Kimberly Mays and Dr. Larry Peer, Humanities
Alessandro Manzoni, one of the great Italian authors studied worldwide, is best known for his novel, The Betrothed. However, he wrote many other works that deserve careful study as well. While he is studied heavily in Italy, Manzoni often gets pushed aside in traditional American educations. The purpose of our project was to examine other works and correspondence in the context of his role in the beginnings of European Romanticism.
Although we had an extensive preliminary bibliography, I found myself with too much reading and not enough ideas. It was probably too ambitious to plan on writing a publishable or presentable paper on a topic I knew relatively nothing about. My mentor allowed me complete freedom to study and work on my own. I appreciated the open nature of the project, but felt inadequate to assert myself as an expert on the subject. As mentioned above, Manzoni is sometimes completely left out of a survey of important world literature. After reading article after article in both English and Italian, I now feel like I have a broad introduction to Alessandro Manzoni’s works and the criticism about it. This is the base I should have had before undertaking the project. The 2006 International Romanticism Conference expressed interest in the resulting paper, but it was not presented because I felt uncomfortable doing so.
All in all, I am grateful for what I learned, especially the research skills. My personal goal for the project was to learn the ins and outs of literature study and research. I can comfortably say that goal was met. I also elevated my Italian to the level desired. Before the project I was comfortable with day to day conversation and light reading. Reading Manzoni and Manzoni criticism in Italian forced me to learn how to decode the language in academic writing. That knowledge has been extremely helpful in subsequent literature studies. Unfortunately, I did not reach my professional goal of presenting at the Romanticism conference.