Marilena Parlati Marilena Parlati i(A131200 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 Do Australian Modernisms Strike Back? Still Harping on ‘Margins’ Marilena Parlati , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: Rethinking Peripheral Modernisms 2024; (p. 99-118)

'New modernist studies problematise the term ‘modernism’, its uses and abuses, therefore views on non-hierarchical modernist constellations exemplify the “simultaneous uncontemporaneities” Patrick Williams expanded upon in 2000. The purported ‘belatedness’ of ‘other’ modernisms is predicated on such premises, with Oceania, and more specifically Australia, as a fertile case in question. By looking askance at peripheral modernisms, and thus trying to read against the grain of a stale and debatable centre/margin cultural divide, this paper investigates many received assumptions by focussing on two women writers who have both been marginally included under the ‘modernist umbrella’: Christina Stead, an Australian expatriate to both Britain and the US, and Eleanor Dark, who chose to remain unabashedly local. In particular, I investigate Waterway (1938) and Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), novels in which Dark and Stead portray the metropolitan fluidities of the capital city of a settler-state described by John Williams as a “quarantined culture”.' (Publication abstract)
1 Europe and its ‘Ends’. Haunting (by) the Past in Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe Marilena Parlati , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia , vol. 2 no. 2 2011; (p. 42-52) 'This paper aims at attempting an analysis, by force partial, of white Europe as such a metaphor in the light of recent critical work on whiteness within a European context. Quite obviously, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 strongly impacted upon the numerous and often conflicting discourses related to the construction and reconstruction of global and European identities which followed that momentuous event; I refer here to the lacunar mythical roots Luisa Passerini finds in the idea of Europe itself (2002), to the shadows of the Shoah, but also to studies of European post-socialism in its unpredictable and still underrated connections with post-colonialism and the aftermath (and vampiric debris) of the Cold War.' Marilena Parlati.
1 Looking for/at Australia : Roots and Repulsion in Contemporary Australian Women's Writing Marilena Parlati , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Imagined Australia : Reflections around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity between Australia and Europe 2009; (p. 251-263) 'No matter how seriously attacked and deranged, identity remains a keyword for contemporaneity. Political agendas and propagandas are packed full with claims and calls for new or old senses of belonging; nations and narrations abound with discourses focussed upon finding ro recuperating personal and collective memories, which might thus safeguard one's dreamy rootedness and secure location in the world. And yet, within these manifestoes lie dispersed and abjected bodies, weak and nomadic subjects which crowd the bitter arena of contemporary philosophical reflections as well as political praxis and 'vernacular' reality (CF. Kreisteva 1982; Vattimo 1999; Butler 1990, 1993; de Lauretis 1990; Bugliese 2007c) Ethnicity is another term one often encounters in the public as well as private spheres, especially in the Anglophone context. It has replaced the previous race markers in general as well as in critical parlance. And yet, it is a term which seems to be still deeply dangerous in its constructing borders of inclusion and exclusion in/out of any given community. In this view, (visible) ethnics exist insofar as they are recognized (and recognize themselves) as such in vertiginous and self-perpetuating but distorted mirror scene. What is obliterated in such positions is the obvious fact that every human being is ethnically located; of course, the term is a useful tool in the hands of mainstream, powerful groups often advocating multi-forms of marginalization (cf Knippling 1996; Yoshino 1999).' (p251)
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