Carlo Levi: Portrait of the Artist, Between Politics and the Arts

Painter, writer, political activist, Carlo Levi is a towering figure of twentieth century Italian culture. He gained popularity in the 1940s with the novel Christ Stopped at Eboli, in which he documented his experience as an exile antifascist in the Southern region of Basilicata. With this work, he also lamented the dire situation of the Italian Mezzogiorno, immortalizing himself as a civically minded and engaged artist. Levi’s voice still resonates with today’s social and political concerns, but critics have often overlooked much of his literary production beyond this seminal novel. This panel aims at shedding light on unexplored angles of his work and his life, in particular Levi’s groundbreaking activity as a painter, his political activism, and his relationship with his Jewish heritage.

Nov. 1
4:40 p.m.

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Speakers:

Mattia Acetoso is an Assistant Professor of Italian at Boston College. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2012. His research interests include modern Italian poetry, the relationship between literature and music, and contemporary Italian cinema. Prof. Acetoso is the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry: Eros, Tragedy, and National Identity.

 

Daniela Bartalesi-Graf is Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellesley College. Her research interests are in Italian language pedagogy and 20th century Italian cultural studies. She is the author of three textbooks: L’Italia dal fascismo ad oggi: percorsi paralleli nella storia, nella letteratura e nel cinema, at the intermediate-advanced level; Voci dal Sud: A Journey to Southern Italy with Carlo Levi and his Christ Stopped at Eboli, at the advanced level; Caleidoscopio, an Italian Language and Culture Intermediate Textbook, at the intermediate level (co-authored with Colleen Ryan, Professor of Italian, Indiana University). Daniela has also developed four Italian MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) for the edX platform.

David Ward teaches in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellsley College. He is author of five books: four in English, A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Madison, NJ and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995); Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-46 Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the Actionists (Madison, NJ and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996); Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010);Contemporary Italian Narrative and 1970s Terrorism: Stranger than Fact (London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2017); and one in Italian, Carlo Levi: Gli italiani e la paura della libertà (Milan: Rizzoli/Nuova Italia, 2002). He is also co-editor, with Sciltian Gastaldi, of a volume of essays on the writings of the children of the victims of terrorism, entitled Era mio padre: Italian Terrorism of the Anni di Piombo in the Postmemorials of Victims’ Relatives, published in the Italian Modernities series by Peter Lang in 2018. He is currently engaged on a study of Italian contemporary collective writing.