Italian Research Seminar: Roberto Dainotto (Duke)

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Location: Rare Books & Special Collections (102 Hesburgh Library)

The Spring lectures are being planned in a hybrid online and in-person format. Please register here

 

The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor Roberto Dainotto of Duke University titled "We, the People: Strategies of Representation in the Italian Novel":

Taking my cue from an essay I wrote recently on Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on the narrative point of view, I would like to devote this talk for the Italian Research Seminar Series to the analysis of the point of view in some canonical 19th- and 20th century Italian novels. One main objective of the talk is to rethink the relation between formal and sociological criticism in literary studies — or, put differently, a relation between aesthetics and culture.
 
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Roberto Dainotto is Professor of Literature, Italian and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. He has been Professeur invitè at the Université Paris Ouest, and Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa. His main research and teaching interests hinge on the concepts of place and space as narrative, rhetorical, and geopolitical organizational categories. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell UP, 2000); Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007), winner of the 2010 Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies; and Mafia: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015). He has also edited Racconti Americani del ‘900 (Einaudi scuola, 1999), a monographic issue of Italian Culture on Giambattista Vico (2017), and co-edited with Fredric Jameson Gramsci in the World (Duke UP, 2020).


The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.