Call for Papers: Sport in Italian Literature and Arts
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference
Baltimore, Maryland, 23-26 March, 2017
This panel examines the relationship between sport and Italian literature. It also welcomes papers on literary and artistic aspects of sport in journalism, the visual arts, and cinema.
Although sport has never been a major theme in Italian literature, we find it in several works by a number of important authors—from the description of duels and jousts in Italian epic romances, to Leopardi’s A un vincitore nel pallone, to De Amicis’ declaration of love to the pallone da braccio in Gli azzurri e i rossi, to the five poems on soccer by Saba, to the lyrics by such Lombard poets as Sereni, Erba, and Raboni. The same is true of the visual arts, from Futurism (Boccioni’s Dinamismo di un giocatore di calcio), to metaphysical art (Carrà’s La partita di calcio), to Neorealism (Guttuso’s paintings on soccer). As for cinema, we glimpse sport in Neorealist movies (from Rossellini’s Roma città aperta to De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette), and we later find it as a subject of a number of comedies, from Fantozzi to Abatantuono.
Although we find scholarly contributions on the presence of sport in Italian literature in the last decades of the twentieth century, it is only in the past fifteen years that that this subject has received considerable critical attention (see, for example, the two conferences Letteratura e sport in Rome in 2001 and Alessandria in 2005 and the anthology Il calcio è poesia edited by Surdich and Brambilla in 2006).
This panel seeks to contribute to the studies on sport and Italian literature, a fascinating subject that has often been considered marginal. Not only are such studies relevant to a critical understanding of major works of Italian literature, but also they have great pedagogical and educational potential, given the passion of millions of people for sport in every culture, and particularly in the US.
Please submit your abstract online by September 30, 2016 here.