The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture on Italian resistance writer, Beppe Fenoglio's Racconti della guerra civile, by Giovanni Vedovotto, a Ph.D. candidate in Italian in the Department of Romance Languages.
This seminar aims to demonstrate how the representation of the partisans in Fenoglio’s work is far from simply celebratory and to highlight its problematic elements. Considering the Racconti della guerra civile, Fenoglio’s first (unpublished) collection of short stories, Vedovotto argues that the Fenoglio represents the partisans not as national heroes, but rather as impulsive, childish, and insensitive, and that he even goes so far as to compare them with the fascists. Nevertheless, at the same time, this highly ambiguous representation of the partisans does not correspond to an inversion of the negative and positive poles of the civil war: the fascists are still the enemy to defeat.
Vedovotto graduated from Università degli Studi di Padova with both a BA and a MA, focusing on Italian Renaissance epic poetry. His dissertation concerns Dante’s relationship to Franciscanism.
The meeting will be held via Zoom and is accessible to members of the Notre Dame community by invitation only. If you would like to attend, please fill out this form or contact the Center for Italian Studies via email. Invitations will be sent to affiliates of the Center in advance of the meeting.
The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.
Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.