‘Making original use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of "minor literature" and its power to shift boundaries and enable new forms of becoming, Roberto Binetti reads the work of Italian women poets who transform the contours of lyric poetry and its political valencies. An exemplary account of how new lyric voices can break down binary oppositions while finding different forms of subjectification and self-representation.’ – Jonathan Culler, Cornell University
Poetics of Becoming: Women’s Poetry in Italy’s Long Seventies explores the work of Elsa Morante, Amelia Rosselli, Patrizia Cavalli, and Biancamaria Frabotta, examining how their poetry redefined lyric subjectivity in 1970s Italy. Engaging with feminist theory and cultural history, the book interrogates the category of scrittura femminile and its limitations, considering how these poets navigated questions of political agency, heterodox experimentalism, and marginalization within a male-dominated literary canon. Through close readings and comparative analysis, it highlights their responses to the feminist movement, postwar Italian politics, and philosophical debates. The study argues that their poetry enacts a process of ‘becoming’, destabilizing fixed identities and expanding the boundaries of lyric expression as a site of both resistance and renewal. Poetics of Becoming reimagines the relationship between gender, politics, and poetics, offering a new framework for understanding women's poetry in modern Italy.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Women’s Poetry in Italy’s Long Seventies
Chapter 1
A Poetics of Femininity? From scrittura femminile to Minor Literature
Chapter 2
World: Lightness and Gravity in Morante and Cavalli
Chapter 3
Audience: Clarity and Obscurity in Rosselli and Frabotta
Epilogue
The Personal is Political: Towards a Poetics of Becoming
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Roberto Binetti is a STARS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Padua. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. He holds a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, where he also served as a Lecturer in Italian at St Anne’s College.
