The many voices of Piedmont: language, identity and alterity in the works of modern and contemporary Piedmontese writers

The aim of this project is to carry out a linguistic analysis of a group of modern and contemporary narratives written by authors from the same Italian region: Piedmont. The novels and short stories examined stand out for the intriguing ways in which they move between a variety of idioms – Italian, Piedmontese dialects, English and pastiches, with some rare excursions into French. A sociolinguistic study and an overview of political changes that Piedmont underwent from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries are provided, with the purpose of outlining the region’s sociogeographical and historical background which can be seen to have fostered multilingualism in a group of writers. With the support of linguistic studies and philosophical theories on the relation between identity, alterity and language (such as Edwards’s Language and Identity and Bakhtin’s reflections on language), I then elucidate the presence of diverse linguistic varieties in selected narratives by Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio, Primo Levi, Nanni Balestrini, Fruttero & Lucentini, Benito Mazzi and Younis Tawfik. In other words, my purpose is to explain the reasons for multilingualism in each writer, as well as to underscore the ideological positions which lie behind the linguistic strategies of the authors. With this study I attempt to fill a gap and cast new light on Piedmontese literature. Although some critical studies on the use of dialect or English exist on individual authors and works (e.g. Meddemmem on Fenoglio’s use of English and Beccaria on Pavese’s inclusion of Piedmontese dialect), and some important contributions to the history of Piedmontese literature have appeared in print, to date no current, systematic study that compares different Piedmontese writers under the language/identity theme has been published. The study concludes with a summary of the evolution of plurilingualism in Piedmont and highlights the common trends in the use of multiple linguistic varieties as tools for both social demarcation and an opening up to alternative, marginalised andforeign cultures.

Pedem referens: art historical memory and the analogue in the work of Tacita Dean, Jeremy Millar and Lucy Skaer

This thesis explores the new art historical turn in contemporary art through close engagement with three British artworks. These are Tacita Dean’s, Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers), 2002, Jeremy Millar’s, The Man Who Looked Back, 2010, and Lucy Skaer’s, Leonora, 2006. Each of these artworks combines an art historical agenda with a celebration of the specificities of analogue film and photography in the context of our digital age. This thesis combines twentieth century photographic theory from Roland Barthes, André Bazin and Walter Benjamin, among others, with the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan in order to argue that the indexical qualities of analogue film and photography place the medium in close proximity to the Lacanian Real. In its obsolescence the analogue’s language of both touch and loss is heightened. Each chapter of this thesis explores a different aspect of the Real in relation to specific attributes of the analogue, such as its propensity for archiving cultural traumas, its receptiveness to chance, and its proximity to death.