Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

Summer 7-30-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

August 2026

Department

Comparative Studies Program

College Granting Degree

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Department Granting Degree

Comparative Studies Program

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Ilaria Serra

Abstract

This dissertation traces nearly fifty years of representations of disability, understood as a cultural category, from the late 1970s to the early 2020s, in two interconnected traditions: Italian and Italian American literature. In particular, it explores how disability reshapes the act and aesthetics of writing in contemporary Italian and Italian American novels and memoirs. Given the field’s relative newness, the substantial groundwork still required, and the many connections between literature and disability, this dissertation uses nine case studies with a balanced pairing of Italian and Italian American works in each chapter: Carmelo Samonà’s Fratelli (1978) and Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish (1980); Tommaso Avati’s Il silenzio del mondo (2022) and Claudia Durastanti’s La straniera (2019); Nadina LaSpina’s Such a Pretty Girl: A Story of Struggle, Empowerment, and Disability Pride (2019), Lorenzo Amurri’s Apnea (2013), and Ada d’Adamo’s Come d’aria (2023); Louise DeSalvo’s Breathless: An Asthma Journal (1997) and Cesarina Vighy’s Scendo. Buon proseguimento (2010). These texts are not selected only as social and historical testimonies of attitudes toward disability, nor merely to identify positive or negative representations of disability. They are chosen for their literary value and their use of imagery, metaphors, style, and themes to offer alternative ways of understanding and describing disability. For this reason, they are organized into thematic chapters, each addressing a different condition and literary theme: intellectual disability and the language we use to describe it (Knocking on the Threshold); d/Deafness and characterization (The Deafened Moment); physical disability and the wheelchair as a symbol (On the Wheelchair); and chronic illness and style (A Breath of Words). In addition, the case studies are grouped by literary genre: the first half of the dissertation engages with novels, while the second half focuses on memoirs, with Claudia Durastanti’s La Straniera serving as a point of transition at the end of the second chapter. The works chosen vary in degree of fiction, from clear first-person memoirs (LaSpina, Amurri, D’Adamo, DeSalvo, Vighy), to semi-autobiographical novels (Samonà, De Rosa), to fully fictional novels (Avati), and somewhere in the middle (Durastanti).

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