Charles Leavitt | University of Notre Dame (original) (raw)

Books by Charles Leavitt

University of Toronto Press, 2020

Neorealism emerged as a cultural exchange and a field of discourse that served to shift the confi... more Neorealism emerged as a cultural exchange and a field of discourse that served to shift the confines of creativity and revise the terms of artistic expression not only in Italy but worldwide. If neorealism was thus a global phenomenon, it is because of its revolutionary portrayal of a transformative moment in the local, regional, and national histories of Italy. At once guiding and guided by that transformative moment, neorealist texts took up, reflected, and performed the contentious conditions of their creation, not just at the level of narrative content but also in their form, language, and structure. Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History demonstrates how they did so through a series of representative case studies. Recounting the history of a generation of artists, this study offers fundamental insights into one of the most innovative and influential cultural moments of the twentieth century.

Articles by Charles Leavitt

Italian Culture, 2024

Pietro Francisci’s 1947 film, Natale al campo 119, offers unacknowledged insights into the repres... more Pietro Francisci’s 1947 film, Natale al campo 119, offers unacknowledged insights into the representation, redirection, and repression of the memory of Italian colonialism in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Portraying colonial agents and parodying colonial ideology, Francisci’s film approaches the history of colonialism, and in particular the invasion of Ethiopia, both more directly and more critically than other post-war Italian commercial films. Yet Natale al campo 119 also demonstrates how a direct but nevertheless dishonest confrontation with colonialism more effectively facilitated its displacement from the national narrative than could the supposed silence that is often identified in Italian cinema. In its depiction of Italian prisoners of war, and especially in its depiction of the African American guard who oversees those prisoners, Francisci’s film appears to invert the nationalist and racist hierarchies that undergirded Italian Fascism’s colonialist ideology. At the same time, however, Natale al campo 119 exemplifies Italy’s post-war national mythology in too readily granting self absolution for Fascism’s crimes, including those committed in pursuit of colonial conquest. Thanks to the evident contradictions in its representation of Italian colonial history, Natale al campo 119 provides fertile ground for investigating the discursive formation of Italy’s multidirectional memory.

Italian Studies, May 20, 2022

Gian Paolo Callegari's prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone i... more Gian Paolo Callegari's prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone in Italy's response to the Holocaust. Among the earliest Italian creative works to confront the genocide of the European Jews, Callegari's play challenged the legacies of anti-Semitism in European culture. Yet it also concealed the troubling history of its author's own Fascist anti-Semitism. Exploring this apparent paradox, the present essay situates both play and playwright in the postwar Italian context. I argue that Cristo ha ucciso makes possible a substantial reconsideration of the public reckoning that attended news of the liberation of the death camps. This is because, with its provocative claim that Christian forgiveness had to be abandoned as an impediment to justice, Callegari's play offered a radical alternative to the Christian humanist framework predominant in Italian narratives of the Second World War.

Italian Culture, Volume 40, Issue 1, 2022

One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the... more One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the occasion of the journal boundary 2's Anniversary Conference on April 28, 2018. The talk was devoted to "Lorianism, or the Fragility of Critical Barriers," a topic that had already played an important role, albeit less developed, in Buttigieg's pathbreaking essay "Gramsci's Method," originally published in boundary 2 in 1990. In both the article and the talk, what preoccupied Buttigieg was how Gramsci interrogated the cultural work and the political function of historical groups of intellectuals, and how "shoddy thinking, crackpot theories, critical carelessness, and general intellectual irresponsibility" can seriously infect any form of political thought, in the early twentieth century as well as today (Buttigieg 1990, 70). Buttigieg's Gramscian trajectory would thus appear to be framed by a reflection on the historical role of intellectuals and the risk of lacking the "perseverance, intellectual discipline, intense cultural work, and political organization" (Buttigieg 2009, IX) that intellectual labor should instead entail. This special issue of Italian Culture, entitled "Gramsci's Method Thirty Year Later," is meant to celebrate the scholarship and intellectual legacy as well as to commemorate the loss of Joseph A. Buttigieg, who passed away on January 27, 2019. Formerly William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a founding member and past president of the International Gramsci Society, Buttigieg was a formidable scholar as well the translator of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which he published in a definitive three-volume critical edition (1992, 1996, 2007). Yet, for many of us, Joeas he preferred to be calledwas not just a scholar, but also a terrific teacher and an example of intellectual coherence and integrity. Like Gramsci, Buttigieg, too, considered education not only inseparable from culture and politics, but also a crucial element in his inquiry into the function of intellectuals in society and the role they played in history (see Buttigieg 2002, 69-70). For him, this inquiry was not merely theoretical but deeply personal, grounded in his own experiences as a Maltese immigrant who became a professor in the United States.

Àcoma, 2021

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstru... more In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of authors including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that postwar Italian intellectual impegno – defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform – was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated “myth of America” that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

Letteratura e letterature, 2020

This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the Italian reception of Ge... more This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the
Italian reception of German Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s and explores their role in the development of Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. I argue that, precisely because Italian critics approached the German critical category – and indeed all critical categorisation – with scepticism, they facilitated the more indiscriminate use in Italian of the term «neorealismo», which originated, at least in part, as a calque for the German «Neue Sachlichkeit», but which came eventually to constitute a distinct – and distinctly Italian – critical category. Focusing in particular on Giovanni Necco’s 1933 essay Neorealismo made in Germany, I argue that, in the Italian context, questions of classification and definition were deemed
peripheral to the critic’s task, meaning that references to «neorealismo», while customary, remained largely heuristic. As a result, Italian «neorealismo» was free gradually to shift and to expand towards its current definitions.

The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2018

Among the most iconic images in world cinema, the final shot of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città a... more Among the most iconic images in world cinema, the final shot of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945) has inspired an effusion of critical commentary but little critical consensus, instead giving rise to opposing interpretations. I argue that the shot, in which the camera pans to follow a band of children as they march on a hillside overlooking the city of Rome, was shaped by a post-war dispute over the fate of Italian children after Fascism. Re-educating and re-claiming these children was felt to be one of the most pressing tasks facing Italy after the war, and I argue that it was this task that Rossellini and his collaborators sought to represent and even to undertake in their film. Thanks to their efforts, the final shot of Rome, Open City facilitated both a compelling confrontation with Italy’s Fascist past and a convincing – if far from straightforward – vision of its post-war future.

The Italianist, 2017

This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical ... more This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty, Italians increasingly dissented from Croce, but they remained more wedded to Crocean thought – and in particular to Crocean historicism – than has often been argued. Like their predecessors in previous generations, post-war Italian intellectuals positioned themselves dialogically, in constant conversation with Croce’s hegemonic philosophy. The antecedents of their reaction against Crocean historicism can therefore be identified in earlier responses to Croce’s thought, and in this essay I examine two such responses: those of Antonio Gramsci and Renato Serra. I also examine the contemporary resonances of the (partial) anti-Crocean turn, exemplified by a consequential 1992 debate over Holocaust historiography pitting Carlo Ginzburg against Hayden White. Comparing these various assaults on the ‘Crocean citadel of historicist idealism’, I argue that the challenge to Croce has been posed most cogently by those whose dissent from his dominant intellectual paradigm was inspired not by outright opposition but rather by doubt and scepticism. In the essay’s conclusion, I explore the significance of such scepticism, exemplified by the post-war critique of Crocean historicism, for the ongoing debates over ‘probing the limits of representation’.

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and societ... more Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the interrelation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.

Le Tre Corone, 2016

In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was cen... more In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies, shaping critical approaches to Boccaccio for decades after 1945. Reading scholarly and critical studies of Boccaccio alongside the Neorealist debates, I assert that throughout the second half of the twentieth century Boccaccio’s poetics were frequently discussed in a language borrowed from Neorealism, with his corpus evaluated by means of the standards endorsed by Neorealist critics. Just as Boccaccio’s poetics exerted an influence on the proponents of Neorealism, therefore, so too did Neorealism exert a lasting influence on Boccaccio scholarship, whose notions of Boccaccio’s ‘medieval realism’ should be seen as an outgrowth of the Neorealist poetics advocated by post-war Italian artists and intellectuals.

California Italian Studies, 2013

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstru... more In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

Italian Culture, Mar 2013

The author contends that many of the conventions of Italian film studies derive from the conflict... more The author contends that many of the conventions of Italian film studies derive from the conflicts and the critical vocabulary that shaped the Italian reception of neorealism in the first decade after the Second World War. Those conflicts, and that critical vocabulary, which lie at the foundation of what has been called the ‘institution of neorealism,’ established an irreconcilable binary: Cronaca and Narrativa. For the neorealists and their critics, Cronaca stood for the effort to record data faithfully, while Narrativa represented the effort to employ the shaping force of human invention in the representation of information. This essay’s first section analyzes the earliest reviews of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta alongside the contemporaneous literary debates over Cronaca and Narrativa. The second section reconsiders the reception of Pratolini’s Metello and Visconti’s Senso, which similarly centered upon the conflict between Cronaca and Narrativa. The third section proposes that the concepts which have often been employed to unify neorealism are destabilized by the Cronaca/Narrativa binary. In search of a solution to neorealism’s conceptual instability, this essay proposes more critical and purposeful appropriations of the movement’s problematic genealogy.

MLN (Comparative Literature Issue), Dec 2012

The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new ... more The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature's historical formulations. This essay reclaims a forgotten milestone, the 1946 essay "La 'letteratura mondiale'" by the eminent Italian philologist and comparatist Luigi Foscolo Benedetto. What Benedetto's "letteratura mondiale" theorized, and what his critical and philological writings put into practice, was a mode of oppositional reading in which cultural, historical, and ideological difference would counteract the consensus of the present in order to engender a more cosmopolitan and open society. Benedetto's work was founded upon the belief that informed engagement with the literary text-attentive to its linguistic, thematic, and cultural alterity-can produce and support a burgeoning internationalism that will be social and political as well as literary. As I read him, Benedetto contributed two central insights to the historical development of world literature, insights that remain valuable to the contemporary desire for a truly global approach to literary study. First, Benedetto was more sensitive than virtually any other theorist to the difficulties inherent in the attempt to foster an egalitarian, comprehensive, and trans-national literary methodology. Second, he was more attentive to the power dynamics of literary study than were many of his contemporaries and predecessors, and thus offers a methodology to overcome the cultural prejudices and nationalist ambitions that tend to manipulate textual analyses and literary historiographies. Benedetto's insight into the necessity for a textual engagement that is also a social engagement has become all the more relevant today as scholars work to develop new, ethical approaches to world literature, and new methodologies for reading globally.

The Italianist, Feb 1, 2012

Chapters in Books by Charles Leavitt

Innesti : Primo Levi e i libri altrui, 2020

Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, 2020

Largely ignored by scholarship and increasingly occluded in historical memory, Tombolo was once s... more Largely ignored by scholarship and increasingly occluded in historical memory, Tombolo was once so central to Italian culture and politics that even allusive references to the term could conjure the doubt, anxiety, and indignation of a society working to recover after the war. A pine grove located between Pisa and Livorno, Tombolo housed a large American encampment, which was both a key staging site for the Allied invasion of Italy and a centre of power for the post-war American occupation. It was also the site of a flourishing black market, rampant prostitution, and racial tensions, which combined to give it an outsized role in the Allied occupation as well as in the Italian imagination. Indeed, a mix of prurience and prejudice made Tombolo a kind of Italian obsession after the war. It became the "città proibita" or forbidden city, the subject of lurid tales of white slavery, murder, and kidnapping, money laundering, and thefts totalling billions of lire. In countless journalistic exposes, short stories, novels, and even two neorealist films-Tombolo, paradiso nero (Ferroni, 1947) and Senza pietà (Lattuada, 1948)-Tombolo was the staging ground for a cultural confrontation with the transgressions of the Second World War and the post-war occupation. As such representations made clear, violent clashes in Tombolo pitted not only American against Italian but also white against black, northern against southern, man against woman, Right against Left. In art as in life, therefore, Tombolo became the "contact zone" for the competing racial regimes of Jim Crow and Fascism, and for the resistance against those regimes: the nascent American Civil Rights movement and Italian anti-Fascism. Then it was largely-but not entirely-forgotten. I argue that, despite this willful act of collective forgetting, the contact and conflict of Tombolo substantially re-shaped both Italian and American society in the years that followed the conclusion of the Second World War.

Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas, and Nostalgia in Post–World War II Italian Culture, 2018

In composing The Woman of Rome (La Romana, 1948), I argue in this chapter, Moravia was attempting... more In composing The Woman of Rome (La Romana, 1948), I argue in this chapter, Moravia was attempting to redress the twinned traumas of national history and personal memory. The novel's protagonist, a Roman prostitute, serves as the symbolic incarnation of-as well as the developing resistance to-bourgeois corruption and Fascist coercion. An intricate intertextuality facilitates this social critique, allowing Moravia not only to reclaim his repressed memory but also to redeem it, reexamining his own experience from the prostitute's perspective. Moravia imbued his protagonist with a host of figurative associations that lent her narrative-and her narrating voice-a profoundly transformative significance. Through her, he not only reclaimed his repressed memory but also revealed the structures of bourgeois social domination and bourgeois morality. More significantly, he explored the power of literary symbolism to transcend those structures, and to dismantle them. As the subjective center of his fiction, and as the symbolic embodiment of the confluence between his remembered encounter and his intertextual exploration, the protagonist of The Woman of Rome can be said to signify Moravia's renewed commitment to unseating the established order through the unfettered representation of uncensored reality.

University of Toronto Press, 2020

Neorealism emerged as a cultural exchange and a field of discourse that served to shift the confi... more Neorealism emerged as a cultural exchange and a field of discourse that served to shift the confines of creativity and revise the terms of artistic expression not only in Italy but worldwide. If neorealism was thus a global phenomenon, it is because of its revolutionary portrayal of a transformative moment in the local, regional, and national histories of Italy. At once guiding and guided by that transformative moment, neorealist texts took up, reflected, and performed the contentious conditions of their creation, not just at the level of narrative content but also in their form, language, and structure. Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History demonstrates how they did so through a series of representative case studies. Recounting the history of a generation of artists, this study offers fundamental insights into one of the most innovative and influential cultural moments of the twentieth century.

Italian Culture, 2024

Pietro Francisci’s 1947 film, Natale al campo 119, offers unacknowledged insights into the repres... more Pietro Francisci’s 1947 film, Natale al campo 119, offers unacknowledged insights into the representation, redirection, and repression of the memory of Italian colonialism in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Portraying colonial agents and parodying colonial ideology, Francisci’s film approaches the history of colonialism, and in particular the invasion of Ethiopia, both more directly and more critically than other post-war Italian commercial films. Yet Natale al campo 119 also demonstrates how a direct but nevertheless dishonest confrontation with colonialism more effectively facilitated its displacement from the national narrative than could the supposed silence that is often identified in Italian cinema. In its depiction of Italian prisoners of war, and especially in its depiction of the African American guard who oversees those prisoners, Francisci’s film appears to invert the nationalist and racist hierarchies that undergirded Italian Fascism’s colonialist ideology. At the same time, however, Natale al campo 119 exemplifies Italy’s post-war national mythology in too readily granting self absolution for Fascism’s crimes, including those committed in pursuit of colonial conquest. Thanks to the evident contradictions in its representation of Italian colonial history, Natale al campo 119 provides fertile ground for investigating the discursive formation of Italy’s multidirectional memory.

Italian Studies, May 20, 2022

Gian Paolo Callegari's prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone i... more Gian Paolo Callegari's prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone in Italy's response to the Holocaust. Among the earliest Italian creative works to confront the genocide of the European Jews, Callegari's play challenged the legacies of anti-Semitism in European culture. Yet it also concealed the troubling history of its author's own Fascist anti-Semitism. Exploring this apparent paradox, the present essay situates both play and playwright in the postwar Italian context. I argue that Cristo ha ucciso makes possible a substantial reconsideration of the public reckoning that attended news of the liberation of the death camps. This is because, with its provocative claim that Christian forgiveness had to be abandoned as an impediment to justice, Callegari's play offered a radical alternative to the Christian humanist framework predominant in Italian narratives of the Second World War.

Italian Culture, Volume 40, Issue 1, 2022

One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the... more One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the occasion of the journal boundary 2's Anniversary Conference on April 28, 2018. The talk was devoted to "Lorianism, or the Fragility of Critical Barriers," a topic that had already played an important role, albeit less developed, in Buttigieg's pathbreaking essay "Gramsci's Method," originally published in boundary 2 in 1990. In both the article and the talk, what preoccupied Buttigieg was how Gramsci interrogated the cultural work and the political function of historical groups of intellectuals, and how "shoddy thinking, crackpot theories, critical carelessness, and general intellectual irresponsibility" can seriously infect any form of political thought, in the early twentieth century as well as today (Buttigieg 1990, 70). Buttigieg's Gramscian trajectory would thus appear to be framed by a reflection on the historical role of intellectuals and the risk of lacking the "perseverance, intellectual discipline, intense cultural work, and political organization" (Buttigieg 2009, IX) that intellectual labor should instead entail. This special issue of Italian Culture, entitled "Gramsci's Method Thirty Year Later," is meant to celebrate the scholarship and intellectual legacy as well as to commemorate the loss of Joseph A. Buttigieg, who passed away on January 27, 2019. Formerly William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a founding member and past president of the International Gramsci Society, Buttigieg was a formidable scholar as well the translator of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which he published in a definitive three-volume critical edition (1992, 1996, 2007). Yet, for many of us, Joeas he preferred to be calledwas not just a scholar, but also a terrific teacher and an example of intellectual coherence and integrity. Like Gramsci, Buttigieg, too, considered education not only inseparable from culture and politics, but also a crucial element in his inquiry into the function of intellectuals in society and the role they played in history (see Buttigieg 2002, 69-70). For him, this inquiry was not merely theoretical but deeply personal, grounded in his own experiences as a Maltese immigrant who became a professor in the United States.

Àcoma, 2021

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstru... more In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of authors including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that postwar Italian intellectual impegno – defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform – was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated “myth of America” that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

Letteratura e letterature, 2020

This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the Italian reception of Ge... more This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the
Italian reception of German Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s and explores their role in the development of Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. I argue that, precisely because Italian critics approached the German critical category – and indeed all critical categorisation – with scepticism, they facilitated the more indiscriminate use in Italian of the term «neorealismo», which originated, at least in part, as a calque for the German «Neue Sachlichkeit», but which came eventually to constitute a distinct – and distinctly Italian – critical category. Focusing in particular on Giovanni Necco’s 1933 essay Neorealismo made in Germany, I argue that, in the Italian context, questions of classification and definition were deemed
peripheral to the critic’s task, meaning that references to «neorealismo», while customary, remained largely heuristic. As a result, Italian «neorealismo» was free gradually to shift and to expand towards its current definitions.

The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2018

Among the most iconic images in world cinema, the final shot of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città a... more Among the most iconic images in world cinema, the final shot of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945) has inspired an effusion of critical commentary but little critical consensus, instead giving rise to opposing interpretations. I argue that the shot, in which the camera pans to follow a band of children as they march on a hillside overlooking the city of Rome, was shaped by a post-war dispute over the fate of Italian children after Fascism. Re-educating and re-claiming these children was felt to be one of the most pressing tasks facing Italy after the war, and I argue that it was this task that Rossellini and his collaborators sought to represent and even to undertake in their film. Thanks to their efforts, the final shot of Rome, Open City facilitated both a compelling confrontation with Italy’s Fascist past and a convincing – if far from straightforward – vision of its post-war future.

The Italianist, 2017

This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical ... more This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty, Italians increasingly dissented from Croce, but they remained more wedded to Crocean thought – and in particular to Crocean historicism – than has often been argued. Like their predecessors in previous generations, post-war Italian intellectuals positioned themselves dialogically, in constant conversation with Croce’s hegemonic philosophy. The antecedents of their reaction against Crocean historicism can therefore be identified in earlier responses to Croce’s thought, and in this essay I examine two such responses: those of Antonio Gramsci and Renato Serra. I also examine the contemporary resonances of the (partial) anti-Crocean turn, exemplified by a consequential 1992 debate over Holocaust historiography pitting Carlo Ginzburg against Hayden White. Comparing these various assaults on the ‘Crocean citadel of historicist idealism’, I argue that the challenge to Croce has been posed most cogently by those whose dissent from his dominant intellectual paradigm was inspired not by outright opposition but rather by doubt and scepticism. In the essay’s conclusion, I explore the significance of such scepticism, exemplified by the post-war critique of Crocean historicism, for the ongoing debates over ‘probing the limits of representation’.

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and societ... more Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the interrelation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.

Le Tre Corone, 2016

In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was cen... more In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies, shaping critical approaches to Boccaccio for decades after 1945. Reading scholarly and critical studies of Boccaccio alongside the Neorealist debates, I assert that throughout the second half of the twentieth century Boccaccio’s poetics were frequently discussed in a language borrowed from Neorealism, with his corpus evaluated by means of the standards endorsed by Neorealist critics. Just as Boccaccio’s poetics exerted an influence on the proponents of Neorealism, therefore, so too did Neorealism exert a lasting influence on Boccaccio scholarship, whose notions of Boccaccio’s ‘medieval realism’ should be seen as an outgrowth of the Neorealist poetics advocated by post-war Italian artists and intellectuals.

California Italian Studies, 2013

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstru... more In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

Italian Culture, Mar 2013

The author contends that many of the conventions of Italian film studies derive from the conflict... more The author contends that many of the conventions of Italian film studies derive from the conflicts and the critical vocabulary that shaped the Italian reception of neorealism in the first decade after the Second World War. Those conflicts, and that critical vocabulary, which lie at the foundation of what has been called the ‘institution of neorealism,’ established an irreconcilable binary: Cronaca and Narrativa. For the neorealists and their critics, Cronaca stood for the effort to record data faithfully, while Narrativa represented the effort to employ the shaping force of human invention in the representation of information. This essay’s first section analyzes the earliest reviews of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta alongside the contemporaneous literary debates over Cronaca and Narrativa. The second section reconsiders the reception of Pratolini’s Metello and Visconti’s Senso, which similarly centered upon the conflict between Cronaca and Narrativa. The third section proposes that the concepts which have often been employed to unify neorealism are destabilized by the Cronaca/Narrativa binary. In search of a solution to neorealism’s conceptual instability, this essay proposes more critical and purposeful appropriations of the movement’s problematic genealogy.

MLN (Comparative Literature Issue), Dec 2012

The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new ... more The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature's historical formulations. This essay reclaims a forgotten milestone, the 1946 essay "La 'letteratura mondiale'" by the eminent Italian philologist and comparatist Luigi Foscolo Benedetto. What Benedetto's "letteratura mondiale" theorized, and what his critical and philological writings put into practice, was a mode of oppositional reading in which cultural, historical, and ideological difference would counteract the consensus of the present in order to engender a more cosmopolitan and open society. Benedetto's work was founded upon the belief that informed engagement with the literary text-attentive to its linguistic, thematic, and cultural alterity-can produce and support a burgeoning internationalism that will be social and political as well as literary. As I read him, Benedetto contributed two central insights to the historical development of world literature, insights that remain valuable to the contemporary desire for a truly global approach to literary study. First, Benedetto was more sensitive than virtually any other theorist to the difficulties inherent in the attempt to foster an egalitarian, comprehensive, and trans-national literary methodology. Second, he was more attentive to the power dynamics of literary study than were many of his contemporaries and predecessors, and thus offers a methodology to overcome the cultural prejudices and nationalist ambitions that tend to manipulate textual analyses and literary historiographies. Benedetto's insight into the necessity for a textual engagement that is also a social engagement has become all the more relevant today as scholars work to develop new, ethical approaches to world literature, and new methodologies for reading globally.

The Italianist, Feb 1, 2012

Innesti : Primo Levi e i libri altrui, 2020

Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, 2020

Largely ignored by scholarship and increasingly occluded in historical memory, Tombolo was once s... more Largely ignored by scholarship and increasingly occluded in historical memory, Tombolo was once so central to Italian culture and politics that even allusive references to the term could conjure the doubt, anxiety, and indignation of a society working to recover after the war. A pine grove located between Pisa and Livorno, Tombolo housed a large American encampment, which was both a key staging site for the Allied invasion of Italy and a centre of power for the post-war American occupation. It was also the site of a flourishing black market, rampant prostitution, and racial tensions, which combined to give it an outsized role in the Allied occupation as well as in the Italian imagination. Indeed, a mix of prurience and prejudice made Tombolo a kind of Italian obsession after the war. It became the "città proibita" or forbidden city, the subject of lurid tales of white slavery, murder, and kidnapping, money laundering, and thefts totalling billions of lire. In countless journalistic exposes, short stories, novels, and even two neorealist films-Tombolo, paradiso nero (Ferroni, 1947) and Senza pietà (Lattuada, 1948)-Tombolo was the staging ground for a cultural confrontation with the transgressions of the Second World War and the post-war occupation. As such representations made clear, violent clashes in Tombolo pitted not only American against Italian but also white against black, northern against southern, man against woman, Right against Left. In art as in life, therefore, Tombolo became the "contact zone" for the competing racial regimes of Jim Crow and Fascism, and for the resistance against those regimes: the nascent American Civil Rights movement and Italian anti-Fascism. Then it was largely-but not entirely-forgotten. I argue that, despite this willful act of collective forgetting, the contact and conflict of Tombolo substantially re-shaped both Italian and American society in the years that followed the conclusion of the Second World War.

Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas, and Nostalgia in Post–World War II Italian Culture, 2018

In composing The Woman of Rome (La Romana, 1948), I argue in this chapter, Moravia was attempting... more In composing The Woman of Rome (La Romana, 1948), I argue in this chapter, Moravia was attempting to redress the twinned traumas of national history and personal memory. The novel's protagonist, a Roman prostitute, serves as the symbolic incarnation of-as well as the developing resistance to-bourgeois corruption and Fascist coercion. An intricate intertextuality facilitates this social critique, allowing Moravia not only to reclaim his repressed memory but also to redeem it, reexamining his own experience from the prostitute's perspective. Moravia imbued his protagonist with a host of figurative associations that lent her narrative-and her narrating voice-a profoundly transformative significance. Through her, he not only reclaimed his repressed memory but also revealed the structures of bourgeois social domination and bourgeois morality. More significantly, he explored the power of literary symbolism to transcend those structures, and to dismantle them. As the subjective center of his fiction, and as the symbolic embodiment of the confluence between his remembered encounter and his intertextual exploration, the protagonist of The Woman of Rome can be said to signify Moravia's renewed commitment to unseating the established order through the unfettered representation of uncensored reality.

This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestation... more This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constructed throughout history continues to inspire innovative work on virtually every period of Italian culture. Rather than accepting the many assertions of realism and the many projections of idealism that have characterized Italian culture from its beginnings, this volume aims for a critical and multi-focal assessment of manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy.

The Italianist, 2017

This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestation... more This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constructed throughout history continues to inspire innovative work on virtually every period of Italian culture. Rather than accepting the many assertions of realism and the many projections of idealism that have characterized Italian culture from its beginnings, this volume aims for a critical and multi-focal assessment of manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy.

The Italianist 37.2 (2017): 133-34.

Italian Culture

One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the... more One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the occasion of the journal boundary 2's Anniversary Conference on April 28, 2018. The talk was devoted to "Lorianism, or the Fragility of Critical Barriers," a topic that had already played an important role, albeit less developed, in Buttigieg's pathbreaking essay "Gramsci's Method," originally published in boundary 2 in 1990. In both the article and the talk, what preoccupied Buttigieg was how Gramsci interrogated the cultural work and the political function of historical groups of intellectuals, and how "shoddy thinking, crackpot theories, critical carelessness, and general intellectual irresponsibility" can seriously infect any form of political thought, in the early twentieth century as well as today (Buttigieg 1990, 70). Buttigieg's Gramscian trajectory would thus appear to be framed by a reflection on the historical role of intellectuals and the risk of lacking the "perseverance, intellectual discipline, intense cultural work, and political organization" (Buttigieg 2009, IX) that intellectual labor should instead entail. This special issue of Italian Culture, entitled "Gramsci's Method Thirty Year Later," is meant to celebrate the scholarship and intellectual legacy as well as to commemorate the loss of Joseph A. Buttigieg, who passed away on January 27, 2019. Formerly William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a founding member and past president of the International Gramsci Society, Buttigieg was a formidable scholar as well the translator of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which he published in a definitive three-volume critical edition (1992, 1996, 2007). Yet, for many of us, Joeas he preferred to be calledwas not just a scholar, but also a terrific teacher and an example of intellectual coherence and integrity. Like Gramsci, Buttigieg, too, considered education not only inseparable from culture and politics, but also a crucial element in his inquiry into the function of intellectuals in society and the role they played in history (see Buttigieg 2002, 69-70). For him, this inquiry was not merely theoretical but deeply personal, grounded in his own experiences as a Maltese immigrant who became a professor in the United States.

Alberto Moravia's 1947 novel The Woman of Rome employs a surfeit of literary symbolism to represe... more Alberto Moravia's 1947 novel The Woman of Rome employs a surfeit of literary symbolism to represent its protagonist, the prostitute Adriana, in which she symbolizes the superabundance of reality that had come to supplant the autho's bourgeois moralism.

The Italianist, 2015

Editors 'Dove e come si è depositata la polvere dei sogni nati nel buio delle sale? Come la si pu... more Editors 'Dove e come si è depositata la polvere dei sogni nati nel buio delle sale? Come la si può misurare?'-Gian Piero Brunetta, Buio in sala 'Il cinema si era impadronito completamente della mia esistenza'-Francesco Rosi This editorial marks the sixth issue of the Italianist dedicated entirely to film, but cinema has been one of the journal's areas of focus from the beginning. In no small part, this is due to the contributions of Christopher Wagstaff, one of the pioneering scholars of Italian cinema in the UK. Wagstaff, who retired this year after four decades at the University of Reading, should be celebrated for his 'commitment to raising Italian film studies to a high academic standard', says Zygmunt Barań ski, Wagstaff's former Reading colleague. 'He worked tirelessly and, at times, eccentrically, to develop new undergraduate and graduate courses, to build a major film library, to establish national and international contacts and networks, to enlighten and encourage students, and, most importantly, to demand the highest standards of scholarly seriousness from himself and his students'. Wagstaff's students echo this sentiment. 'Chris has taught me not to be satisfied with easy solutions, but to think hard, the best I can', says Sergio Rigoletto. In the words of Alex Marlow-Mann, 'it is no coincidence that so many of today's Italian cinema scholars studied under Chris, and his legacy rests not solely on his own hugely influential scholarship, but also on the way he shaped and informed the work of so many others, myself included'. Wagstaff's contributions to Italian Film Studies range widely, from meticulous investigations of the film industry and its international markets, to subtle explorations of popular cinema and the media, to rigorous readings of the work of Italy's most renowned directors. Especially remarkable is his scholarship on neorealism, which culminated in his monograph Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (University of Toronto Press, 2007), a commanding study that is 'destined to become a classic in film studies', in the words of Pierre Sorlin. Working against the received wisdom of 'the institution of neorealism', Wagstaff insists on examining the canonical neorealist films with exacting care, and in so doing he debunks some of the mythology that continues to surround them. Wagstaff's is one of the most significant efforts at de-mystifying Italy's postwar cinema to have emerged since the 1976 Pesaro Film Festival, which engendered a momentous reconsideration of neorealism's debts to the 'Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo'. Among the giovani leoni leading the post-Pesaro charge for an