{"title":"Should Shipwrecks Be Sweet?","authors":"M. Truglio","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9812514","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Demand for books about current events in Italy has yielded scores of children’s books in the past three decades that treat the topic of immigration. The goals of eliciting empathy in children and explaining to them complex historical and contemporary events can be challenged by the perceived need to shield children from traumatizing scenes. This essay examines four recent children’s books published in Italy that dramatize immigration from Africa. Authors Maria Attanasio, Erminia Dell’Oro, Dino Ticli, and Francesco D’Adamo allude to canonical Western literature (such as Pinocchio and Cuore) as a way to sweeten these often bitterly disquieting narratives for their young readers. This essay probes the potentials and limits of intertextuality and ultimately argues that several texts go beyond leveraging the image of capsized ships in the Mediterranean, an image that has become a media fetish, to engage readers in ways that facilitate both empathy and critical self-reflection.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Romanic Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9812514","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, ROMANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Demand for books about current events in Italy has yielded scores of children’s books in the past three decades that treat the topic of immigration. The goals of eliciting empathy in children and explaining to them complex historical and contemporary events can be challenged by the perceived need to shield children from traumatizing scenes. This essay examines four recent children’s books published in Italy that dramatize immigration from Africa. Authors Maria Attanasio, Erminia Dell’Oro, Dino Ticli, and Francesco D’Adamo allude to canonical Western literature (such as Pinocchio and Cuore) as a way to sweeten these often bitterly disquieting narratives for their young readers. This essay probes the potentials and limits of intertextuality and ultimately argues that several texts go beyond leveraging the image of capsized ships in the Mediterranean, an image that has become a media fetish, to engage readers in ways that facilitate both empathy and critical self-reflection.
Romanic ReviewArts and Humanities-Arts and Humanities (all)
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
23
期刊介绍:
The Romanic Review is a journal devoted to the study of Romance literatures.Founded by Henry Alfred Todd in 1910, it is published by the Department of French and Romance Philology of Columbia University in cooperation with the Departments of Spanish and Italian. The journal is published four times a year (January, March, May, November) and balances special thematic issues and regular unsolicited issues. It covers all periods of French, Italian and Spanish-language literature, and welcomes a broad diversity of critical approaches.