The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor Michael Subialka (UC Davis) titled:
Modernist Syncretisms: Gabriele d’Annunzio, TS Eliot, and Religious Models for a Modern Aesthetic
Does modernization entail secularization? Should modernist writers thus be seen as tending toward a secular rejection of the religious traditions that they often refer to in their works? Indeed, are such citations of foreign cultures and their beliefs signs of an Orientalist exoticism? While it has often been assumed that the answers to such questions are affirmative, I seek to chart a more nuanced picture of certain complex interactions between European modernists and their non-Western sources. In fact, key modernist writers drew on a wide span of global religious traditions to reshape the aesthetic expression of European modernity. This includes two figures from very different backgrounds and ideological positions, Gabriele d’Annunzio and TS Eliot, who both nevertheless reveal the complex way in which modernist writers were not just fascinated by but seriously engaged with studying a syncretic blend of spiritual and religious traditions centered on cultivating meditative consciousness. In their work, this form of consciousness becomes a model that reshapes modernist art while also informing a new praxis of aesthetic attention that these writers seek to imprint onto their audiences. Their syncretic modernism uses religious consciousness to rethink the affordances of aesthetic form.
Michael Subialka is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at the University of California, Davis. His work focuses on the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the arts, positioning European decadence and modernism in a global context. He has published widely on these topics, including in his monograph, Modernist Idealism: Ambivalent Legacies of German Philosophy in Italian Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2021), and recent co-edited volume, Gabriele D’Annunzio and World Literature: Multilingualism, Translation, Reception (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Co-President of the Pirandello Society of America and Co-editor of their scholarly journal, PSA, he is collaborating with Lisa Sarti on the new digital edition of the first complete English translation of Pirandello’s short stories, Stories for a Year; he has also been elected as incoming Editor-in-Chief of California Italian Studies (CIS). Professor Subialka studied as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, where he majored in Italian and Philosophy, before receiving his PhD from The University of Chicago. He has taught previously at Oxford (St Hugh’s College) and Bilkent University.
The lecture is co-sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.
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.