Questo articolo ha per argomento la lingua usata da Bernardino Ciambelli nei suoi romanzi. Alla fine del Novecento, in un periodo di migrazioni massive degli Italiani in Nord America, la creazione delle Little Italies ha permesso l’emergenza di una letteratura specialmente indirizzata a queste popolazioni provenienti da tutte le regioni del paese. Mentre l’italiano era ancora minoritario, che i dialetti prevalevano sul panorama linguistico, la questione di sapere in che lingua un autore poteva scrivere per toccare il pubblico più largo possible si pone naturalmente. Se si considera anche il contesto anglofono che circondava queste comunità, pare interessante vedere come uno scrittore ha potuto adattarsi a tutti questi obblighi. A metà strada tra letteratura popolare, storia sociale e evoluzioni della lingua italiana, questo articolo prova di schiarire tanto gli adattamenti fatti dal romanziere quanto l’ambiente linguistico particolare che ha inciso sulle sue scelte.

According to the historian Owen Davies, Daniel Defoe represented cunning-folk as pure quacks who played tricks upon their clients to despoil them of their money. This paper adopts a more qualified point of view. Admittedly, most cunning-folk did not possess any supernatural powers at all and were only trying to swindle their patients. But Defoe did not discard the possibility that some of those magical practitioners might have enlisted the services of the Devil to achieve their cures. Indeed, positing the existence of a world of spirits was part of Defoe’s strategy to combat atheism. This was an aim he shared with the Restoration thinkers Méric Casaubon, Henry More and Joseph Glanvill. But Defoe lived in a different intellectual context : that of the early Enlightenment, which was marked by a growing scepticism towards the existence of the supernatural. This goes a long way towards accounting for his ambivalent portrayal of cunning-folk.

Terror Australis by Leah Shelton was produced at le Théâtre de la Commune in Aubervilliers, before touring in Paris, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, alongside other plays, as part of the Australian Express Project, in autumn 2019. This 45-minute-long neo-burlesque cabaret show, in English with French surtitles, deconstructs Australian identity and history (how the place was colonised, the importance of the Bush, the machismo culture of alcohol and sport) by giving a feminist twist to all the cultural items that make Australia. To do so, the performer uses all the stage conventions (props, décor, fourth wall), but also the cinematographic codes derived from ozploitation. In this article, the authors analyse the way national and gender identities are intrinsically linked in this off-the-wall road-trip through the Australian outback.

En esta entrevista concedida en febrero de 2017 en Madrid, Marta Sanz, escritora española, nos ofrece una reflexión sobre su escritura. Así, no sólo dialogamos sobre sus opciones narrativas, sobre la construcción y las representaciones de sus figuras femeninas en su obra novelesca sino también sobre su compromiso como ciudadana y autora.

En el campo literario argentino, uno de los autores de lo extremo contemporáneo que siempre ha reivindicado lo híbrido, lo mestizo, lo impuro como principio estético y de creación literaria es el escritor Marcelo Cohen (Buenos Aires, 1951). Si las relaciones inter- y transmediales entre la literatura y la música han sido estudiadas en detalle en la obra ensayística y literaria de Cohen (cf. la tesis doctoral de Miriam Chiani de 2012), aquellas que se dan entre otras producciones artísticas, mediáticas y discursivas no se han profundizado suficientemente hasta el presente. En Los acuáticos (publicado en 2001), libro de novelas cortas fundacional de un universo de ficción original –el “Delta Panorámico”–, proponemos explorar las interacciones entre la literatura, las artes (la pintura, el teatro, la puesta en escena del cuerpo) y los discursos (el discurso periodístico, el discurso científico). Nos preguntamos entonces si la TransLiteratura de Marcelo Cohen (que postulamos en este trabajo) no dependería de la mezcla los géneros, de las producciones artísticas y mediáticas modeladas por la escritura de lo heteróclito.