Laura
Fortini teaches italian Literature at the Università di Sassari.
She has been on DWF's editorial board since 1993, and was among the founding
members of the "Società Italiana delle Letterate". She
has published widely on Italian contemporary women writers and on Italian women
mystics , as well as on Ariosto and humanistic and Renaissance culture. She
is on the editorial board of "RRromanelrinascimento".
Reviews for DWF
Articles for DWF
Marks on the Wall, 1995, n. 28, pp. 22-36
The author retraces and constructs the genealogical ties linking a group of Italian women writers (who pre-date feminism but also anticipate it in ways which have not always been fully understood and valued) to the new wave of contemporary writers. Starting with a discussion of the work of Maria Bellonci, Anna Banti, Alba de Céspedes, Elsa Morante,
Fortini then moves on to these young writers, and identifies their distinctive mark in "the taking over of a body which is at one with the mind… They say 'I', and they need not say they are female; as they say it, in the way they say it, the forms of narration are changed".
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Lucifer of the housewives, 1997, n. 33, pp.
15-27
The author retraces here the life of Paola Masino, a contemporary Italian writer, who together with her partner Massimo Bontempelli was a central figure of the intellectual life of the first half of our century. Sharply aware of the conflict between the possibility of female freedom and the role and identity a woman was given as woman, Masino turns this awareness - and the awareness of an indomitable defeat - into her novel Nascita e morte di una massaia (Birth and Death of a Housewife).
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If on a winter evening in Salzburg, 1997, n. 36, pp. 17-22
The author answers the questions posed in the editorial of the previous issue of DWF narrating the story of her meeting with feminism in her university years: how this meeting resulted in a radical change of her way of relating to the preceding generations of women and to the world around her.
Faced with a feeling of estrangement regarding the real possibilities of politics, the relationships with other women gave her a sense of self which allowed her to fulfil her wish to be "whole" in public places (her work places, for example: secondary schools and the university), having as her point of reference a symbolical community of women, which is now lost.
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The challenge of an impossible literaryness, 1999,n. 42-43, pp. 10-31
Re-reading a series of texts by Italian women writers, with a special focus on the last decades, the author retraces themes and motives of a common style of literary enunciation; its use of and reliance an metonymy rather than metaphor is the peculiar trait, as well as the merit and value, of this recent literary production.
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FORTINI Laura - BONO Paola, Writing (from) the world, 2000, n. 45-46, pp.
3-4
The authors, members both of DWF's editorial board and of the steering committee of the SIL, briefly tell the reasons for the collaboration resulting in this issue.
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Editorial note, 2001, n. 1, pp. 2-4
Since the end of 1999 DWF has been involved in a complex but potentially fruitful process of change; the editorial board has asked to take place in the reflection some women, whose contribution to the political and theoretical developments of Italian feminism was deemed especially significant.
This issue, edited by Federica Giardini, Tonia De Vita, Rita Corsi is a first result of the process; it addresses the question of the relationships between different generations of feminists, trying to focus upon its lights and shadows - adopting the "literary " strategy of fictional pseudonymous letters.
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Young bodies in their springtime, 2001, n. 2-3, pp. 37-45
The author compares and contrasts the ways in which desire operates in her relationship with the other women in DWF's editorial board, and in her relationship with students at the university where she teaches.
She explores the differences between acknowledgement and mirroring in the experience of a teacher who looks at her women students; there is pleasure for the relationship, but also an often unconfessed need for a mirroring effect, as well as the search for a valorization of one's way of acting.
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FORTINI Laura - BONO Paola, Disloyal lovers, 2001, n. 4, pp. 6-14
With reference both to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and to Adrienne Rich's "Disloyal to Civilisation", in this dialogue Bono and Fortini propose and explore "disloyalty" as a position for women of different culture, race, ethnic group, class, religion. Being disloyal each to one's own culture, race, ethnic group, class, religion, while recognising their relevance to one's life, is a way of underlining sexual difference without cancelling the differences between women.
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The author retraces and interrogates her motivations in choosing to study some writers, uncovering the roots of her preferences and passions - why Ariosto rather than Tasso, why women novelists of the Twentieth rather than of the Nineteenth century, why the peripheral, non 'canonical' writing of the mystics?
Investigating a series of positions and movements - physical and mental - she individuates a possible answer in some stylistic traits (where style is also a vision of the world and a way of inhabiting it) that call her resonating with both levity and strength.
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L'opacità del genere o della necessità di disarticolare l'Occidente,
2003, n. 4, pp. 72-79
Abstract not found.
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Criminal happiness, 2005, n. 2-3, pp. 20-28
The author focuses on the meanings of «reato» (crime, criminal offence), offering several examples of the crime of addition and change in literature and the visual arts, and underlying the happiness involved in committing them as part of a political project, and in recognizing them as such.
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The efficacy of difference, 2005, n. 2-3, pp. 90-96
A book about Etty Hillesum and Daniela Padoan’s conversations with three women survivors from Auschwitz have prompted the author to take up again (see Dwf, n. 60, 2003) her reflection on the opacity of gender as a critical category, stressing instead the importance of sexual difference as a necessary, consciously assumed, position in order to produce valuable critical narrations.
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Reviews for DWF
ALERAMO Sibilla, Andando e stando, a cura di Rita Guerricchio, Milano,
Feltrinelli, 1997
rev. by Laura Fortini, 1999, n. 41, pp. 103-105
Critiche femministe e teorie letterarie, a cura di R. Baccolini et al.,
Bologna, Clueb, 1997
rev. by Laura Fortini, 1997, n. 36, pp. 99-101
DE GIORGIO M., Le italiane dall'Unità a oggi. Modelli culturali e comportamenti
sociali, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1992
rev. by Laura Fortini, 1993, n. 17, pp. 79-81
DE GRAZIA Victoria, Le donne nel regime fascista, Venezia, Marsilio, 1993
rev. by Laura Fortini, 1994, n. 22/23, pp. 132-134
PIANO Maria Giovanna, Onora la madre. Autorità femminile nella narrativa
di Grazia Deledda, Torino, Rosenberg & Sellier, 1998
rev. by Laura Fortini, 1999, n. 41, pp. 103-105
PICCONE STELLA Simonetta - SARACENO Chiara (a cura di), Genere. La costruzione
sociale del femminile e del maschile, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1996
rev. by Laura Fortini, 1997, n. 36, pp. 101-103
RICALDONE LUISA (a cura di), Incontri di poesia. Mariella Bettarini, Paola
Mastracola, Giulia Niccolai si interrogano su genere e scrittura, Trauben
Edizioni, Torino, 2000
rev. by Laura Fortini, 2001, n. 1, pp. 87-88