romance languages and literatures
 

Vincenzo Binetti
Graduate Chair
Professor of Italian

Office: 4004 MLB 1275
Phone: (734) 647-2685
E-mail: vbinetti@umich.edu

Ph.D. Harvard University, 1994

Areas
19th-20th Century Italian Literature, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory


Interests and Current Work
My primary field of study is nineteenth and twentieth century Italian literature. I am concerned with analyzing the dynamics among Italian intellectuals working between the dominant culture and so-called 'sub-dominant' cultures in the years crucial to the Italian definition of a national identity: that is to say, the Romantic period, the Risorgimento and the second postwar period. I recently became intrigued with notions of 'space' and 'communities' and their relationship to State-formations in a frame of time going beyond the immediate postwar period and covering instead a wider historical and geographical frame.

I am also working on two other projects. The first will investigate the problematic concept of "resistance" in literature and society. One starting point for this developing interest is already contained in my article "The Myth of the Resistance or the resistance to the Myth? For a (re)reading of The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese."

The second project is concerned with analyzing and rethinking the political movements and uprisings of the 1970s, a period of Italian history which had a profound resonance and impact not only in Italy but also in Europe, and deeply affected the lives of many people involved in those events as well as the way of thinking and imagining Italian national identity.


Recent and Selected Publications
Città nomadi:Esodo e autonomia nella metropoli contemporanea. Verona: Ombre corte, 2008

Cesare Pavese: Una vita imperfetta. La crisi dell'intellettuale nell'Italia del dopoguerra. (Cesare Pavese: an imperfect life. The crisis of the intellectual in postwar Italy.) Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1998.

"Between Romanticism and Realism: The Poetics of Engagement and the romanzo sociale during in the Italian Risorgimento." Forum for Modern Language Studies, Oxford University Press 38 (2002): 2.

"Identità nazionale e mito resistenziale: per una (ri)lettura de La casa in collina di Cesare Pavese." Narrativa, Université Paris X 22 (2002)


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