Chapman Italian Studies News

The new anthology of essays titled “Pier Paolo Pasolini. Prospettive americane” is published by Metauro Edizioni (Pesaro, Italy) and co-edited with Dr. Fulvio Orsitto from California State University Chico.

This volume contains a series of essays from scholars who operate across national borders and offers a fresh image of Pasolini. The international perspective of the chapters in this book carries with it a demystifying force, an ability to transcend the increasingly mythical aura connected to the figure of the poet in Italy. The Pasolinian myth is re-examined with critical coherence, while taking into account his contradictions and artistic limits. Every tile of the “Pasolini-mosaic” is nothing else but a new and “other” image, which helps to construct a versatile and contradictory figure such as Pasolini’s. The volume is shaped according to a peripheral perspective originating outside of Italy to reveal subtleties and folds that escape from the purely “Italian” point of view. The perspective of this collection of essays aims at going beyond the intellectual schematics that, in Pasolini’s case, often end to the impasse of a secular sanctification of the artist. The essays collected in the present volume interweave perspectives that originate from American, British, and Italian criticism; tread new paths; and put into practice methodologies which are freed and dislocated from the usual dominating political and academic questions.

The volume contains essays by: Gian Maria Annovi, Luca Barattoni, Fabio Benincasa, Fabrizio Cilento, Viviana Cois, Mark Epstein, Monica Facchini, Daniele Fioretti, Antonio Iannotta, Fulvio Orsitto, Federico Pacchioni, Anna Paparcone, Gloria Pastorino, Enrico Vettore.

Read a description of the event in the local gazzette.