How Does The Hymen Looks Like

books that have made (and unmade), Italy

Tuesday March 1 at 19:00, Italian Cultural Institute, Rue de
Livourne 38, Brussels

"I take inspiration from some newspaper controversy 2009: what will be celebrated in Italy (we wondered), in 2011? The nation or the Italian? The answers were different. There were those who said, the unitary state founded in 1861. Others said: the formation of the Italian nation, dating back to that year. Someone else said: the national consciousness is much older than the Constitution of the Italian unit. In fact, the consciousness (awareness elitist, of course) to be Italians since the Middle Ages, and it is evident in poets like Dante and Petrarch. The "language issue", which lasted for centuries, has played a detector. Dante, Pietro Bembo, Alessandro Manzoni, and finally are the cornerstones of the debate. The intellectual circles foster a consciousness of belonging to a common language (but of the written language and literature) and cultural. Things began to change in the eighteenth century, until after the French Revolution and during and after the Risorgimento, the issue becomes "national" in the sense that they went in search of a common language that was spoken by all citizens as emblematic of this need is precisely Manzoni. The request for a unification policy was instead much later than that of a common literary language, and began to make inroads into intellectual and political elite with the arrival of the French in Italy in 1796. Born a poem, a narrative and a theater (including music) that promoted the spread of the ideologies of the Risorgimento. Concluded the Risorgimento, he saw, however, even the birth of a more aplogetica literature, but critical. " (Arnaldo Di Benedetto)

Arnaldo Di Benedetto is Professor of Italian literature at the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy ' University of Turin. His fields of study prevalent are the work of Torquato Tasso and, more generally, the literature of the Renaissance, the work of Vittorio Alfieri and the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and aspects of literature and authors and moments the culture of the twentieth century. He also comparative interests, in particular with reference the relationship between Italian literature and German, and Italian and French.