The Italian Research Seminar
Joseph Francese (Michigan State) - “Where Do Ideas Come From? Of Critical Method and/or Historical Materialism”
Thursday October 6 at 5:00pm in Special Collections, Hesburgh Library
Prof. Francese will provide an overview of our profession, and of scholarly writing and publishing, before discussing the importance of applying critical approaches to intellectual inquiry. He will then give an overview of his more recent scholarship, on Italian literature in the Fascist and post-Fascist era, against the backdrop provided by the historical, political, and sociological development of Italy since the 1930s.
Joseph Francese is University Distinguished Faculty at Michigan State University, Senior Editor of Italian Culture (the journal of the American Association for Italian Studies) since 2003, and currently Editor of “Studi di italianistica moderna e contemporanea nel mondo anglofono/Studies in Modern and Contemporary Italianistica in the Anglophonic World” (a monograph series published by Firenze University Press). He is the author of numerous articles and chapters on topics in Renaissance and contemporary literature, and has written books on Sciascia, Pasolini, postmodern narrative, Italian cultural politics in the 1950s, and the fictions of Eco, Consolo, and Tabucchi. He has edited three volumes of collected essays, the latest being Perspectives on Gramsci: Culture, Politics, and Social Theory for Routlege. Vincenzo Consolo: Gli anni dell’Unità (1992-2012), ovvero la poetica della colpa-espiazione appeared in 2015. At present, he is working on a book-length studies of political engagement among twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian intellectuals, on the polemic between Vittorini and Togliatti in the late 1940s, and on the Neo-avantguarde.