The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor John Welle (Notre Dame) titled:
Literary Celebs: Amalia Guglielminetti, Guido Gozzano and the Price of Fame
“L’unica poetessa che abbia oggi l’Italia,” Gabriele D’Annunzio declared of Amalia Guglielminetti, who began her literary career at the age of eighteen in 1901 with the ode “Al giglio sabuado” celebrating the birth of Princess Jolanda of Savoy. In the following decade, emerging onto the rich cultural scene of her native Turin, the Italian center of both the worker’s movement and the drive for female emancipation, she would bring forth three of the most important books of poetry of the new century: Le vergini folli (1907), Le seduzioni (1909), and L’insonne (1913). Adopting classical forms such as the songbook, the sonnet, and the tercet, her modernizing self-fashioning showcases various masks of the modern “donna nuova,” from the femme fatale to the emancipated woman. While linked to such traditional figures as Gaspara Stampa and other female poets of the Renaissance, she was also praised for her “stupefacente originalità.”
Moreover, her early career, in its rapid rise to literary success, parallels that of her intimate friend, confidant and fellow Turin poet, Guido Gozzano. Their epistolary exchanges, numbering some one hundred and twenty-six letters, dated between 1906 and 1912, shed light on their mutual admiration, tense romantic engagement --- more literary than amorous ---, and common “will to fame.”
Within the context of women writers of the early twentieth century, as well as within that of the modern Italian poetic canon, this research seminar proposes revisiting Amalia Guglielminetti’s literary accomplishments for serious critical reconsideration. While focusing on the dialogue in letters and in verse between these two poets from Turin during the high point of their literary celebrity, I will also trace the factors that have marginalized the female writer in relation to her male counterpart(s), denying her the fame that she so richly deserves.
John P. Welle is Professor of Italian and Concurrent Professor of Film, Television + Theatre, Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame.
The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.