Rozprawy doktorskie na temat „World war, 1939-1945 – italy – fiction”

The subject of this doctoral dissertation is a thematic study of the representation of the Resistance in French fiction films since 1944. This work encompasses the larger fields of history and memory of the Resistance and the Second World War. It is a cinematographic historiography which explores 50 years of film production about the French Resistance. It analyzes the historical choices put forward by film, the censorship which had to be overcome, as well as the sources it used. It also examines how film contributes to the formation of historical consciousness. These developments are compared with the written history of the Resistance. The sources for this work include both visual and written materials: films, preliminary documents, censorship files, and film criticism. Nine interviews provide an additional aspect to this corpus. The parallel drawn between the historiography of the Resistance and the films allowed for a better understanding of the fluctuating relationship between film and historical studies. Also, the examination of this filmography from the perspective of women resisters permitted filmic analysis to move beyond the traditional and politically oriented evaluations of films based on Gaullist or communist memory.

The Hoboken War Bride is a work of historical fiction set in Hoboken, New Jersey during World War II. A young soldier named Daniel and an aspiring actress named Hildy marry days after meeting, though the marriage is doomed to fail. This young couple is not compatible. Daniel ships out to basic training the day after their hasty marriage, leaving Hildy behind with his family, the Anellos, who she quickly becomes attached to. Hildy is exposed to family in a way she had never lived with her own, embracing them even though she doubts she'll ever have a future with Daniel. When Daniel returns after the end of the war, the young couple try to make their marriage work, but it fails almost immediately. Both Hildy and Daniel struggle to pick themselves up after their divorce, finding themselves making choices they never thought they would when they were younger.

This study applies the ICB model of state behavior in international crisis to one actor, Italy, in the 1953 Trieste crisis. At the historical level it reconstructs in detail, through recently declassified American and Italian documents, the flow of events from mid-1951 until October 5, 1954 when the signing of the so-called Memorandum of Understanding solved the Trieste question. At the theoretical level, it seeks to determine the impact of crisis-induced stress on the coping processes and choice patterns of Italian decision-makers. The findings confirm the major hypothesis (advanced by Holsti and George) about the stress-performance nexus, namely that "moderate" levels of stress improve decision-making performance while "high" stress might impair it. A modification of the definition of foreign policy crisis adopted by the ICB model is also suggested.

The French Expeditionary Corps that fought in Italy during World War II was a French army, but that description must be qualified. Therefore this thesis asks two questions: how did France manage to send the equivalent of an army to Italy if French military leadership in 1943 had no direct access to French manpower resources; and the most important question since it is unique to the historical debate, why were the troops that were sent to Italy so effective once there when compared to the 1940 French army? To answer the first question, it was a French colonial army – soldiers mainly from Africa – that enabled France to send an army to Italy. The second question was not so easily addressed and is actually composed of two parts: current scholarship finds that at the tactical level French troops of 1940 no less capable than the troops in Italy, but more importantly it was the French military leadership's willingness to expend the lives of their colonial solders with little regard that allowed the French Expeditionary Corps to allow the United States Fifth Army to enter Rome just days before the Allied invasion of Normandy. And in order to understand why the French military was willing to expend the lives of its African soldiers, this thesis also had to examine the French colonial system dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, this paper explores the different components of leadership that each army, which were African (primarily from North Africa and French West Africa) and metropolitan (mostly from European France), used to lead and direct their men. Thus, this study is more than just a pure military history. It is also a cultural and social history of France in relation to its colonies.
M.A.
Department of History
Arts and Humanities
History MA

The classically idyllic, carefree world of childhood would appear to be diametrically opposed to the horrors of war and world-wide conflict. However, throughout film history, filmmakers have continually turned to the figure of the child as a prism through which to examine the devastation caused by war. This thesis will investigate the representation of childhood experience of the Second World War across six fiction films: Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1947), René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night (1964) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). Spanning forty years, I will examine how these films, whilst sharing many thematic and formal concerns, are unquestionably diverse. They are products of specific socio-cultural milieux, but are also important works in the evolution of cinematic style in art cinema. The films can be aligned to various trends such as neorealism (Paisan, Germany Year Zero), Modernism (Ivan’s Childhood, Diamonds of the Night) and Neo-expressionism (Come and See). Structured in four parts – on witness, landscape, loss and play – I will suggest that just filmmakers utilise childhood experience – often fragmented and chaotic in terms of temporality - to reflect the chaos of war. The first part of my study focuses on the child as witness, the child as Deleuzian seer. I draw on the writings of Gilles Deleuze as well as post-Deleuzian interventions of Tyrus Miller and Jaimey Fisher to argue that whilst Deleuze’s characterization of the child figure as passive is somewhat problematic when applied to the neorealist works, it can, however, be more rigorously applied to Come and See, a film in which, I suggest, the child embodies a much purer form of the Deleuzian seer. In the second part of my study, drawing on the work of Martin Lefebvre and Sandro Bernardi amongst others, I discuss the representation of landscape and its relation to the figure of the child. The third part will examine the representation of loss as well as the symbolic quality of water and its links to the maternal with reference to psychoanalytic theory and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The fourth and final part also draws on psychoanalysis in examining the role of play in the six films with particular reference to the work of D.W Winnicott and Lenore Terr. My study seeks to contribute to the comparatively under-explored subject of the child in film through close analysis of film aesthetics including mise-en-scène, editing, and film sound.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the evolution of children's historical fiction dealing with World War II in order to describe the changes that have occurred over the past 50 years. Two questions were asked in the study: (1) Has the characterization of protagonists portrayed in historical fiction about World War H evolved since 1943? and (2) Have the accounts of the events of World War H portrayed in historical fiction evolved since 1943? Content analysis was used as the method of collecting data. The sample consisted of 86 novels written from 1943 to 1993. Upon completing the reading and coding, the researcher discussed the categories and questions posed. As part of analysis, the discussion of the novels in each period was accompanied with an overview of trends in children's literature and events affecting society. The analysis led to the following conclusions: 1. Authors were impacted by changes in the social and political climate, as evidenced by the changes in the gender of the protagonists, an increase of violence, and the inclusion of women. 2. Novels written during the 1980s and 1990s were written with a stronger American perspective. 3. At the time that an increase of violence was seen in American society, descriptions of World War II events and protagonists' actions became more violent and more graphic. 4. Though the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war with Japan, an inadequacy still exists in the number of novels that provide readers with details related to the atomic bombs. Though much of World War II was fought in the Pacific Rim, a deficiency remains in the number of novels set in Pacific Rim countries. Recommendations for further research include performing a study that examines other genres, analyzing the changes observed in the portrayal of protagonists. A study could be conducted to analyze the author's ethnicity and relationship to the war and determine if differences exist.

A collection of three, interwoven short stories set in Japantown, San Francisco and the Topaz Internment Camp in central Utah during World War II. The pieces in this collection feature themes of cultural identity and the reconstruction of personal identity in times of change and crisis. Collection includes the stories "Moving Sale," "Evacuation," and "Resettlement."

Cette thèse porte sur les représentations de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le roman français, de 1945 à 1960. Elle vise à mettre en lumière un corpus de la « guerre manquée », opposé à la vision épique dominante dans l'après-guerre. Elle analyse dans leurs dimensions esthétiques, éthiques et politiques, une vingtaine de romans dont le point commun est de donner à voir une guerre irréelle ou insaisissable, qui a pu constituer pour bien des Français une expérience commune.La première partie analyse la façon dont s’écrit le combat manqué. Ces romans dessinent l’image d’une guerre à la fois fantomatique et violente : observée à distance, presque toujours médiatisée, dissimulée sous des semblants de paix, mais invariablement destructrice.Les romans mettent également en lumière l’échec de la communauté. Par opposition au récit fondateur et unificateur qu’est l’épopée, ils dénoncent très tôt le mythe d’une France tout entière unie dans la lutte. La deuxième partie montre comment se construit l’image d’une nation déchirée ou passive, dont ils incarnent la mauvaise conscience.On s’intéresse enfin à la « pensée du roman », en montrant comment ce dernier a été le vecteur d’une réflexion spécifique sur la communauté. Contre les positions de la Résistance littéraire, puis de l’existentialisme, il a interrogé le primat du rationnel en l’homme ; contre la vogue du document, il a revendiqué la fiction pourexplorer les zones d’ombre ; contre la demande d’exemplarité, enfin, il a constitué un espace d’investigation autonome, attaché à contester les failles et les limites du discours épique
This thesis deals with the representations of the Second World War found in the French novels published between 1945 and 1960. It aims to shed light on a body of works that depict a “failed war”, unlike the epic vision which prevails in the post-war period. It analyses from an aesthetic, ethical and political perspective twenty novels or so which portray war as an unreal, elusive experience shared by French people.The first part of this work scrutinizes the way writers depict the failure of war. These novels portray the conflict as both spectral and brutal – seen from a distance, almost always mediated, concealed under the appearance of peace, yet unescapably destructive.These novels also throw light on the failure of community. A far cry from the seminal, unifying narrative of the epic, they start attacking the myth of France as unified in the war effort very soon after the end of the conflict.The second part of this thesis looks at the ways they construct the image of a torn or passive nation, as if they were France’s guilty conscience.This study will finally examine the way the novel “thinks”, how it was specifically used to convey a specific reflection on community. Against the discourses of literary Resistance, then Existentialism, it questioned the primacy of rational thinking in men; against the prominence of documents, it embraced fiction as a means to explore dark territories; against the calls for exemplariness, it constituted itself as an autonomous space to investigate the war, as well as to challenge the failures and shortcomings of the epic discourse

This thesis is a broadly chronological study of representations of Japan and the Japanese in Australian novels, stories and memoirs from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Adopting Edward Said???s Orientalist notion of the `Other???, it attempts to elaborate patterns in which Australian authors describe and evaluate the Japanese. As well as examining these patterns of representation, this thesis outlines the course of their development and change over the years, how they relate to the context in which they occur, and how they contribute to the formation of wider Australian views on Japan and the Japanese. The thesis considers the role of certain Australian authors in formulating images and ideas of the Japanese ???Other???. These authors, ranging from fiction writers to journalists, scholars and war memoirists, act as observers, interpreters, translators, and sometimes ???traitors??? in their cross-cultural interactions. The thesis includes work from within and outside ???mainstream??? writings, thus expanding the contexts of Australian literary history. The major ???periods??? of Australian literature discussed in this thesis include: the 1880s to World War II; the Pacific War; the post-war period; and the multicultural period (1980s to 2000). While a comprehensive examination of available literature reveals the powerful and continuing influence of the Pacific War, images of ???the stranger???, ???the enemy??? and later ???the ally??? or ???partner??? are shown to vary according to authors, situations and wider international relations. This thesis also examines gender issues, which are often brought into sharp relief in cross-cultural representations. While typical East-West power-relationships are reflected in gender relations, more complex approaches are also taken by some authors. This thesis argues that, while certain patterns recur, such as versions of the ???Cho-Cho-San??? or ???Madame Butterfly??? story, Japan-related works have given some Australian authors, especially women, opportunities to reveal more ???liberated??? viewpoints than seemed possible in their own cultural context. As the first extensive study of Japan in Australian literary consciousness, this thesis brings to the surface many neglected texts. It shows a pattern of changing interests and interactions between two nations whose economic interactions have usually been explored more deeply than their literary and cultural relations.

Est-ce que les romans écrits par six grands auteurs italiens (Beppe Fenoglio, Italo Calvino, Elio Vittorini, Renata Viganò, Mario Tobino), membres de la Résistance, peuvent aider les historiens à mieux comprendre cette période de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale et à analyser les processus de la construction de la mémoire collective. Les fictions apportent des éléments pour comprendre l'état d'esprit des hommes qui ont pris le parti de se battre contre les nazis et les fascistes. Les écrivains présentent le caractère spontané, incertain des motivations de ces rebelles, loin d'être des héros. L'historien Guido Quazza définit ces attitudes par le terme « d'antifascisme existentiel », insistant sur les aspects valeureux de ce mouvement, comme les historiens qui l'ont précédé. Cette différence entre les deux visions apparaît également dans l'examen des attitudes de la population. Les romans insistent sur la multiplicité et l'instabilité des comportements des civils. Les travaux des historiens des années 50 se concentrent sur les formes de soutien du monde paysan. Dans les années 70 ils étudient cette partie de la population italienne qui n'a pas voulu prendre parti, qu'ils nomment « la zone grise ». Les romans accordent une place au rôle des femmes dans la Résistance, pris en compte plus tard par la recherche historique.Cette analyse montre l'efficacité de la littérature pour l'histoire culturelle et anthropologique de la Résistance, par sa finesse et sa subtilité elle permet de percevoir, derrière les événements, les pensées des gens qui y participent. De plus l'utilisation de la littérature comme source peut contribuer à l'élaboration d'une mémoire complexe
Six notable Italian authors (Beppe Fenoglio, Italo Calvino, Elio Vittorini, Renata Viganò, Luigi Meneghello, Mario Tobino) portrayed what the life of the insurgents was during World War II. This research investigates the potential of their fictional works to help historian better understand this crucial period, they experienced.An appraisal of fictitious accounts of the war, as seen from the insurgent's perspective, may help understanding their state of mind once facing the armed forces of both the German occupant and fascists battalions. Their pre-political sensibility has been defined by the historian Guido Quazza as 'existential anti-Fascism". Historian's accounts of the Italian Resistance portrayed it from a somewhat idealistic view, mostly highlighting the heroic side. However, it is clear from the literature analyzed, that it was far from harmonious. The writer stresses the multifarious and the diversity of the population's comportments. Historical works of the 1950's concentrated on analyzing the support by the peasants to the Resistance, while in the 1970's this focus shifted to the importance of the "grey zone", the non-committal population. The novels underline the factual, supportive attitude of women throughout the Italian Resistance, only corroborated by recent scholarly works.This research indicates the efficacy of fictional literature as a complement to the use of historical cultural anthropology, for analyzing components of the Italian Resistance. Their keenness and subtlety allows scholars to better assess people's thoughts behind observed events. Use of this material may help avoid a simplified building of memory

Defence date: 3 March 2000
Examining Board: Prof. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Universität Bielefeld (supervisor) ; Prof. Luisa Passerini, Istituto Universitario Europeo (co-supervisor) ; Prof. Claudio Pavone, emeritus, Università di Pisa ; Prof. Jakob Tanner,Universität Zürich
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017
L'oggetto di questa tesi sulla Seconda Guerra Mondiale e sulla Resistenza armata in Italia è il racconto che viene «inventato» per narrare gli eventi passati o la memoria selettiva. Si tratta di uno studio su storia e memoria e sul modo in cui funzionano e sono trasmesse. Basandosi sull'analisi di fonti disparate come le riviste storiche divulgative, le immagini fotografiche e documenti alleati e tedeschi, esso osserva le discrepanze tra i fatti (storia) e la loro narrazione (memoria). Inoltre studia come sono narrati i fatti, come si ricorda e si dimentica, chi è il narratore (testimoni, seconda generazione, collettività) e come ciò influisce sul racconto tramandato. Il testo tenta di capire se c'è una ragione per la forma narrativa scelta e quale potrebbe essere. Prendendo spunto dal funzionamento psicologico della memoria individuale, esso osserva la memoria collettiva e come, nel dopoguerra, l'Italia narrandosi «sceglie» o «inventa» una memoria che le dia una nuova identità.

This thesis is composed of a creative component, the novel Hannah and Emil, based on the lives of my grandparents, and an exegesis that examines two contemporary novels dealing with issues similar to those I confront in the creative component: Burning In by Mireille Juchau and The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert. Although there are many narratives based on German experience in the Second World War, Hannah and Emil deals with a group not well known to readers in English, non-Jewish left wing dissidents. Their narrative emerges from the material and non-material effects they left behind: papers, photographs and arcane objects, but also memory and stories, and those things that were left unsaid. This foregrounding of such means of receiving the past situates this novel alongside others, like those of Juchau and Seiffert, that deal with family memory as inheritance. In the novel, Hannah, a Russian Jew brought up in London, leaves her family as a young woman and travels to continental Europe to learn languages. Interested in the lives of working people, she finds herself in Berlin in the 1930s, and then working as a translator for the trade unions in Brussels. There she meets Emil, recently escaped from the Nazis who murdered his father in a wave of violence against the Left. Together Hannah and Emil run a youth hostel in England until in 1940, with invasion from Germany seemingly imminent, the British government arrests thousands of German and Austrian refugees, and transports them on the infamous Dunera to Australia. Hannah and Emil is to an extent a political romance, a story of lives committed to ideals, and to each other. It is also a story about what is lost and what remains in family stories, and what might be imagined into the gaps left behind by previous generations. The exegesis, after giving a brief background on my own inheritance of the materials and stories of family history, centres on Burning In and The Dark Room, novels whose characters also receive their sense of a broader history through family stories, photographs and objects. Applying the ideas of Marianne Hirsch (postmemory), Dominick LaCapra (‘empathic unsettlement’), Dori Laub (listening to witnesses) and James Young (‘received history’), these readings propose that fiction can express a distinctive knowledge received through mediated forms, a way of knowing marked by what is not known. The exegesis claims that in this way fiction offers an ethical epistemology that allows for the otherness of the past to those trying to understand it in the present.

Defence date: 15 October 2003
Examining Board: Victoria De Grazia (EUI, Firenze); Gérard Delille (EUI, Firenze, supervisor); Gabriella Gribaudi (Università Federico II, Napoli); Marco Palla (Università di Firenze)
First made available online on 23 October 2014.
Questa ricerca nasce dal recente ritrovamento, presso gli eredi del pittore fiorentino Giovanni Colacicchi, di lettere e documenti appartenuti a Carlo Levi, risalenti al periodo in cui il pittore e scrittore torinese tenne aperto uno studio a Firenze: dalla fine del 1941 alla fine del 1945. Durante questi anni, accadono molte cose che un biografo definirebbe “fondamentali”. Dalla Questura di Firenze parte l’ordine di arresto che costa a Levi la terza carcerazione della sua vita: dalla fine del giugno 1943 sarà detenuto al carcere delle Murate, da cui uscirà il 26 luglio. Tra il 1943 e il 1944, nascosto in piazza Pitti, scrive Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli, che resterà il suo libro più celebre. A Firenze Levi aderisce al Partito d’Azione, e quindi lo rappresenta, dall’agosto 1944, nella direzione interpartitica della “Nazione del Popolo”, il quotidiano pubblicato a cura del Comitato Toscano di Liberazione Nazionale. Tra i cinque condirettori, Levi si ritaglia un ruolo di assoluto primo piano: ha un peso molto rilevante nella scelta dei collaboratori, a lui si devono la presenza di certi temi e prese di posizione sulle pagine della “Nazione del Popolo”. Levi interviene direttamente – sono almeno trenta i suoi articoli di fondo, concentrati soprattutto nei primi mesi di vita del giornale –, oppure commissiona alcuni pezzi ad hoc ai suoi collaboratori più stretti.