Università degli Studi di Milano - March 15 and 16, 2012
| Conference
Programme |
Conference
Poster |
Abstracts | Participants |
| Conference
Programme |
Conference
Poster |
Abstracts | Participants |
| The
Università degli Studi di Milano joined the wide international
tribute to Dickens’s bicentenary
with a two-day event. Organised
by Francesca Orestano, Carlo Pagetti and Alessandro Vescovi, in
collaboration with the British Council and AIA, the Conference Dickens: Lives in Fiction... and Afterlives took
place on March 15 and 16 and focused on Dickens’s biographies
– both fictional and
real – and his afterlives. |
|
 |
Students,
both from high schools and the Milan universities, Dickens's fans and
lovers, journalists, translators, scholars, and generally a vast public
attended the conference which went on successfully for two full days. As
far as biographies are concerned, Michael Slater explained the problems
and the
challenges he had to face while writing his recent Charles Dickens: A Life Defined
by Writing
(2009). Maria Teresa Chialant focused on the unstable dualism which
characterises Dickens’s life
and works, analysing the narrative motifs of the split self and the
double in novels like The
Old Curiosity Shop, Great Expectations
and The Mystery of
Edwin Drood. Marisa Sestito’s paper dealt
with Dickens’s readings and the new forms of existence
Dickens allowed his characters to live once
he seized the opportunity to work again on his novels. John Bowen
discussed what it means to live
on after death or after a radical loss: he quoted a few passages from David Copperfield
to show how
Dickens’s ‘autobiographical fragment’,
inserted in Forster’s biography, lives on in fragments or
ruins in this and other novels. Life after death and before birth was
explored by Dominic Rainsford:
starting from passages from David
Copperfield and Our
Mutual Friend, his paper examined how
Dickens’s ideas on these matters relate to the plotting of
his narratives.
|
|
In the wake of Dickens’s afterlives, Andrew
Sanders’s lecture presented Dickens as an
unsuccessful social reformer but a prophetic voice both in his social
philosophy and in his influence
on his literary progeny. Carlo Pagetti considered the afterlife of the
protagonist of Great Expectations, Pip,
analysing his transformations in a variety of adaptations and media,
from the
cinema to mass culture. Moving onward, Victor Sage presented
‘the afterlife of the afterlife’,
offering a parallel between Scrooge, Selma Lagerlof’s The Phantom Carriage,
and Frank Capra’s
movie It’s a
Wonderful Life. He examined, in fact, the structure of a
modern journey into the
underworld, sparked by A
Christmas Carol’s combination of an uncanny
ghost story, social
exploration and moral critique, and he commented on the differences
between the three works
mentioned above. Marco Canani explored Dickens’s leitmotiv of
food through
the representation of
Miss Havisham’s decaying banquet: he mapped out how Dickens
relates the verbal and visual
representation of food to the psychological and emotional depiction of
his characters, and then he
moved
on to “the Joycean afterlife”
of Dickens tracing it to “The Dead”. Angela Anna
Iuliucci
presented both a textual and a visual comparison between Oliver Twist and
its latest grotesque
rewrite Oliver Twisted
(2012) by J.D. Sharpe, demonstrating that the latter holds up because
the
former is already a gothic and grotesque text. A session dedicated to
Dickens and the circus
featured the lecture by Michael Hollington, who proposed three utopian
alternatives to the
alienation of Modernity, represented by Hard Times, and
versions of the circus and its society
present in many modernist works of art, in Chaplin’s
cinematic contributions and Angela Carter’s
fiction. Following the idea of
the circus, Claudia Cremonesi attempted to analyse the central role of
the circus and of the figure of the clown in Dickens and
Fellini’s visions of life, focusing on Hard Times and on the
Fellinian dialectical opposition between the Whiteface and the Augusto
as the
means of a poetical escape from the uncomfortable reality of life. Dickens’s afterlife was also tackled from the point of view of intertextuality and critical reception, and specific attention was devoted to the Italian and Spanish context. Alessandro Vescovi traced the history of Dickens’s nineteenth-century reception in Italy by focussing on translations from the 1840s to the emergence of “Verismo” and pointing out how Dickens became popular both in high- and low-brow market for different reasons. Francesca Orestano mapped Dickens’s legacy in Italian fiction, and especially in Emilio de Marchi’s Demetrio Pianelli, in Edmondo de Amicis and in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Similarly, Clotilde De Stasio presented a brief survey of Dickens’s reception in the Italian media in recent years, pointing out that some of Dickens’s works – namely A Christmas Carol – have become “culture texts” and hence have originated a number of interesting adaptations. Luca Cremonese presented an analysis of the Italian television adaptation of Dickens directed by Ugo Gregoretti. The Pickwick Papers is especially interesting, as Gregoretti intentionally broke with ‘the fourth wall’ in order to interact with the viewers. As far as the Spanish reception is concerned, Maria Rosso presented a detailed research of the press coverage of Dickens in the second half of the nineteenth century: she focussed on translations, reviews and articles that contributed to create a somewhat stereotyped image of Dickens and which give an account of the interest he aroused in Spain. Paul Vita, on his part, gave a paper on José Méndez Herrera’s early twentieth-century Spanish translations of Dickens’s novels. One of the aims of the conference was indeed to keep a broad perspective, so as to explore Dickens’s reception and legacy in and out of the English-speaking cultural establishment. This was well stressed in the opening remarks of Emilia Perassi (Head of the University Department which organized the conference), who offered an interesting insight into Charles Dickens and Jorge Luis Borges. |
|
| Conference
Programme |
Conference
Poster |
Abstracts | Participants |