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Abstract
My dissertation investigates how the traumatic phenomenon of political violence in Italy has been narrated in novels and represented in films. My aim is to show that a tension persists between the need to create a unitary memory and the impossibility of reconciling positions that continue to be perceived as opposite and problematic in Italian collective memory. My analysis draws on the notions of spectrality, elaborated by Jacques Derrida; trauma, defined by Freud and recently revived by Cathy Caruth and E. Ann Kaplan; and allegory, proposed by Romano Luperini and other critics.
In Chapter 1, I analyze films by Gillo Pontecorvo, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Valentino Orsini, and Giuliano Montaldo, to show how they displace the trauma of political violence both temporally/historically and spatially/geographically, providing a reflection on the relation between violence, power and state formation. Chapter 2 investigates how some characters and situations depicted in novels written by Natalia Ginzburg, Nanni Balestrini, and Leonardo Sciascia can be read as allegories (family, prison, language) of the Italian body politic dealing with conflicting discourses on political violence. In Chapter 3, I focus on the representation of the trauma of political violence in films by Gianni Amelio, Marco Tullio Giordana, Mimmo Calopresti, and Marco Bellocchio, and on novels by Gian Mario Villalta, Geraldina Colotti, Antonella Tavassi la Greca, and Francesca D'Aloja. Their works deal with the effort of Italian society to forgive and incorporate in its body politics both former terrorists and their narrations. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate how the specter of political violence is still haunting contemporary Italy by analyzing the noir genre, both in its literary and cinematic versions. To this end, I examine novels by Massimo Carlotto, Giancarlo De Cataldo e Raul Montanari, and films by Michele Soavi and Michele Placido. Here in particular I follow Deleuze's idea of cinema concluding that the noir genre is apt to produce a substitute historical experience through its "affective" powers on the audience.
My study shows how during the last forty years Italian cinema shifted from an ideological and political narrative to an intimate and/or philosophical account, and then to a genre representation. With respect to novels, I demonstrate how political violence has traumatically affected not only family and gender relationships but also national identity narrated in fictional writings. If it is true that trauma produces new subjects, then the new Italian subject appears to be constructed by a tension between refusal and inclusion of the specter of political violence in discourses of identity and nation/state formation.
