Through a series of original analyses of poetic works belonging to the Italian canon or purposely posing themselves at the margins of it, this book seeks to highlight poetry as an art form which has the capacity to show the incongruities of society, not just semantically, but especially through the use it makes of signifiers, which allow meaning to come through notwithstanding linear communication. Specifically, this volume identifies and analyzes a line of diverse early modern to contemporary Italian poetic works in which the goal is not only to imitate or represent the world, but to enact a change upon it. Rather than resulting in an exercise in self-indulgence, these works focus on poetics as an agent of social transformation. Deleuze and Guattari used, in 1976, the metaphor of the rhizome: a subterranean - and therefore subversive - root, a growth that develops in hidden, unpredictable directions. The rhizome is a figure of alterity and discontinuity, in opposition to the binary logic proper of hierarchical structures. Each of the works analyzed in this volume enhances, in different ways, this intuition by proposing a non-linear undergrowth that affects poetics and invades the very logic of society, finally enacting a revolt, and transforming the world from within.
About the Author: Federica Santini is Associate Professor of Italian and coordinates the Italian Studies Program at Kennesaw State University, where she is also affiliated with the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Her main research interests are modern and contemporary Italian poetry and translation studies. Her articles and translations have appeared in numerous publications in the United States and Italy, including Rivista di Studi italiani, L'illuminista, L'anello che non tiene, the Journal of Italian Translation, Italian Culture, and Il Verri. She is the co-editor of Perche New York (Scritture, 2007), with Luigi Ballerini, and Bridging Cultures: International Women Faculty Transforming the US Academy (University Press of America, 2011), and the author of the volume Io era una bella figura una volta: Viaggio nella poesia di ricerca del secondo Novecento (Scritture, 2013). Giovanna Summerfield is Associate Professor of Italian and French and serves as Associate Dean for Educational Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University. Her research focuses on long eighteenth-century (1660-1830) French and Italian literature (with an emphasis on Sicilian writers), religious and philosophical movements, women's studies, film studies, and Mediterranean studies. Some of her most recent publications are Le Siciliane: cosi' sono se vi pare (Puntoacapo, 2011), Vendetta: Essays on Honor and Revenge (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman (Continuum, 2010), and Domenico Tempio: Poems and Fables (Legas, 2009). In 2012, she taught as Visiting Scholar at the University of Catania and is currently serving her second year as Imagining America Research Fellow at Syracuse University.