Category Archives: PSA Journal

Call for Submissions PSA XXXII (2019)

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Call for Submissions

PSA XXXII (2019)

Co-editors: Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka

PSA, the journal of the Pirandello Society of America, is happy to announce its call for submissions for our upcoming issue (volume 32, which will be printed in spring 2020). The journal is interested in and publishes on not only the work of Luigi Pirandello but also the broader context of modernist theatre, literature, and culture in which he operated. The editors are pleased to consider submissions that fall within this field and invite comparative and interdisciplinary contributions. PSA is a peer-reviewed journal, and submissions are sent to readers anonymously for expert review.

Article submissions should generally be between 5,000 and 10,000 words, follow MLA formatting, and can be made via email (send an anonymized word document with separate cover sheet including personal information) to: editorpsa@gmail.com  The submission deadline for this issue is January 20, 2020. Questions for the editors can be directed to the email address above.

In addition to article submissions, PSA seeks submissions that would fit into its other sections:

  • Interviews for publication in the journal’s “In Conversation” section. We are happy to accept submissions consisting of interviews with directors, actors, filmmakers, translators, or other artists who work on Pirandello or who connect themselves to Pirandellian themes.
  • New translations of Pirandello’s work or relating to Pirandello’s work.
  • Original creative work inspired by or relating to Pirandello.
  • Finally, the journal also publishes book and performance reviews relating to Pirandello and encourages submissions of any relevant reviews to the editors.

We are happy to accept submissions for these on a rolling basis. These submissions can likewise be made via email (as a word document) to: editorpsa@gmail.com

We look forward to reading your submissions,

Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka

Co-editors, PSA

PSA XXXI – Pirandello in New York: “Raison d’être: An Evening of Pirandello”

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In the Pirandello Society of America’s recent edition of the PSA journal, Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni talks to Jennifer Jewell and Patrick Mulryan about their recent collaboration on Raison d’être: An Evening with Pirandello. Jewell (actor and producer) and Mulryan (director and adaptor) tell PSA‘s O’Keefe Bazzoni about their experimental approach to Pirandello, as their 2018 theatre piece featured new translations and a collage of three plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Chee-Chee and The Man with a Flower in his Mouth.

Below is John L. DiGaetani’s review of the performance. You can find the entire conversation with Jewell and Mulryan, as well as this and other reviews in the 2019 PSA journal!

Pirandello in New York: “Raison d’être: An Evening of Pirandello”

John L. DiGaetani

 Hofstra University

“Raison d’être: An Evening of Pirandello” sounded suspiciously like a mish-mash to me when I read about the production, but when I saw the performance I was very pleased. The author of the adaptation, Patrick Mulryan, followed Six Characters in Search of an Author as a main text but used two other Pirandello plays to populate the stage with characters. Chee-Chee introduced the play and The Man with the Flower in his Mouth appeared toward the end. This all sounds very weird, but the combination made for a lively evening of Pirandellian theater. After all, Max Reinhardt’s production of the play in Berlin in the ’20s had already altered the play with the addition of details from other Pirandellian plays. The characters originally featuring in Six Characters are not the liveliest, and adding other elements can increase the effectiveness of the play. Pirandello himself was even willing to approve such adaptations.

Mulryan’s adaptation succeeded in keeping the audience interested in what was occurring onstage, despite a minimalist production and uneven acting.  The lighting was evocative and the stage was large—in the basement of a church in an off-Broadway location, in a theater called Theatre 71 at Blessed Sacrament. Though Pirandello was not known for being a good Catholic, Pirandellian theater happened here all the same.

In directing the play, Mulryan kept the action moving and the audience engaged.  Among the actors impersonating the six Characters, Nora Armani was especially moving as the Mother. Even though she had few lines, she was able to keep the audience interested in her and her suffering. The actor playing the Son, David Klein, was especially effective at dramatizing the cynical reserve of this character, while David Linden’s Father maintained a reserved innocence and kept defending it, despite the facts before him. Lucie Allouche’s Step-Daughter brought a convincing mania to her unhappy character. Toward the end, Melissa Eddy Quilty’s Madame Pace generated a comic, absurdist tragedy that altered the situation. Jennifer Jewell became especially moving as the Man with the Flower, bringing a clown-like comedy to his desperate monologue.

Overall, the performance succeeded in generating the comic absurdity so characteristic of Pirandellian tragedy. One hopes that this company will pursue and stage other examples in the history of Italian theater, as well. Venice in the 18th century remains a particularly fertile ground for Italian theater, with its two great Carlos: the realistic Carlo Goldoni and the surreal Carlo Gozzi, who had such a great effect on l9th and 20th century Italian and German opera—including on Pirandello himself.

PSA XXXI – William Weaver’s translation of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

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William Weaver’s compelling translation of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, was first published in 1990 and has since gone out of print, becoming increasingly difficult to find. But in October 2018, a new press based in California, Spurl Editions, re-issued Weaver’s translation, bringing the unforgettable voice and sometimes disturbing vision of Pirandello’s protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, back to English readers again.

In November of 2018, PSA’s Michael Subialka sat down with the editor of Spurl Editions, Eva Richter, to discuss the press’s recent publication of William Weaver’s translation. You can find the rest of this conversation in the PSA journal’s recently-published 31st edition.

Filippo Balbi, “Testa anatomica”

MS: We can’t help but point out the cover image you’ve chosen for the new edition, featuring Filippo Balbi’s painting “Testa anatomica.” Can you tell us more about what made you opt for this image?

ER: I came across this painting even before starting Spurl Editions. I thought it was beautiful, with the muted green-brown background accentuating the odd stretching men’s bodies that form the bodiless head. I thought it would make an eye-catching book cover; when I read Pirandello’s novel, it seemed to fit it perfectly. The multiple figures that make up the painted portrait call back to the novel’s theme that a person does not have one identity that is fixed in time, but rather multiple identities, based on who the person is with, where he is, how he perceives things around him, how he sees himself at that moment, and, further, the inevitable multiplicity of identities that any fictional character (such as Moscarda) takes on, based on who is reading the novel. The head itself, since it has no eyes or body, also seems somehow empty in the way that Moscarda ultimately seems to have emptied himself in the end.

MS: This connection between the image and Moscarda’s experience of multiplicity and self-dissolution seems compelling and speaks to a major theme across Pirandello’s works. In his famous essay from 1908, On Humor (L’umorismo), Pirandello argues that the self is indeed multiple and changing and that we need to be able to see ourselves from outside in order to jar ourselves out of our static self-conception toward a more vital one – much in the way that Moscarda’s journey of self-rediscovery begins with his estranged experience of seeing his own face. I think lots of us can probably relate to seeing ourselves in the mirror and feeling detached, or hearing someone else’s description of us and not recognizing ourselves. Do you think we’re meant to relate to this experience, or is Pirandello drawing something more like a limit case, something that we recognize but that also far exceeds our own, usual experiences?

ER: I agree that Pirandello is drawing something like a limit case, which is bound to exceed our own experiences. It is interesting to me that the narrative expressly acknowledges this—there are multiple instances where Moscarda remarks that although his thought processes may seem familiar to any reader, there is something essentially different about where Moscarda’s thoughts are taking him. Maybe, in this way, the reader is meant to become more alienated from him/herself through reading the novel. Those thoughts that the reader has, over many years, become accustomed to now seem strange, grotesque, and extreme, when viewed through the refracted lens of this narrative. The reader is forced to look at their own seemingly benign self-reflection as only the half-formed beginning of an idea that must lead to a total revolution of the self.

MS: This idea of a total revolution of the self speaks to what you mentioned before about Moscarda ending up “empty” by the end of the novel. Can you say more about that? Do you think that the ecstatic kind of immersion that he experiences with nature in the closing part of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand should be taken seriously, or do you think he has lost his mind? And, in turn, do you think this novel is ultimately positive or negative or neither or both?

ER: I think that those ideas or interpretations exist in an interesting tension with one another. To me, the notion that Moscarda is “empty” by the end of the novel has to do with the narrative’s ultimate rejection of all those things that make a typical fictional character a “character.” Moscarda rejects language, discourse, and human relationships for the “wordless” sphere of nature. This may be a positive development, especially because he has gone past the more solipsistic thoughts that obsessed him in the beginning—but, of course, there is also something a little sickening in Moscarda’s withdrawal. And, because Moscarda’s withdrawal marks the end of the novel, it is like witnessing this character’s death.

MS: Maybe since we’re talking about the disappearance of the novel’s protagonist, now is a good time to change topic and ask a bit more about the specific translation and some of its nuts and bolts. For example, we noticed that you thank Bard College for its support of the publication. Could you say more about their involvement?

ER: William Weaver, who translated One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, as well as other works by Pirandello, was a professor of literature at Bard College for many years. Bard College licensed the rights to publish his excellent translation to us.

MS: Weaver’s translations of Pirandello and other Italian authors are by now “classics,” and he played a huge role in helping to bring modern Italian literature to English-language audiences. Are there any aspects of his rendering of this novel that you particularly like or find compelling, or any things that you would have liked to see done differently?

ER: I think Mr. Weaver did a wonderful job with this translation, as well as with his translation of The Late Mattia Pascal. His use of modern, generally conversational vocabulary helps to imbue Moscarda with a personality that feels genuine; conversely, Mr. Weaver’s use of syntactically complex sentences and structures conveys that sense of an increasingly vertiginous philosophical analysis.

MS: Vertiginous is such a good way of describing the feeling of the novel’s conceptual development, and it reminds us of Pirandello’s earlier novel, The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904), which Weaver also translated into English. That novel begins with a “philosophical” preface in which the narrator depicts the world spinning in the void of space, making its inhabitants lurch here and there, pointlessly, until they die. A somewhat bleak, existentialist kind of outlook. The Late Mattia Pascal is still in print, recently re-released in the New York Review Books series of Italian titles. But of course many of Pirandello’s works are no longer available – or were never available – in English. Honestly, we find it somewhat baffling that despite his international fame, his Nobel Prize, and everything else, Pirandello’s works have still not been completely translated into English. As someone in the business, we wonder if you have any thoughts about what kinds of obstacles might have held that process up. Is this a specifically “American” problem (there is, for example, a “complete works” translation in German, which was edited by the prolific Pirandello scholar Michael Rössner)?

ER: We find it baffling as well! Yet this seems to be a fairly widespread issue in American publishing. In other countries (such as Germany, France, etc.), you regularly see the complete translated works of an author published by the same publisher. I am not sure if there is something about the American market that discourages this kind of thing, if maybe American readers just want to read the “one classic,” instead of a writer’s full life’s work. Hopefully translators and publishers will continue to bring Luigi Pirandello’s works into English, so that we non-Italian readers can have access to the range of his fascinating work.

PSA XXXI – Pirandello’s “Sicilianness” in Translation

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In the PSA journal’s 31st edition the PSA editors asked a group of their contributors to talk about the ‘biggest issues facing translators’ of Pirandello. Amongst the numerous responses were two that dealt, crucially, with the ‘Sicilianness’ of Pirandello’s plays and the difficulties and possibilities that exist when one is translating out of such a specific language/dialect (cultural and linguistic). Elisa Segnini (Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Glasgow) and Enza De Francisci (Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow) both talk about translating Pirandello’s ‘Sicilian’ plays while Michael Rössner (Professor Emeritus of Romance Literatures at the University of Munich) wraps up the discussion with a note on translation in context.

We hope you enjoy the discussion, there will be more excerpts of the latest edition of the PSA journal to come!

In “Pirandello and Translation: A Conversation across the Field” the PSA editors asked a group of their contributors to talk about the ‘biggest issues facing translators’ of Pirandello. Amongst the numerous responses were two that dealt, crucially, with the ‘Sicilianness’ of Pirandello’s plays and the difficulties and possibilities that exist when one is translating out of such a specific language/dialect (cultural and linguistic). Elisa Segnini (Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Glasgow) and Enza De Francisci (Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow) both talk about translating Pirandello’s ‘Sicilian’ plays while Michael Rössner (Professor Emeritus of Romance Literatures at the University of Munich) wraps up the discussion with a note on translation in context. 

PSA: As you all point out, Pirandello’s history in translation can be as complicated as his stances on translation – with problems and questions but also exciting surprises. With that in mind: what do you think are the biggest issues or questions facing translators interested in Pirandello’s work? What are the biggest questions that scholars should consider when thinking about Pirandello’s work in relation to theories or practices of translation? 

Elisa Segnini: Today, the “Sicilian” plays offer interesting opportunities at a time in which we are going beyond the assumption that translations from dialect need to be mediated by national language before reaching international visibility. The key question is how to stress cultural and linguistic specificity in the target text without engaging in cultural appropriation, travesty, or even parody. Some of these issues emerged in relation to the recent adaptation of Liolà by Tanya Ronder, which was used for the 2013 production directed by Richard Eyre at the National Theatre. Eyre’s choice to cast Irish actors and use gipsy music reminded me of Crémieux’s decision to transpose Sicily into Corsica in the 1935 Parisian production of Questa sera si recita a soggetto. Both choices say something about the translator’s/director’s sensitivity to portrayals of cultural representations but, in suggesting cultural and temporal equivalence, are also problematic and controversial.

There are exciting possibilities for theatre translators and directors working with Pirandello today, although, as my experience has shown, concrete challenges remain. When, in 2014, I discussed the possibility of adapting a classic like Questa sera si recita a soggetto for the Canadian stage with theatre director Guglielmo Bernardi, we became immediately aware of the obstacles. First, the play is extremely demanding in terms of production, as it combines the Italian tradition of acting – the ability to improvise and sing – with the technology fashionable on stage in the Weimer Republic. Casting, in fact, had already been an issue for Pirandello in Berlin the 1930s! Furthermore, the play is embedded with cultural references that were immediately recognizable in Europe in the 1930s, but they are unfamiliar to contemporary Italians, not to mention to international audiences. For example, the play presupposes familiarity with Verdi’s melodramas: Il Trovatore features prominently not only at the musical level, but also thematically. By introducing allusions to Gipsies and “Gipsiness,” it underlines issues of ethnic difference and marginality. What would happen to this subtext in a production for the contemporary Canadian stage? In addition, what about the misogynistic feelings and the violent behavior that Pirandello deliberately foregrounds as typical markers of “Sicilianness?” The essentialism entailed in the representation of the protagonist, we feared, may be offensive to the local Italian and Sicilian communities. The play has, of course, been staged in the last few years both in Italy and abroad. But we felt that these issues were important, and that it would be challenging to put together a production that took them into consideration. 

Enza De Francisci: In fact, one of the main aspects in translating Pirandello which has interested me the most is how to translate the sense of Sicilian-ness (or sicilianità) of his work. If, as Pirandello states: “Una letteratura dialettale, insomma, è fatta per restare entro i confini del dialetto” (In sum, dialect literature is made to stay within the confines of the dialect, Spsv, 1208), then what happens when dialect literature comes out of its geographical borders? In Tanya Ronder’s new version of Liolà, this meant transporting the Sicilian countryside characters to rural Ireland, a decision which raises numerous questions regarding cultural translations, an approach primarily associated with scholars such as Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere, and Lawrence Venuti. Can one community be faithfully translated by another, particularly when different varieties of a language are concerned? Manuela Perteghella has identified various strategies for transposing dialect and slang in theatre, and it seems that this new version of Liolà fits in well with her definition of a parallel dialect translation:

To translate a dialect or slang into that of another specific target language, usually one that has similar connotations and occupies an analogous position in the target linguistic system. Proper names are kept as in the original, as are topical jokes, places, and other source-language cultural references. Use of actors (specified) regional accents [. . .]. This strategy will achieve the desired reception effect only if the translator works closely with director and actors. There is always the danger of mis-reception (i.e., a play perceived to be born within the audience cultural system). (Perteghella 2002: 50)

Indeed, Ronder’s version of Liolà was performed by a cast employing an Irish accent: an accent which arguably has “similar connotations [as the source language] and occupies an analogous position in the target linguistic system,” as Perteghella puts it. What was thus translated here was not just the words from Pirandello’s script but the concept of sicilianità as a type of ‘Other,’ or more specifically, a type of Ireland. From a socio-linguistic point of view, the parallel between the two islands implied that instead of being written in the “major” language the original script used a kind of “sub-language.” By introducing this linguistic element, audiences were able to recognize that the village characters were from a marginalized community and a territory detached from the mainland, without having to involve the use of dialect itself. The translation was therefore able to preserve the genetic code of the original script as well as to communicate with the British audience. From a more historical and cultural perspective, the choice resonated even more so. Both Sicily and Ireland have had a difficult history with their “major” counterparts, with Sicily often characterized as the “Africa of Italy” following political unification in 1861 and Ireland (excluding Northern Ireland) gaining independence in 1921. However, as Perteghella reminds us, “[t]here is always the danger of mis-representation in parallel dialect translations.” Arguably, the danger emerged in Liolà when the Irish-speaking actors employed Sicilian gestures on stage. Richard Eyre invited the director Luca Vullo to lead workshops on how to gesticulate in Sicilian and, therefore, the mis-representation can be said to be rooted in this mix between the Irish and Sicilian worlds (De Francisci, 2017). So for me, the biggest question to consider when translating Pirandello’s “commedia campestre” is how to go about adapting something so culturally-specific as sicilianità?

Michael Rössner: It is the question of cultural translation which is fundamental for our world: You have to consider the contexts – the context of origin and the context of the translation or of the final reception of his work – and you have to consider the negotiation (borrowing the term from Homi Bhabha) which takes place between these contexts. Translation is not just a replacement of one series of words by another; it changes the contexts, and it is an ongoing process.

 

PSA XXXI Just Published

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In the PSA journal’s 31st edition, which is currently at the presses, editors Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialki talk to a group of Pirandello’s translators in “Pirandello and Translation: A conversation across the Field.” We’ve excerpted a piece of it for you here, in which the editors put a couple of questions to translators Jacob Blakesley, Jane House, Mary Anne Frese Witt, Michael Rössner and Martha Witt.

PSA: Our discussion up to this point, specifically regarding the language barrier and handling of idioms, makes us think of the oft-debated dilemma of literal vs. free translation, which seems always to be a somewhat controversial issue. Which method did you opt for when you translated Pirandello? Why?

Jane House: I suppose I’m halfway in between. Being too literal one becomes bland and sometimes nonsensical. Going too far in being “free,” one verges on adaptation. Creating a literal translation at the start will help make sense of the original and the translator’s first duty is to make sense; one must often wrestle with the original; thinking that the author made an error shows arrogance and laziness. Beyond making sense, I try to retain the poetry of a sentence or phrase; to be sensitive to the sounds of the original, the relationship of the phrase to other phrases; to this end, I will often count the number of syllables in the word, or in the sentence, and then endeavor to make my English of equal length. This is especially important in theatre where the rhythm of a line or an exchange of lines can so often evoke laughter or tears in the audience. I may read the original aloud, to hear the sounds and intonations. I grew up on British poets, especially Shakespeare, and discovered the iambic pentameter and learned how changing the meter can add drama to a text. Pirandello was a poet. His prose can include passages that are overwhelmingly lyrical; he was able to paint touching images with few words, because he was sensitive to sound, rhythm, alliteration, inflection and other elements that poetry comprises. He will use alternate words or expressions for the same action: crying, weeping, sobbing, shedding tears, wailing, howling. It can help the translator to be aware of these changes in the original; they can be inspirational guideposts.

Michael Rössner: Similar strategic decisions had to be made for the translation of Pirandello’s works into German. The project was started by my friend Johannes Thomas in 1982. What we found was a puzzle: Pirandello’s novels and short stories had been translated in some cases in a very strange way—leaving out the “philosophical” parts and adapting his work to the present context. In the 1920s this entailed a kind of post-Nietzschean neo-baroque style where, for example in Six Characters, the “Author” became the “Creator” and the characters became “creatures” in order to interpret the play as a quest for God in a world where God was dead. In the 1950s it took the form of an expressionist literature avant la lettre. So, we tried to return to Pirandello himself, to reconstitute his ideas. When the first project ended because of financial problems, I took over. We were able to find an editor for the whole edition between 1997 and 2001, and in that edition I have tried to realize the kind of “experiencing” instead of “rational judging” that Pirandello himself recommends in his essay [On Humor]. If you are really “inside” his work, you may experience what he describes as his way of composing: you hear the voice of the figures, you hear the voice of Pirandello himself in your language, and this helps you to make decisions.

Jacob Blakesley: I would say, first of all, that I think the concepts ‘literal’ and ‘free’ in the context of translation theory are not useful terms, since they are too ambiguous. An interlinear translation, a gloss translation, a word-for-word ungrammatical approach, a grammatically correct non-literary translation, a grammatically correct literary translation can all be described, in various degrees, as ‘literal’. The main problem is that the notion of ‘meaning’ in literary studies—and all the more so in translation studies—is polysemous and multi-layered, including both the signifier and the signified. And so I think that the concepts of ‘literal’ and ‘free’ should be discarded in favour of looking at how the translations fit into the target literary system.

In my translation of Pirandello, I had to try to stick as close to a word-for-word translation as possible, because the aim of my translation was to provide a facing-page translation to the Italian text. I would have preferred, in fact, to have translated another way, but I was both conscious of the linguistic aid that my version was supposed to offer (having been a student once myself) and I was directed by Dover to be very adherent to the source text’s semantic meaning. Dover’s copyeditors also objected on several occasions to places where they thought I had not been close enough to the text.

Mary Ann Frese Witt & Martha Witt: We view most translation work, to some degree, as a work of interpretation. Although we pay close attention to the original text, we also seek to make it relevant to the current readership, so on the spectrum between ‘literal’ and ‘free’ translation, we are somewhere in the middle in an effort to serve as handmaidens to the original while remaining mindful of today’s audience.

PSA: Well, this resonates perfectly with what renowned Italian essayist Cesare Garboli used to say about the translator’s task: he loved to compare it with that of a performer, as both must have the ability to “interpret” the text. Garboli looked at the narrative work as a piece of music, in other words. Do you agree with Garboli? And was this your approach when you developed your own voice for translating Pirandello?

Mary Ann Frese Witt & Martha Witt: The comparison is an apt one. Just as no performer will ever know completely what was in the mind of the composer, no translator will ever know exactly what was in the mind of the author. Both performer and translator convey the musical piece or the foreign text to their audience through their own sensibility, style, and interpretation. Yes, the translator is also an interpreter.

Jacob Blakesley: I definitely agree with Garboli that a translator necessarily interprets the text s/he translates—in this sense, as others have stated, translation can be the utmost act of reading. We must remember that there is a linguistic abyss between an original text and the translation: the words we read in translation are those of the translator. In this sense, there is definitely co-authorship. We don’t read the words of Homer in English; we read the words of Robert Fagles or Emily Wilson. A translation is always the product of a meeting of poetics, as Franco Buffoni, the Italian poet and translation theorist says. In that sense, the voice of the author and the voice of the translator come together. Because of the constraints mentioned above, I don’t really feel like there was a harmonious meeting of poetics, since my style was limited by the facing-page Italian text and the need to be as close to the original semantic meaning and syntax as possible.

Jane House: Cesare Garboli is certainly on the right track with this analogy. Performers must be sensitive to the author’s intentions, to text and subtext and their character’s underlying emotions; to relationships with others; they must have knowledge of the historical period and social customs, and so on. I have spent much of my life, especially as a young professional actress, on stage performing in classical plays by such masters as Aeschylus, Alfred de Musset, Franz Wedekind, Anton Chekhov, and Tennessee Williams as well contemporary plays such as Lenny by Julian Barry on Broadway and, on national tours, Bedroom Farce by Alan Ayckbourn and An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley. Each of these works demand that the performer delve into the life of the play as depicted by the playwright. Performing in the chorus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound remains an indelible experience as we trained for six weeks in movement and vocal expression.

However, translation demands that one “perform” in one’s imagination while wrestling with the language at home alone. Acting demands a presentation before an audience using one’s entire physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual equipment; you yourself are the instrument you need to play. In either case, background study and the imagination are of primary importance in interpreting texts.

Call for articles: PSA XXVIII (2015)

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PSA, the Pirandello Society Annual journal, invites articles from multiple disciplines for volume XXVIII (2015) of the publication. We welcome articles that engage Pirandello’s work and influence from perspectives including film, literature, theatre or the visual arts. We welcome comparative and interdisciplinary work that examines a range of topics including: the historical context of Pirandello’s work, the broader discourses in which his work and ideas can be read, theoretical perspectives that might enrich our understanding of his work and the work of his contemporaries, studies of the sources relevant to Pirandello’s work, studies of the reception and legacy of Pirandello in Italy and/or globally.

We also seek reviews of recent performances, adaptations, and publications on these and related topics.

PSA is a leading source of English-language research on Pirandello that regularly features work by both established and emerging scholars. In publication since 1985, it is committed to fostering both specialized research on Pirandello as well as comparative and interdisciplinary approaches; likewise, the Pirandello Society of America strongly supports not only the study but also the production of Pirandello’s theatrical work. All submissions to the journal are read by the issue editor(s), and all published articles go through a process of double-blind peer review. Volume XXVIII (2015) of the journal will be in print in early 2016.

PSA submission guidelines:

Use the current MLA Style Manual (references in the text, minimal endnotes, Works Cited following the endnotes) for articles (15-25 MS pages) and book or performance reviews (2-3 MS pages). Please, do not use automatic formatting. Any images included must be available in separate, high resolution files and the author will be responsible for securing permission if needed. Manuscripts will be peer reviewed.

Articles should be accompanied by a short abstract and bio.

Please, submit articles (MSword.doc) via email to editorpsa@gmail.com by July 31, 2015. Please provide a separate cover page giving the author’s name and contact information. Leave no self-identifying information in any portion of the text.  Submit via email attachment. Mark your subject line: PSA 28.

Please direct any inquires to the editor at the same address.

Call for Articles – PSA XXVII (2014)

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PSA, the Pirandello Society Annual journal, invites articles from multiple disciplines for volume XXVII (2014) of the publication. We welcome articles that engage Pirandello’s work and influence from perspectives including film, literature, theatre or the visual arts. We are especially interested in papers that examine political themes and motivations throughout his corpus or comparative and interdisciplinary articles that examine the European and/or global resonance of Pirandellian themes, tropes, or images in the visual arts, film, or on stage.

PSA is a leading source of English-language research on Pirandello that regularly features work by both established and emerging scholars. In publication since 1985, it is committed to fostering both specialized research on Pirandello as well as comparative and interdisciplinary approaches; likewise, the Pirandello Society of America strongly supports not only the study but also the production of Pirandello’s theatrical work. All submissions to the journal are read by the issue editor(s), and all published articles go through a process of double-blind peer review.

PSA submission guidelines:

Use the current MLA Style Manual (references in the text, minimal endnotes, Works Cited following the endnotes) for articles (15-25 MS pages) and book or performance reviews (2-3 MS pages). Please, do not use automatic formatting. Manuscripts will be peer reviewed.

Articles must be accompanied by an abstract of approximately 250-300 words and a brief bio (100 words).

Please, submit articles (MSword.doc) via email to editorpsa@gmail.com by August 15, 2014. Please provide a separate cover page giving the author’s name and contact information. Give no self-identifying information in any portion of the text.  Submit via mail attachment. Mark your subject line: PSA 27.