The Power of Silence. From Ovid’s Philomela to Lisario by Antonella Cilento
PDF (Italiano)

Keywords

Antonella Cilento
Philomela
contemporary Italian women’s writing
women’s voice

How to Cite

Antelmi, G. (2018). The Power of Silence. From Ovid’s Philomela to Lisario by Antonella Cilento. Studia Romanica Posnaniensia, 45(3), 95–107. https://doi.org/10.14746/strop.2018.453.009

Abstract

The present article examines how Antonella Cilento reinvents the myth of Philomela in Lisario o il piacere infinito delle donne, Premio Strega finalist (2014) and winner of Boccaccio Prize (2014). After evidencing the narrative aspects of Ovid’s myth – the rape; the cutting out of the tongue depriving the raped woman of her voice; the expression of the violence she experienced – the analysis focuses on how Cilento overturns the myth by interweaving Ovid’s tale with the topos of Sleeping Beauty. Despite her silencing, Lisario discovers and appropriates the pleasure that can be drawn from her body. The paper concludes by considering how the protagonist finds new and non violent ways to express herself and relate to future generations of women.
https://doi.org/10.14746/strop.2018.453.009
PDF (Italiano)

References

Cavarero, A. (2010). A più voci. Filosofia dell’espressione vocale. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Cilento, A. (2014). Lisario o il piacere infinito delle donne. Milano: Mondadori.

De Carneri, M. (2015). Il fallo e la maschera. L'inconscio patriarcale della psicanalisi. Milano: Mimesis.

Doglio, M.L. (2000). Letter Writing, 1350-1650. In L. Panizza, S. Wood (Eds.), A History of Women’s Writing in Italy (pp. 13-24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Douglas, M. (1996). "atural Symbols. Exploration in Cosmology. London: Routledge.

Dunn, L., Jones, N. (1994). Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Giorgio, A. (1993). Narrative as Verbal Performance: Énonciation and Énoncé in Fabrizia Ramondino’s “La signora di Son Batle”. Italian Studies, 48, 86-106.

Irigaray, L. (1985). This Sex Which is "ot One. New York: Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, L. (1989). Sessi e genealogie, trad. L. Muraro. Milano: La Tartaruga.

Joplin Klindienst, P. (2002). The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours. In L.K. McClure (Ed.), Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World (pp. 259-86). Oxford: Blackwell Publisher.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trad. J. Harle Bell, J.R. von Sturner, R. Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.

Loraux, N. (1991). Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trad. A. Forster. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Marder, E. (1992). Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela. Hypatia, 7, 148-166.

Miller, N.K. (1986). Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text, and the Critic. In N.K. Miller (Ed.), The Poetics of Gender (pp. 270-295). New York: Columbia University Press.

Ovidio, P. (2015). Metamorfosi. Torino: Einaudi.

Segal, C. (1993). Philomela’s Web and the Pleasures of the Text: Reader and Violence in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. In I.J.F. de Jong, P. Sullivan (Eds.), Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature (pp. 257-280). New York: Leiden.

Trivellini, S. (2015). The Myth of Philomela from Margaret Atwood to… Chaucer: Contexts and Theoretical Perspectives. Interférences littéraires, 17, 85-99.

Williams, J. (1997). Interpreting "ightingales. Gender, Class and Histories. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.