Book launch
Innesti: Primo Levi e i libri altrui, curated by Gianluca Cinelli and Robert Gordon
Published by Peter Lang
With Gianluca Cinelli, Robert Gordon, Ian Thomson and Anna Baldini
Introduced by ICI Director Katia Pizzi and Philip Cooke
Primo Levi was an avid reader: extraordinarily curious, he explored several genres and fields of knowledge, from literature to science to history etcetera, consulting specialist journals and books alike, in order to research a subject or simply to enjoy reading about it, often approaching foreign cultures in their original language, always eager to learn and to understand more. Levi himself gave an account of his vast collection of books in his anthology La ricerca delle radici (1981), however there is still so much more to find out about it. Gianluca Cinelli and Robert Gordon have tackled this task by looking at the innesti , the connections between Levi’s writings and the work of twenty-one other authors, including classics such as Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Baudelaire and Carroll, modern ones like Kafka, Mann and Calvino and scientists Galileo, Darwin, Heisenberg and Lorenz.
On Webex
Gianluca Cinelli is an independent researcher of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature. Among his works, Nuto Ravelli (2011), La questione del male in Storia della colonna infame di Alessandro Manzoni (2015) and “Viandante giungessi a Sparta…”. Il modo memorialistico nella narrativa contemporanea (2016). He is editor of the magazine Close Encounters in War
Robert S.C. Gordon is Professor of Modern Italian Culture at Cambridge University. He has worked extensively on Italian literature, cinema and cultural history and on Holocaust studies. Among his works, Primo Levi’s ordinary virtues (2005) and The Holocaust in Italian Culture (2013). He is co-curator of the 2016 issue of the magazine Quest: Holocaust intersections in 21st century Europe.
Philip Cooke is Professor of Italian at Strathclyde University, where he is also Director of Research for the School of Humanities. Among his publications, Double Trouble: Gianpaolo Pansa’s Il Sangue dei Vinti, from Novel to Film (2017), We all miss you: Enrico Berlinguer in post-Berlin Wall Italy (2016), Italian resistance writing in the years of the Second Republic (2015), Fascism and anti- Fascism (2015)
Ian Thomson is an award-winning biographer, reporter, translator and literary critic. Among other works, he has written Primo Levi: a Life (2002), widely regarded as the definitive biography of the Italian writer and nazi camp survivor.
Anna Baldini teaches History of Publishing and History of Literary Criticism at the Università per Stranieri of Siena. She authored the book Il comunista. Una storia letteraria dalla Resistenza agli anni Settanta (2008), for which she received a Special Mention as Best Early Career Scholar at the first Edinburgh Gadda Prize, and co-authored with D. Biagi, S. De Lucia, I. Fantappiè and M. Sisto La letteratura tedesca in Italia (1900-1920). Un’introduzione (2018).
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