought about the use of Intercomprehension in the United States and how we can fine-tune the teaching of Italian at CSULB and in similar multilingual contexts, where the presence of heritage Spanish speakers is sizeable (40% in the case of CSULB) and growing.