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Within the scheme of the DIVE-IN: Diversity & Inclusion (2018-2022) Excellence Project, the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna has progressively become a permanent interdisciplinary laboratory, capable of dealing with some urgent challenges in contemporary international policies, i.e., the concepts of linguistic and cultural diversity, inclusion and citizenship, both in abstract terms and in their implementation in academic research and teaching. This article aims at describing the activities and products conceived and developed by the several teams in which the Project was articulated, thus showing the substantial ways through which it shaped the present and the future of the Department, by allowing to avoid the fragmentation of knowledge and by facilitating the creation of new collective and multidisciplinary synergies.

This article discusses the notion of space as it relates to the condition of women in history, society, culture, and literature. The concept of space has been widely used by 20th-century feminist theorists as a key metaphor to warn against the marginalization of women from cultural and power discourses. Alternatively, through the idea of a “politics of location”, spatial metaphors were used to highlight the diverse contexts and perspectives pertaining to each individual woman, which must be taken into consideration in contemporary multicultural feminist debates. This article aims at exploring how the notion of space was reframed by Italian scholar Daniela Brogi in her recently published essay Lo spazio delle donne (2022), which precisely revolves around the metaphor of space, and which represents a multifocal take on the condition of women in Italian culture and society and proposes new ways to deconstruct widespread patriarchal logics, as well as new lenses to look at women’s experiences with a view to encouraging opportunities for intercultural growth.

This paper aims at a critical analysis of comedian Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside (2021) – a show filmed during the Covid-19 lockdown period – in terms of defamiliarization techniques, and especially through the lens of the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung. By resuming the main theories of estrangement, comparing Shklovsky’s ostranenie to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and transposing them into the context of contemporary cinematic texts, the analysis foregrounds instances of the V-effect in Inside, namely the ironic exposure of the automatisms of contemporary society, the attention drawn towards performativity, and the goal of encouraging viewers to adopt a critical frame of mind. Despite the emotional detachment that Verfremdung conventionally pursues, this essay explores the complex interplay between estrangement and affective responses in the audience’s engagement with the comedy special.

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

The poetry of Sylvia Plath (1932⁻1963) has received a considerable number of critical responses, among which spatial analysis occupies a minor position, although her texts explore complex relationships between subject and context. Drawing from a threefold theoretical apparatus (Bachelard’s theory of the poetic space, the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, and the trope of liminality), this article focuses on the analysis of Plath’s increasing use of in-between spaces and objects of transition and transformations (mirrors, thresholds, windows), as well as on her predilection for heterotopic and alienating sceneries (hospital rooms, cemeteries), in both her poetry and prose. The study first acknowledges Plath’s choice of spatial imagery as a progressive orientation towards transitional states and places of otherness and ambivalence. Then, it highlights the specific role of heterotopic and liminal spaces in the process of reconfiguration of female identity. Given the impossibility for the female subject to rely on imprisoning domestic spheres to suture the edges of her fragmented self, reconceptualization of her own consciousness only becomes possible in the movement across a threshold. The analysis finally determines that the poetic evocation of spaces of conflict and difference paradoxically contributes to the shaping of female identity.