Literature - Female, Singular

Under the entry “literature,” the dictionary writes: s.f. sing. or feminine singular noun. Curious, for a history that has been told to us for centuries almost always in the masculine. Have you ever found Gaspara Stampa in a literature textbook? And Moderata Fonte? Vittoria Colonna? Matilde Serao? Sibilla Aleramo? Some appear only briefly, others disappear completely, and still others seem to enter history only when someone decides to recover them. Yet they wrote, published, thought, influenced their time. In Italian school curricula, the only female author unanimously admitted into the canon is Elsa Morante. The others — more than 400 documented — have vanished. So where did the women writers go? Why were they excluded? And what have we lost by not reading them? Female Literature, singular is a lecture-performance that, starting from the writers excluded or marginalized from the literary canon, questions the way school has taught us to read literature, history and value. Dates: - Thursday 21 January at 8:30 pm - Friday 22 January at 8:30 pm