On the 7th centenary of Giovanni Boccaccio’s birth
The Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura.
THE NARRATIVE FICTION OF GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO: FORMS,THEMES AND RECEPTION: International conference
February 28 – March 2, 2013
Department of Italian Studies
University of Toronto
Free admission
To see the programme, please click here.
“The conference will see the participation of 33 speakers coming from Italy, Canada, USA, United Kingdom. The Keynote speakers will be Prof. Renzo Bragantini, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” and Prof. Pier Massimo Forni, Johns Hopkins University. The aim of the conference is to study the Decameron from a wide variety of perspectives taking into consideration the foundational impact that Boccaccio’s masterpiece has had, and continues to have, on Western literature.
The conference will explore the following themes:
1. Narrative Forms
• Linguistic models of the Boccacian
tradition
• Narrative strategies in the Decameron:
the macrosystem of the cornice and other
models of the Oriental and Western
tradition
• The genre of the novella from Boccaccio
to the 20th century: between reality and
fiction
2. Themes
• Opposition in the Decameron: the tragic
and the comic grotesque; philogyny and
misogyny; the useful and the pleasurable;
the marvellous and the true
• The boundaries of the imagination:
adventure in the Decameron as research
and exploration
• The female narrator: the intellectual elite
in the Decameron and Boccaccio’s other
works
3. European Intertextuality
• The Decameron and the European
literature of invention: the literature of the
langue d’oc and d’oil; Spanish literature;
Arabic literature; the exemplary literature
and other narrative boundaries
• The Decameron and its classical sources
• Boccaccio’s reception in Europe:
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Marguerite of
Navarra’s Heptameron; Cervantes’s Novelle”
