Guido Mattia Gallerani

Roland Barthes

To the French thinker and writer (1915-1980) I have devoted several essays (e.g. on his interviews and reception in Italy). I participated with some encyclopedic entries in the Dictionnaire Barthes (edited by Claude Coste, Honoré Champion, 2024). I published the book Roland Barthes e la tentazione del romanzo (Morellini, 2013), which studies the author’s late production to investigate the evolution of his nonfiction writing, and the intellectual biography Roland Barthes. Dalla vita al testo (Carocci, 2024).

Entretiens de Roland Barthes: étude interdisciplinaire d’une posture d’auteur (sociologie, génétique, humanités numériques (Ville de Paris Grant, 2015): the main achievement of this research is to update a list including all the interviews given by Barthes (on print, on radio, and on TV) as the investigation within different archives has more than redoubled the total amount of his interviews listed before, in Œuvres Complètes or elsewhere.

[PDF below: List of print, radio and filmed interviews given by Roland Barthes; an English version of this list has been published here.]

The Imagination of Flight (2020-)

The research investigates the impact of technological, material and ideological changes on literature and mass culture. The relationships between literature and society are studied through the historical-material analysis of the influences that mechanical and technological innovations imprint on cultural and artistic products such as texts, paintings, art installations, movies, etc. The project aims to study changes in the imagination of flight (in the modes of vertical viewpoint, air travel, means of ascension) at the appearance of the airplane [see this article].

The Imagined Interview (2017-2022)

Journalism invented the interview, a tool to investigate the lives of writers. This indiscretion triggers the authors’ reaction: while the interview appears in the newspapers, the authors begin to imagine interviews that never took place and in which they entertain themselves or talk to other characters. The imagined interview is a new literary genre that builds on the forms of the journalistic genre of the interview. As its derivation, the imagined interview also spreads from print media to radio, from television to digital devices [see my open access book, and two articles in English and French].

Pseudo-essays (2010-2019)

Following my dissertation and series of articles, my 10-year research on the genre of the essay has been achieved in my book Pseudo-saggi. (Ri)Scritture e critica letteraria (Morellini, 2019). Here, I develop the original idea of the pseudo-essay: a literary form of the critical essay. Through different strategies of camouflage, the pseudo-essays spread throughout Europe and the United States, and they experience various metamorphosis in combination with different media and artistic supports, such as magazines and journals, theatre, literary books (fiction and autobiography). Finally, the pseudo-essay represents a hybrid form with visual media, as in the case of the video essay.

Beyond Forensic Poetry: Lyric and Legal Languages in Contemporary Poems (2015-2018)

In the field of Law and Literature studies, contributions on poetry are rare. My research focuses on a selection of contemporary poetic works: Cornelius Eady’s A Brutal Imagination (2001), Frédéric Boyer’s Le Goût du suicide lent (1999), Maurizio Cucchi’s Il disperso (1976) and Corrado Benigni’s Il tribunale della mente (2012). Their lyrical shaping of law establishes a difference from the model of “forensic” poetry that can be found in Reznikoff’s Testimony (1978-1979). Generally speaking, I study the relationship between the literary discourse and the institutional discourse of law starting from the debate on the language of modern poetry [see this article].

Liste entretiens Barthes_VF.pdf