Author: martina

Our project aims at investigating the representation of cognitive disability in drama texts from the sixteenth century to today, with a focus on the reception of a few Shakespearean female characters: first and foremost, Ophelia, but also the Jailer’s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Lady Macbeth and Cassandra. Historically, women have been discriminated against by patriarchal society; women who have cognitive disability have experienced a further exclusion from social accessibility. Their behaviours have been read as performances susceptible of being interpreted on the basis of a two-way transaction between the arts and the sciences.

Our methodology is interdisciplinary bridging different fields, including reception studies, disability studies, the history of European medicine, and the semiotics of theatre and drama. We will take into examination texts and materials belonging to multiple European countries. Accessing Ophelia will include the organisation of one-day seminars/conferences and lead to the publication of an edited volume and a number of articles. Moreover, on the basis of the experience gained by the participation in the subproject CEMP (Classical and Early Modern Paradoxes in England) within the previous Project of Excellence, we will create a digital database of texts which feature relevant interpretations of the cognitive disability of the Shakespearean dramatis personae (from eighteenth-century critics to modern neuroscientists), along with iconographic materials, historic audio recordings, silent films, etc.

Group leader: Emanuel Stelzer

Internal members:

• Silvia Bigliazzi
• Petra Bjelica
• Felice Gambin
• Cristiano Ragni
• Roberta Zanoni

External members:

• Clark Lawlor (Northumbria University, Letteratura inglese e Storia della medicina)
• Sandra Pietrini (Università di Trento, Storia del teatro)
• Anne Sophie Refskou (Aarhus University, Letterature comparate)
• Martina Zamparo (Università di Udine, Letteratura inglese)

Actions: WP 1.1, WP 1.3 

References: 

Kiefer, Carol Solomon, ed. 2001. The Myth and Madness of Ophelia. Amherst: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College. 
Peterson, Kaara L. & Deanne Williams, eds. 2012. The Afterlife of Ophelia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 
Rhodes, Kimberly. 2016. Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.  
Showalter, Elaine. 1985. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism”. In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker & Geoffrey Hartman, 77-94. New York and London: Methuen. 

In the context of a comprehensive and wide meaning of inclusion – characterised by the valorisation of every kind of diversity -, theatre and the performing arts have received an increasing attention within the interdisciplinary fields of Disability studies (in particular, Disability Theatre) and Accessibility studies. The concept of “inclusive theatre” (“inclusive theatre-making” Di Giovanni 2021) refers to a fully accessible theatre practice based on the active participation of every member of the company in as many phases of production as possible, from the creation to the reception of a show.

“Teatro a Rotelle” company (Theatre on Wheels) is composed by non-professional actors, mostly students, with different forms of ability and disability and it is supported by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. The company has already produced videos and plays which develop an inclusive theatre practice that has received numerous awards and critical attention (see publication “Inclusive theatre-making on the stage: the case of Rebekka Kricheldorf’s Homo Empathicus (2014)” on Intralinea, 2022).  

During the five-year period 2023-2028, the company “Teatro a Rotelle” aims to create a context of experimentation for an inclusive and accessible theatre experience for actors and audiences with the help of assistive software. 

To achieve this goal, an interdisciplinary collaboration between directors, technicians and theorists of inclusive theatre will be developed. 

2023-2024:

• Acquisition and implementation of assistive software and digital media;  
• Mapping and study of contemporary experiences of inclusive theater in different international contexts; 
• Creation of an inclusive theatre festival. 

2025-2027: 

• Production of the first inclusive work for both for actors and audience; 
• Creation of guidelines for an inclusive theatre; 
• Contribution to the theory of inclusive theatre within Disability studies. 

Group leaders: Manuel Boschiero and Massimo Salgaro

Internal members:

• Sidia Fiorato 
• Nicoletta Vicentini 
• Jana Karšaiová

External members:

• Claudia Olivieri (Catania) 

Actions: WP 1.1, 1.2, 1.4

Bibliography:

Kuppers, P (2001), Decontructing Images: Perfoming Disabilities. Contemporary Theatre Review, 11: 25-40.
Di Giovanni, E. (2022). Inclusive theatre-making: Participation, empowerment and well-being. inTRAlinea Special Issue: Inclusive Theatre: Translation, Accessibility and Beyond, Di Giovanni E., and Raffi F. (eds), https://www.intralinea.org/specials/article/2609
Di Giovanni, E. (2021). Oltre l’accessibilità. I teatri inclusivi. Lingue e linguaggi 43: 15−31.
Boschiero M. and Karšaiová, J., Salgaro, M., Vicentini, N. (2022), Inclusive theatre-making on the stage: The case of Rebekka Kricheldorf’s Homo Empathicus (2014). inTRAlinea Special Issue: Inclusive Theatre: Translation, Accessibility and Beyond, Di Giovanni E., and Raffi F. (eds), https://www.intralinea.org/specials/article/2593
Johnston, K. (2016) Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. 

New phenomena such as digital social reading, instapoets, and the “rating culture” expressed in online reviews challenge traditional literary criticism in newspapers and journals. Millions of reviews on platforms such as Amazon or Goodreads are part of this culture of participation and a counterweight to professional criticism. At the same time, successful instapoets such as Rupi Kaur reject the expertise of the gatekeepers of “prestigious literary circles” and try to establish a direct connection with readers. Literary studies adopt a variety of positions regarding these new phenomena. Most literary scholars still ignore or even demonize them. In fact, online reviewing not only presents new forms of reviewing, it challenges the prestige of conventional criticism and the traditional distinctions between professional and non-professional criticism (Laienkritik in German). 

The aim of this project is to build the proper methodological framework to capture these changes in the current literary system. To do this, the phenomenon of online reviewing has to be contextualized within the history and the praxis of assigning literary value to literary texts, the so-called canonization. In addition, literary theory needs to be able to analyze quantitative data and to integrate numbers into its models (engaging in a procedure that is called operationalization).  

At the basis of the project will be a corpus of book reviews published in literary magazines and online reviewing platforms. The analysis will proceed through a combination and integration of methods: (a) the theoretical and stylistic research of literary criticism; (b) socio-psychological analysis of the dynamics that inform reviewing practices; and (c) computational modeling of the linguistic aspects that distinguish them. 

Our project will require the integration of three main perspectives (the literary, the social, and the computational).  

Group leaders: Marco Rospocher and Massimo Salgaro

Internal members:

• Ainur Kakimova (PhD student)
• Simone Rebora 
• Gabriele Vezzani (PhD student)

External members:

• Francesca Frontini (CNR Pisa) 

Actions: WP 1.1; WP 1.3 

References:

Franzen, Johannes. 2021. ‘Everyone’s a critic : Rezensieren in Zeiten des ästhetischen Plebiszit’. In Unterstellte Leseschaften: Tagung, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, 29. bis 30. September 2020. DuEPublico. https://doi.org/10.37189/duepublico/74186. 
Hajibayova, Lala. 2019. ‘Investigation of Goodreads’ Reviews: Kakutanied, Deceived or Simply Honest?’ Journal of Documentation 75 (3): 612–26. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2018-0104. 
Pianzola, Federico. 2021. Digital Social Reading. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1162/ba67f642.a0d97dee. 
Rebora, Simone, Peter Boot, Federico Pianzola, Brigitte Gasser, J Berenike Herrmann, Maria Kraxenberger, Moniek M Kuijpers, et al. 2021. ‘Digital Humanities and Digital Social Reading’. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36 (Supplement_2): ii230–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab020.