Colloque international : Verga Pop. Traces of Verga in visual and performing arts, in literature, and in popular culture
25 novembre 2022, Université de Salamanque
Échéance des propositions : 30 juillet 2022
We are pleased to announce a call for papers for an international conference (online and in-person) at the University of Salamanca (25/11/2022, online and in-person), with the collaboration of the University of Calabria and the patronage of the Verga Foundation.
Organizers: Milagro Martín Clavijo (Universidad de Salamanca, mclavijo@usal.es), Daniela Bombara (independent scholar, daniela.bombara63@gmail.com), Ellen Patat (Università degli Studi di Milano, ellenpatat@gmail.com)
Ninna nanna, ninna nò, sta arrivando Mazzarò
Resta sveglio che sennò, porta via quello che può
Ninna nanna, ninna nò, sta arrivando Mazzarò
Resta sveglio che sennò, porta via quello che può
Caparezza, Ninna nanna di Mazzarò, in Habemus Capa, 2006
More than ten years ago, Felice Rappazzo wondered in a contribution on Annali della Fondazione Verga (3, 2010) what could be the usefulness of critically analyzing those works by Verga which had already received so much attention by scholars. On Verga’s centenary, we would like to broaden this question of crucial relevance by focusing on works that organically engage the original corpus and the figure of an author who is already widely canonized as the father of Verismo. The objective is thus to concentrate on a new ‘object’ in order to put forward new forms of investigation that bring significant elements of innovation to the long-established lines of research.
Caparezza’s song in the exergue re-elaborates Verga’s character, portraying him as the image of an unbridled capitalism. This song can be included in a line of productive research that intends to trace the representations, the rewritings and the transformations of Verga as writer and character, as well as of his works and the related topics, within the domain of popular literature and culture and the collective imaginary. Although Verga’s presence in cultural forms of mass distribution is certainly not comparable to the remaking of other ‘great’ authors of the Italian literature, at the end of the Nineteenth century, alongside his narrative works, his productivity was greatly appreciated in extra-literary fields, such as cinema and theatre; the author himself rewrites his works in other genres and with other expressive codes. It is therefore our intention to fully outline the multimedia and popular image of Verga in current culture, in an attempt to retrieve the complexity of Verga’s intellectual personality, which ab origine crosses and innovates different genres, showing also its productivity in contemporary society.