- Maria Truglio
Webinar: Identities and Literature for Children: Body, Gender, and Nation
The Universidad de O'Higgins has the honor to invite you to
Identities and Literature for Children: Body, Gender, and Nation
DATE: 23 June 2023
TIME: 17:00 - 19:00 PM (CLT, Continental Chile Time (UTC-4))
To calculate the time for your own time zone, see Savvy Time World Clock Converter
VENUE:
Link for Spanish speaking audience / Este es para la gente que habla español
https://youtube.com/live/Mg0-6jYB1uI?feature=share
Link for English speaking audience / Este para la gente que habla inglés
This webinar event aims to present the developments in an on-going collaborative project among children's literature scholars in the U.S. and Chile, looking at multiple national contexts.
The group is supported by the "Fund for the Promotion of International Cooperation for Regional Research Institutions," funded by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) and the University de O'Higgins. This project was entitled "Issues on national and regional identities in literature for children and adolescents: interdisciplinary academic exchanges and didactic proposals for the educational field" and brought together researchers from the Universidad Católica del Maule, the Universidad Autónoma de Chile, the Universidad de Concepción, the Universidad de O'Higgins, the University of Oklahoma and the Pennsylvania State University.
During this event there will be short papers on critical proposals to be published by the working group in the near future.
First talk: "Foundational Children’s Fictions: nation, gender and body" by Emily Sterk, Ph.D. (Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish and Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow, Department of Spanish, Haverford College, USA).
Second talk: "Transformación, mutilación, desaparición: cuerpos y órganos en la configuración discursiva de sentidos de identidad nacional/cultural" by Ximena Troncoso Araos, Ph.D. (Associate Professor, Department of Educational Science, Universidad Católica del Maule - Chile)
Keynote talk: "Intertextuality in Italian children's books on migration: The Andes, The Apennines and the Atlas Mountains" by Maria Truglio (Professor of Italian and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State University, USA).
Keynote Abstract: Demand for books about current events in Italy has yielded scores of children’s books in the past three decades that treat the topic of immigration. The goals of eliciting empathy in children and explaining to them complex historical and contemporary events can be challenged by the perceived need to shield children from traumatizing scenes. A strategy employed by many authors to meet this challenge is that of intertextuality: these narratives of “current events” allude to canonical Western literature (such as Pinocchio, Heart, The Betrothed, and Antigone) as a way to familiarize and at times to “sweeten” these often bitterly disquieting narratives for their young readers. My talk will focus on the 2008 illustrated novel From the Atlas Mountains to the Apennines by the Sicilian writer Maria Attanasio. As signaled by the title, the book calls on the tale “From the Apennines to the Andes” from Edmondo De Amicis’ Heart (1886) to tell its story. I probe the potentials and limits of such intertextuality. Ultimately, I argue that several texts go beyond leveraging the image of capsized ships in the Mediterranean, an image that has become a media fetish, to engage readers in ways that facilitate both empathy and critical self-reflection.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER: Maria Truglio received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University. She is Professor of Italian and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State (University Park). Her research investigates Italian literature from the nineteenth century to the present day with attention to questions of gender and national identity formation. She focuses on the field of children’s literature, bringing psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and postcolonial methodologies to bear on texts written for young people from the unification period forward. Her first book, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli (U of Toronto P, 2007) examined the works of the canonical Symbolist poet Giovanni Pascoli through a psychoanalytic lens, with attention to his conception of childhood. Her monograph Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity (Routledge, 2017) analyzed books for young readers in the period between unification and fascism (1861-1922). With Nicolás Fernández-Medina she co-edited the volume Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (Routledge, 2016), which includes her discussion of Massimo Bontempelli's 1922 magical realist children's book. She is now researching how contemporary Italian children’s literature ascribes meanings to the “Mediterranean migration crisis” in light of Italy’s postcolonial context, and contributed an essay on this topic to the Children's Literature Association Quarterly special issue on refugees.