Wednesday 24 April, 5pm
Modern Luck. Narratives of Fortune in the Long Twentieth Century
By Robert Gordon
At the University of Manchester, Samuel Alexander Building (Room A7), Oxford Road
Supported by ICI London
Robert S.C. Gordon, Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge, will present his latest work entitled Modern Luck: Narratives of Fortune in the Long Twentieth Century in conversation with Francesca Billiani and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, moderated by Mara Josi (all from the University of Manchester)
Beliefs, superstitions and tales. We are perennially fascinated by luck and by its association with happiness and danger, uncertainty and aspiration. Yet it remains an elusive, ungraspable idea, one that slips and slides over time: all cultures reimagine what luck is and how to tame it at different stages in their history. The modernity of the ‘long twentieth century’ is no exception to the rule.
Modern Luck sets out to explore the enigma of luck’s presence in modernity, examining the hybrid forms it has taken on in the modern imagination, and in particular in the field of modern stories. Analysing a rich and unusually eclectic range of narrative taken from literature, film, music, television and theatre – from Dostoevsky to Philip K. Dick, from Pinocchio to Cimino, from Curtiz to Kieślowski – it lays out first the usages and meanings of the language of luck, and then the key figures, patterns and motifs that govern the stories told about it, from the late nineteenth century to the present day.
The book launch will take place in person in Samuel Alexander Building (Room A7), Oxford Rd, and will be live-streamed on Zoom.
Register for this event, either in person or online, HERE
Robert S.C. Gordon is Serena Professor of Italian and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His principal fields of research are modern Italian literature, cinema and cultural history, and Holocaust studies, with a particular interest in the cultural legacy of the Shoah. His first book was on the writer, intellectual and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). He subsequently worked extensively on the Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), authoring a book-length critical study of Levi’s engagement with questions of ethics and testimony, and editing several texts by and about Levi, including his interviews and a co-authored report on medical conditions at Auschwitz. This was followed by a wide-ranging study of the complex legacy of the Holocaust in postwar Italy. He has further edited books on censorship and Holocaust visual culture.
Francesca Billiani is Professor of Italian and was the Director of CIDRAL, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts and Languages at the University of Manchester between 2015 and 2018. Her research focuses on the fascist period, the late nineteenth-century Italian novel, translation theory, censorship, literary journals, modernism, history of publishing, intellectual history and contemporary writing.
Jean-Marc Dreyfus is Professor of Holocaust Studies in the History department at the University of Manchester and former Director of the European Research Council’s Corpses of Mass Genocide and Violence Program. He has extensively written about the anthropology of genocide, the history of the Jews in 19th-20th century France, the politics of memory, forensic Holocaust studies and Primo Levi.
This event is kindly sponsored by Istituto Italiano di Cultura in London and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester