Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
September 6, 2010–August 1, 2011
Profession
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago
Project title
Stanza as “Homicile”: Environments of Exile in Italian Language Arts after World War II
Project description

This research charts the composition of a transnational consciousness in linguistic experimentation across literary, sonic, and visual arts in post-Fascist Rome. Exploration of the ouevres of authors Emilio Villa and Amelia Rosselli, emphasizing their work across languages and genres, aims to track a dual compulsion in Italian poetics poised between the formal heritage of futurism and the sociohistorical fallout of the conflict futurists glorified: a drive to express particular consequences of the violent dispersion of an imagined Italian fatherland and its mother tongue, accompanied by a utopian effort to forge poetic environments that would house an objective, universal language. The projected archival work seeks to bring to light the collaboration between this poetry and contemporary trends toward ambience in the arts, and to situate its formal innovations within a broader postwar reckoning with the patria ideale of Italy as a plural, transient, and even diasporic cultural formation.