La poesia e l'infanzia: incontri, intrecci, possibilità nella terra marginale della "parola magica"

Il presente lavoro di tesi, inscritto in un’ottica pedagogica interdisciplinare che si sviluppa attraverso il paradigma indiziario, si propone di svolgere una riflessione attorno alla «parola poetica» nell’ottica di un’educazione estetica dell’infanzia che passi anche dalla scoperta di un linguaggio polisemico, metaforico, complesso, lieve quale quello poetico. Concetti quali la marginalità e l’alterità del dire poetico e della figura stessa del poeta, che dà voce al momento liminale della communitas, si fanno rivelatori di quella che si mostra come vera e propria “parola magica” capace di dare senso, nel mito e nel rito che costantemente lo rigenera, all’esperienza umana. La ricerca prende quindi in esame alcuni momenti paradigmatici, nella storia dell’immaginario e nella riflessione letteraria occidentale, che hanno favorito l’incontro fra poesia e infanzia nel terreno di una parola che dà voce alla liminalità: da Rousseau a Pascoli, da Baudelaire a Stevenson, numerosi sono gli autori che conducono la riflessione fino a quel territorio di soglia proficuamente spaesante che è la poesia «autentica» per l’infanzia contemporanea. In particolare, questa ricerca prende in esame la collana di poesia della casa editrice Topipittori significativamente denominata “Parola magica”. Ventidue titoli, riconducibili alle due tipologie testuali che C. Boutevin definisce «raccolta di poesie illustrata» e «albo-poesia», permettono un affondo nella poesia contemporanea per l’infanzia, che esprime in questa collana la propria dimensione di soglia: l’interdipendenza fra parola e immagine e la diffusa presenza di «tracce di fiaba» ne sono i principali indizi analizzati in questo lavoro.

"Ancestry, gender and language - The role of culture in economic development"

This thesis is a combination of research questions in development economics and economics of culture, with an emphasis on the role of ancestry, gender and language policies in shaping inequality of opportunities and socio-economic outcomes across different segments of a society. The first chapter shows both theoretically and empirically that heterogeneity in risk attitudes can be traced to the ethnic origins and ancestral way of living. In particular, I construct a measure of historical nomadism at the ethnicity level and link it to contemporary individual-level data on various proxies of risk attitudes. I exploit exogenous variation in biodiversity to build a novel instrument for nomadism: distance to domestication points. I find that descendants of ethnic groups that historically practiced nomadism (i) are more willing to take risks, (ii) value security less, and (iii) have riskier health behavior. The second chapter evaluates the nature of a trade-off between the advantages of female labor participation and the positive effects of female education. This work exploits a triple difference identification strategy relying on exogenous spike in cotton price and spatial variation in suitability for cotton, and split sample analyses based on the exogenous allocation of land contracts. Results show that gender differences in parental investments in patriarchal societies can be reinforced by the type of agricultural activity, while positive economic shocks may further exacerbate this bias, additionally crowding out higher possibilities to invest in female education. The third chapter brings novel evidence of the role of the language policy in building national sentiments, affecting educational and occupational choices. Here I focus on the case of Uzbekistan and estimate the effects of exposure to the Latin alphabet on informational literacy, education and career choices. I show that alphabet change affects people's informational literacy and the formation of certain educational and labour market trends.

The Legacy of Frankenstein’s Creature: Monstrosity and Female Grotesque in Mary Shelley, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson

This English Literature thesis (European PhD EDGES – Women’s and Gender Studies – 34th cycle) is an investigation into the representation of the monstrous body according to the British writers Mary Shelley, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. The main objective is to observe how the representation of the categories of monstrous, abject and grotesque in Western cultural imagination have been influenced across time and literary genres. In the novels of Shelley, Carter and Winterson, the monstrous subject is configured as an alternative to the anthropocentric ideal embodied by the normative subject, of which Victor Frankenstein is the paradigmatic exponent. Plus, there are places considered anti-topoi within which the monster acquires a situatedness and claims a voice, generating an opposed counter-narrative to the imaginary conveyed by the normative subject. Monstrosity outlined by Shelley in the novels Frankenstein and The Last Man constitutes the starting point of my research, aiming to observe how the discourse of the normative body vs. the anti-normative body intersects with the discourse of the spaces of the centre vs. the spaces of the margin. In Carter's novels The Passion of New Eve and Nights at the Circus, the monstrous female constitutes the embodiment of wills, desires and claims challenging the heteronormative system. The space of otherness in which Carter's monster-woman is confined becomes a possibility of reshaping identity for the Subject, deconstructing the logic of power that moulded her within society. Finally, Winterson creates two monstrous women in Sexing the Cherry and The Passion who move through urban spaces, going from the centre to the margins and testifying to the arbitrariness of the system and its weaknesses. Similarly, in Frankissstein, Winterson recovers Shelley's original novel and transforms it into a parodic and intertextual speculation on the fluidity of identity and the limits of transhumanism.