beppe

Image
Beppe Cavatorta
beppe@arizona.edu
Phone
(520) 626-0782
Office
584 Modern Languages
Office Hours
M-F by appointment
Cavatorta, Giuseppe
Professor, Director of Basic Languages

Beppe Cavatorta, born in Parma in 1964, is professor of Italian at the University of Arizona. His research interests include experimental writings, Italian futurism and the neo-avant-garde, the Second World War in literature and film, and the theory and practice of translation. His essays have appeared in journals like Studi Novecenteschi, Anterem, Rivista di studi italiani, Nuova prosa, il verri, Carte Italiane, NAE, Or, Italica, Italian Culture, and Lectura Dantis Virginiana. He is the editor of several books and anthologies: The Promised Land (with Luigi Ballerini, Elena Coda, and Paul Vangelisti, 2000), A. Spatola: The Position of Things; Collected Poems, 1961–1992 (2008), Balleriniana (with Elena Coda, 2010), Luigi Ballerini, Poesie 1972-2015 (2016), and Deconstructing the Model in 20th and 21st-Century Italian Experimental Writings (with Federica Santini). He is also the author of Scrivere contro (Writing against, 2010), in which he recreated a profile of experimental writing in Italy from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1960s, and highlighted works that had been categorized under spurious and often conflicting ideological headings. Cavatorta also specializes in the theory and practice of translation and cultural interchange. He has published his translations of several American poets into Italian in the anthologies Nuova poesia Americana: San Francisco (New American poetry: San Francisco, 2006), Nuova poesia Americana: New York (New American poetry: New York, 2009), and Nuova poesia Americana: Chicago e le praterie (New American poetry: Chicago and the Prairies, 2019). He also published the edition of the experimental novel The Porthole by Adriano Spatola (translated with Polly Geller; 2011) and, in the Journal of Italian Translation, the translation of Emilio Zucchi’s The Marrow of Evil, a selection of poems by Sergio Atzeni (both with Brenna Ward). He is currently translating with Federica Santini Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Cavatorta is finally the co-editor (with Luigi Ballerini) of Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies, an anthology of Italian poetry from Officina to the present. This rather large and daring enterprise (2100 pages is the first tome, published in 2017 by University of Toronto Press) features poems by, among others, Pasolini, Roversi, Leonetti, Sanguineti, Giuliani, Porta, Pagliarani, Rosselli, Villa, Cacciatore, Diacono, Calogero, Majorino, Gugielmi, Raboni, Erba, many critical essays and statements on poetics, and bio-bibliographical notes etc. The second volume is in the making.

Currently Teaching

ITAL 160D1 – Food for Thought in Italian Culture

Food has always been an important thread woven through the fabric of Italian culture. Italian cuisine, as diverse and heterogeneous as it is inside the country from North to South, largely contributed to the building of a strong Italian identity, as testified in recent times by the worldwide success of large-scale marketplaces such as Eataly. This course will investigate food's role in shaping Italian society and its cultural practices by looking at images of food in visual art, literature and film. Our historical review will focus on the many symbolic meanings circulating around the representation of food in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the 20th and 21st centuries. Food will be a lens through which we will read the political, social, and economic changes that have affected Italy in its millennial history.

Food has always been an important thread woven through the fabric of Italian culture. Italian cuisine, as diverse and heterogeneous as it is inside the country from North to South, largely contributed to the building of a strong Italian identity, as testified in recent times by the worldwide success of large-scale marketplaces such as Eataly. This course will investigate food's role in shaping Italian society and its cultural practices by looking at images of food in visual art, literature and film. Our historical review will focus on the many symbolic meanings circulating around the representation of food in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the 20th and 21st centuries. Food will be a lens through which we will read the political, social, and economic changes that have affected Italy in its millennial history.

ITAL 201 – Intermediate Italian I

Continued skill development; reinforcement of basic language skills.

ITAL 310 – Italian Encounters: Spoken Italian in Context

Course emphasizes advanced spoken language through the study of Italian popular culture, which can include history, music, media studies, cultural studies, literature, the visual arts, and everyday Italian life.

ITAL 330A – Resisting Fascism

This course examines how artists dealt with the Italian armed resistance against Fascism particularly during the last two years of World War II, and its continuing importance in post-war Italy. The course analyzes how the representation of the Resistance in literature, art and film have evolved and why, with reference to numerous artistic, literary, and cinematic works. The course aims also at inspiring reflections on the relevance of rethinking the history of that period in light of present political developments in Italy and Europe.

This course examines how artists dealt with the Italian armed resistance against Fascism particularly during the last two years of World War II, and its continuing importance in post-war Italy. The course analyzes how the representation of the Resistance in literature, art and film have evolved and why, with reference to numerous artistic, literary, and cinematic works. The course aims also at inspiring reflections on the relevance of rethinking the history of that period in light of present political developments in Italy and Europe.