Dissolving margins between life, writing, and reading in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend

Public lecture:

Dissolving margins between life, writing, and reading in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend

Ferrante’s quadrilogy is a story of female friendship that challenges the patriarchal sexual, social, and linguistic order of post-world war II Italy. I read the intertwined lives of the protagonists, Elena and Lila, as a space of resistance, agency, and creativity and propose that Ferrante is appealing to women to recognise the power of women’s words and to utilise them to create this space.

Speaker:

Prof. Adalgisa Giorgio

Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies

University of Bath

26 February 6 pm University of Auckland Arts 1 315

Free Entry

Dante Lecture with visiting Italian Professor Cecilia Robustelli

Il "linguaggio di genere" nell'informazione sulle donne

21 February, 6.00 pm,  Dante Alighieri Rooms, Freemans Bay Community Centre

In Italian and English

Free Entry

Il linguaggio è responsabile della costruzione di modelli di genere spesso inadeguati rispetto alla realtà odierna. Il saggio illustra il ruolo dei media in questo processo, con particolare riferimento al linguaggio giornalistico.

Cecilia Robustelli

è una scrittrice, linguista e accademica italiana, docente nel Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, fa parte del comitato esecutivo dell'Accademia della Crusca, vicepresidente della Fondazione Piaggio di Potedera e Presidente della Commissione Pari Opportunità dell'Unione Valdera.

School Open Day and Newsletter

Learn Italian in 2019! We will have an Open Day this coming Thursday at the Dante Rooms, 5pm-7pm, all welcome. Plus, our newsletter is online now, and it is full of events! Click here to read:

Screening the Real: Alina Marazzi's Maternal Trilogy

Alina Marazzi, Film Director 
Monday 11 February, 6pm
Arts 1 220, 
Auckland University
Free entry

Screening the Real: Alina Marazzi's Maternal Trilogy

Alina Marazzi, is an internationally acclaimed director of documentaries, fiction film and theatrical works. Many of her films address issues of gender, motherhood and memory. This presentation focuses on three films that are commonly referred to as her maternal trilogy:  Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For one more hour with you, 2002) Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, 2007) and  Tutto parla di te (All About You, 2013), her first fiction film starring Charlotte Rampling. Marazzi will use clips from the films  to highlight the importance that cinematic form and experimentation take in her re-invention of the real. She considers the reconstruction of her mother’s life and its relationship to women’s history in For one more hour with you; the search for new models for women arising out of  the movements of  the 1970s in We Want Roses Too, and the way fiction functions as a form of alter-ego in representations of maternity and maternal ambivalence in All About You.