Invited Lecture, Colby College
Beppe Cavatorta
November 3rd
http://www.colby.edu/humannature/events/
Throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century, and especially in the 60s and 70s, Italian poets have attempted a radical renovation of the literary institutions and conventions they had received from tradition. Their efforts gave birth to what critics have called the neo-avantgarde. What had begun as an effort to reconsider literature, soon turned into a political experiment aimed at re-writing the world itself. These intellectuals formulated a sharp criticism of traditional power structures and the excesses of capitalism by unmasking its linguistic strategies. This new kind of “realism” did not aim at describing the world but rather at changing it. This lecture will reconstruct the interesting path these writers followed, looking at the way in which the natural world is presented in their poems.
Cavatorta is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His research interests are varied, with scholarly publications on Renaissance authors such as Machiavelli, Savonarola, and Tasso as well as contemporary writers like Alberto Savinio, Antonio Delfini, Tahar Lamri and Adriano Spatola. Among his other interests are Italian Futurism, the neo-avant-garde of Sixties, and the Partisan War as depicted in literature and film. His essays have appeared in several journals.