Articles for DWF
Reviews for DWF
Books reviewed by DWF
Articles for DWF
The connivent dream of perfection, 1986, n. 1, pp. 79-90
A study of the forms and the contents of self-representation in the cinematographic production by women. According to the author, more than writing or theoretical thought, films can be placed in an intermediate area between dream and reality.
Therefore, she means to use women's film production to highlight the unconscious or oniric images which underlie one's self-representation. Following this premise, the analysis develops along three lines: the images of the female body in traditional cinema and in women's cinema; the forms of "looking" of three directors (M. von Trotta, M. Duras, C. Ackermann); the perspective of the female spectator.
In her conclusions the author suggests a philosophic-psychoanalytical interpretation of the conditions which allow women as subjects to live the "illusion" represented and/or created on the screen.
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On the political use of biography. Virginia Woolf, 1986, n. 3, pp. 7-28
Taking for granted the autobiographical aspect of all biographies, whereby the other, for the woman who investigates her life, becomes not only the mirror, the double, but also the mother "symbolic-of-reality", the writer of this article argues that the political sense of biographies resides in their being "stories of relationships" and in their producing "a particular kind of knowledge".
This is why the life of Virginia Woolf can be used to illustrate both of the above aspects through a different line of approach which involves "re-reading" Virginia Woolf and trying to "reassemble her various voices and styles in relation to the meanings she attributed to the various pieces of her living-and-writing".
An analysis of the passages in the Diaries or Letters where she most explicitly tackles the writing/life theme reveals that her life and her writing were fused in a total relationship, as if writing were the only instrument capable of grasping life and expressing it in the one form that rendered it acceptable to be lived. The contradictions she found in creative work - life/death, joy/pain - are thus transposed into a dialectic of symbolisation-sublimation.
This leads her to perceive "the shaping of writing as the sensation of beauty", as a "certain kind of relationship with the body", with all that this implies for Virginia Woolfs interpretation of the concepts of maternity, fecundity, sickness and resurrection. Hence her idea on "the androgyny of the mind", that reassembling of her being that she seeks and experiences in her writing.
However, this rereading of Virginia Woolf does not aim at being the most rigorous interpretation: rather, it is offered as a reconsideration of "what comes before and during the reading and writing of biographies", and of "the way these are related, and the deepest needs of our search for identity".
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Issues for the 21 st century, 1995, n. 25, pp. 64-76
Giving specific examples, the author argues that "in order to asses the meaning and importance of the Beijing meeting, one must look at in the context of the other N.U. Conferences, as well as of the parallel meetings on financial and trade agreements - which are just as important, though they are not always given the same attention.
One must connect the conferences on 'human issues' with the activity of international financial institutions […]. It is also very important to examine the consequences of the 'perverse' link which has lately been established; i.e. that perspective which confuses and unites women's will to become ever more visible and a new awareness on the part of the institutions of their potentialities as resources for development".
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Reviews for DWF
FUSINI Nadia, Nomi. Il suono della vita di K. Blixen, E. Dickinson, V. Woolf,
G. Stein, C. e E. Brontë, M. Shelley, M. Yourcenar, Milano, Feltrinelli,
1986
rev. by Paola Melchiori, 1986, n. 2, pp. 137-140
Books reviewed by DWF
MELCHIORI Paola, Crinali. Le zone oscure del femminismo, Milano, La Tartaruga,
1995
rev. by Sara Fortuna, 1995, n. 26-27, pp. 102-104