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Project Coordinator
Paolo Simonetti
Paolo Simonetti
He is Associate Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the Department of European, American, and Intercultural Studies of Sapienza Università di Roma, where in 2008 he earned a Ph.D. in Literature in English. In the following years, he worked as an adjunct professor at the Universities of Tor Vergata and Sapienza, where from 2015 to 2019 he was a research fellow on projects dealing with Melville’s legacy between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the postmemory of WWII, wonder and poetry, the fiction of the New Sincerity. In 2017 he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in the City of New York. In 2012 and then again in 2020 he obtained the National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor.
His research interests in the field of U.S. literature include the connection between history and fiction in modern and contemporary narrations, the postmodern reconfigurations of the historical novel and the Anglo-American literary tradition, the works of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William T. Vollmann; the relationship between Italian publishing houses and Anglo-American writers, the language of comics and its formal relation with non-graphic literature. He is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project on the global rise of post-truth.
He is the author of a book on conspiracy and paranoia in the works of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Paul Auster (Paranoia blues. Trame del postmodern americano, Aracne 2009) and of about forty critical essays published in books and international journals such as Modern Language Studies, Critique, Leviathan, Ácoma, Fictions, Status Quaestionis, Memoria di Shakespeare.
Between 2014 and 2019 he edited the two-volume Italian edition of Bernard Malamud’s complete works (I Meridiani Mondadori) and two of the three volumes dedicated to Philip Roth’s novels (I Meridiani Mondadori). He collaborates with the Mondadori publishing house as an editor and translator (he edited the Italian editions of A Farewell to Arms and Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway in the Oscar Mondadori series, as well as the correspondence between Hemingway and his son Patrick).
He took part in international conferences delivering papers on diverse authors and topics, and in 2019 he co-organized the eleventh edition of the “International Pynchon Week”. As a reviewer he occasionally collaborates with “Alias”, the Sunday literary supplement of “Il Manifesto”. He is part of the editorial board of the journal RSA (Rivista di Studi Americani) and Costellazioni. He is a member of AISNA, of the Hemingway Society, and of the Melville Society.
Institutional page: phd.uniroma1.it/web/SIMONETTI-PAOLO_nC3396_EN.aspx
Project Members
Donatella Montini
She is Full Professor of English Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome, where she graduated in 1982. She holds an MA in Modern Philology (1988) and a Ph.D. in English Literature, which was awarded in 1995 by the Universities of Pisa and Florence. She has taught English Language and Translation at the University of Rome Sapienza since 2005. She teaches History of English, Stylistics, Political Discourse (undergraduate, MA, PhD students).
Chair of Sapienza Phd programme- Studies in English Literatures, Language and Translation.
2021 Plumer Visiting Fellow in early Modern Studies, at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Chief Editor of Memoria di Shakespeare A Journal of Shakespearean Studies. She is a member of the editorial board of Fictions.
Her research interests and areas of specialization follow three main lines:
-stylistics and narratology (The Language of Fiction, Roma, 2007)
-Shakespearean and early modern studies (she has edited –with I.Plescia, Elizabeth I in Writing. Language, Power and Representation in Early Modern England, Palgrave, 2018; I discorsi dei re, Bari 1999; Le lettere di Shakespeare, Roma 1993; she has also published extensively on the Elizabethan linguist, lexicographer and translator John Florio);
-political discourse in a synchronic and diachronic perspective (Visione politica e strategie linguistiche, Rubbettino, 2010).
She has recently authored a volume on English contemporary stylistics (La stilistica inglese contemporanea. Teorie e metodi, Carocci 2020). She co-edited a book on Queen Elizabeth I’s language and style (Elizabeth I in Writing. Language, Power and Representation in Early Modern England, Palgrave 2018), and a book on the use of non standard language in fictional texts (The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts, Routledge 2021).
Institutional page: phd.uniroma1.it/web/MONTINI-DONATELLA_nC2338_EN.aspx
Giorgio Mariani
He is Full Professor of Anglo-American Languages and Literatures at the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies of the Sapienza University of Rome. Previously, he taught at Rutgers University (where he also earned his Ph D in English) and the University of Salerno. His research has focused on 19th century American literature (especially Herman Melville and Stephen Crane), on the relationship between war, violence and literature, on contemporary Indian-American literature. In addition to having participated in dozens of international and national conferences, he has lectured in numerous Italian and foreign universities. He was Visiting Professor at the École norma supérieure in Lyon, and (numerous times) Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, as well as a member of the Faculty of the Institute for the Future of American Studies at Dartmouth College. He was president of the I.A.S.A. (International American Studies Association) from 2011 to 2015. With Donatella Izzo he directs OASIS (Oriental American Studies International School) as well as the editorial series "Le Balene" (La Scuola di Pitagora) and "Studies in American Literature and Culture" (Sapienza Università Editrice) . He is editor-in-chief of RIAS—The Review of International American Studies and a member of the Ácoma. Rivista internazionale di studi nordamericani (of which he was co-editor from 2001 to 2021).
He has published essays and articles in numerous Italian and foreign journals, including, American Literary History, Leviathan, Studies in American Ficition, Nuova Corrente, Fictions, FIAR-Focus on Inter-American Research, Stephen Crane Studies, RIAS-The Review of International American Studies, RSA Journal, STUDIA ANGLICA POSNANIENSIA, Zapruder, A.I.O.N., Arcipelago, Studi Americani, Letterature d'America, Iperstoria, Novecento Transnazionale and Ácoma. He is also the author of the following books: Guida alla lettura di Moby-Dick, Carocci 2022; Waging War on War. Peacefighting inAmerican Literature, University of Illinois Press, 2015; Leggere Melville, Carocci, 2013; La penna e il tamburo: gli indiani d'America e la letteratura degli Stati Uniti, ombre corte, 2003; Post-tribal Epics: The Native American Novel between Tradition and Modernity, Edwin Mellen Press, 1996; Allegorie impossibili: storia e strategie della critica melvilliana, Bulzoni, 1993; Spectacular Narratives: Representations of Class and War in Stephen Crane and the American 1890s, Peter Lang, 1992.
Institutional page: phd.uniroma1.it/web/MARIANI-GIORGIO_nC2339_EN.aspx
Irene Ranzato
She is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation, in the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia at Rome Sapienza University. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies (Imperial College London). Since 2018 che has been Honorary Research Associate at UCL (University College London). She is a member of the committee of the doctorate in English Literatures, Language, Culture and Translation at Sapienza University. She has been a member of various international research groups and presented papers at numerous international conferences. Her interests focus on audiovisual translation, on the study of regional and social varieties of English and on the intersection between language and ideologies in fictional dialogue. She is a co-founder of the Tradac research group on audiovisual translation and accessibility and she is vice-editor of the journal Status Quaestionis.
Among her publications, the monographs: Translating Culture Specific References on Television: The Case of Dubbing (Routledge 2016), devoted to the analysis of the translation of cultural elements in three television series of different genres, and Queen's English?: Gli accenti dell'Inghilterra (Bulzoni 2017). She is also the co-editor of books and special issues of "fascia A" journals. Among the most recent: Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation (Routledge 2018); Mediating Lingua-cultural Scenarios in AVT (numero monografico di Cultus); Audiovisual Translation: Intersections (numero monografico di Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 2019); Reassessing Dubbing: Historical Approaches and Current Trends (Benjamins 2019). She recently published the chapters: “The problem with culture”, in The Palgrave Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility (2019) e "The sexist translator and the feminist heroine: politically incorrect language in films and TV", in The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender, edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal (2020), and edited, with Donatella Montini, the volume The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts (Routledge 2021).
Institutional page: phd.uniroma1.it/web/RANZATO-IRENE_nC2336_EN.aspx
Valerio Cordiner
He is Associate Professor of French Literature and Culture. He is a 16th-century specialist and the author of five books and about fifty scientific articles.
Latest Research products
11573/1700343 - 2024 - Una politica di grandezza francese
Cordiner, Valerio - 03e Traduzione di libro
11573/1700996 - 2024 - Terra di mezzo: La Renania europea di Maurice Barrès
Cordiner, Valerio - 02a Capitolo o Articolo
book: L’altro d’Oltrereno. Percorsi, incontri, conflitti e riconciliazioni in Europa (1870-1945), tra ideologia e letteratura - (9788868268725)
11573/1701071 - 2024 - L’Altro D’Oltrereno. Percorsi, incontri, conflitti e riconciliazioni in Europa (1870-1945), tra ideologia e letteratura
Cordiner, Valerio; Guerra, Gabriele - 06a Curatela
11573/1686448 - 2023 - La France ultraocéane. Le détournement de la République
Cordiner, Valerio - 03a Saggio, Trattato Scientifico
11573/1637059 - 2022 - Le famiglie minori di Francia: protestanti, socialisti, ebrei in Maurice Barrès
Cordiner, V. - 02a Capitolo o Articolo
book: Il complesso di Esaù Lingue, culture e letterature ‘minori’ e ‘maggiori’? - (9788893772136)
11573/1624695 - 2022 - Simonetta Di Santo Arfouilloux, «Le Torrent et la Foudre. Cicéron et Démosthène à la Renaissance et à l’Âge Classique», Paris, Classiques Garnier, «Renaissance latine », 2020. 615 p.
Cordiner, Valerio - 01d Recensione
paper: REVUE D'HISTOIRE LITTÉRAIRE DE LA FRANCE (Presses Universitaires de France:6 Avenue Reille, 75685 Paris Cedex 14 France:011 33 1 58103100, EMAIL: revues@puf.com, INTERNET: http://www.puf.com, Fax: 011 33 1 58103152) pp. 205-207 - issn: 0035-2411 - wos: (0) - scopus: (0)
Institutional page: https://phd.uniroma1.it/web/CORDINER-VALERIO_nC1709_EN.aspx
Lee McIntyre
He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University (where he won the Fraternity and Sorority Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy), Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
McIntyre is the author of On Disinformation (MIT Press, 2023), How to Talk to a Science Denier (MIT Press, 2021), The Art of Good and Evil (Braveship Books, 2021), Philosophy of Science (Routledge, 2019), The Sin Eater (Braveship, 2019), The Scientific Attitude (MIT Press, 2019), Post-Truth (MIT Press, 2018), Respecting Truth (Routledge, 2015), Dark Ages (MIT Press, 2006), and Laws and Explanation in the Social Sciences (Westview Press, 1996). He is the co-editor of five anthologies: Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (MIT Press, 1994), two volumes in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science series: Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline (Springer, 2006) and Philosophy of Chemistry: Growth of a New Discipline (Springer 2014), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science (Routledge, 2017), and A Companion to Public Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022). McIntyre is also the author of Explaining Explanation: Essays in the Philosophy of the Special Sciences (Rowman and Littlefield/UPA, 2012), which is a collection of twenty years’ worth of his philosophical essays that have appeared in Synthese, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Teaching Philosophy, Perspectives on Science, Biology and Philosophy, Critica, Theory and Decision, and elsewhere.
McIntyre’s popular essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Nature, Newsweek, Scientific American, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Deseret Magazine, New Statesman, the Times Higher Education Supplement, the Humanist, and numerous other venues. He has appeared on CNN International on Amanpour and Company—and several other programs on PBS, NPR and the BBC—and has spoken at the United Nations, NASA, and the Vatican.
His work has been translated into seventeen languages.
Personal page: https://leemcintyrebooks.com/about-lee/
Ali Dehdarirad
He is the author of From Faraway California: Thomas Pynchon's Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy (2023). He is a Postdoctoral Researcher and he currently teaches American Literature and Culture at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he obtained his Ph.D. in English-language Literatures with a focus on American literature. He has published a number of essays on Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William T. Vollmann, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, John Edward Williams, and Stephen Markley. His main research interests include (post)postmodernist and contemporary American literature, urban humanities, California literature, the Anthropocene, and the encyclopedic novel.
Among his most recent publications are “A Disaster Always About to Happen”: Environmental Sustainability in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge and Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (in Literature and Science, 1922-2022: Modernist and Postmodernist Perspectives, 2024) and «La Storia non conoscerà la verità». (Ri)Leggere Giulia nel romanzo “Augustus” di John Williams (in Voci femminili dell'Antica Roma: Ritratti letterari di donne romane, 2024).
Within the project "The Global Rise of Post-Truth," his research concentrates on the concepts of "encyclopedic narratives" (Edward Mendelson) or "system novels" (Tom LeClair) as possible means to reflect upon (and raise awareness about) issues linked to science denial, the environmental crisis, and injustice from a more-than-human perspective in order to assess the formal evolution of postmodernist formal strategies connected to ecological issues.
Institutional page: https://corsidilaurea.uniroma1.it/it/users/alidehdariraduniroma1it
Fabio Ciambella
He is a researcher of English at Sapienza University of Rome. Previously, he served as a Research Fellow in the same field at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo, Italy. During his early career, he also held the position of Junior Research Fellow at the University of Tuscia. He earned his European PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in 2015. His research interests include the intricate relationship between dance and early modern language, historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition. In 2013, he authored a book on the subject of dance in nineteenth-century England, examining its portrayal in literature from Jane Austen's novels to Oscar Wilde's Salome. His PhD thesis, completed in 2015, received prestigious recognition from the Italian Association of English Studies (AIA). The following year saw the publication of his study on dance and its connection to the Copernican Revolution in Shakespeare's canon. Dr. Ciambella’s most recent publications are Dance Lexicon in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: A Corpus-based Approach (Routledge, 2021), a corpus- based analysis of dance-related language in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and Teaching English as Second Language with Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2024)..
Recent Research Products
11573/1702258 - 2024 - Stupri a confronto nella prima età moderna inglese: Linguistica dei corpora e “le tre Lucrezie” di Shakespeare (1594), Middleton (1600) e Heywood (1608). book: Thought is free. Scritti in onore di Daniela Guardamagna - (9791256001002)
11573/1710192 - 2024 - Teaching English as a Second Language with Shakespeare. Saggio, Trattato Scientifico.
11573/1711258 - 2024 - A corpus-based analysis of the Song of Songs' early modern translations (1535-1611). book: The Song of Songs in European Poetry (Twelfth to Seventeenth Centuries) Translations, Appropriations, Rewritings - (978-2-503-60817-4)
Institutional page: https://phd.uniroma1.it/web/Fabio-Ciambella_nC4933_EN.aspx
Alice Balestrino
She is junior assistant professor of American literature at the Università di Roma Tre. She got her PhD at Sapienza in 2019, and from 2019 to 2022, she was program coordinator and research assistant of IFUSS, International Forum for US Studies, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on a comparative analysis of transnational Marrano texts in the context of Modernism, with a particular focus on Gertrude Stein and Margherita Sarfatti. Her book Extra-Vacant Narratives, Reading Holocaust Fiction in the Post-9/11 Age elaborates on the concept of vacancy as a reading strategy for Holocaust uchronias and autofictions written in the aftermath of 9/11. She is also the author of essays on postmemory, Jewish American literature, literary genealogies, alternate histories, and the representation of memory in graphic narratives. She is the recipient of the 2023 Siegel/McDaniel Award of the Philip Roth Society for her article “The Fragility of Democratic Voices in Philip Roth’s Radio.”
Recent Research Products
Essays
The Chivalric Romance in the Age of Its Neoliberal Reproducibility. The Orlando Furioso Transcodified in Marvel's Iron Man Saga, 2023.
"The Worst Lesson that Life can Teach." American Pastoral come romanzo di deformazione neoliberista. 2023.
Border Reconfigurations in Contagious Societies. Epidemics as Biopolitical Crises from the Decameron to Nemesis, 2022.
Books
Extra-Vacant Narratives. Reading Holocaust Fiction in the Post-9/11 Age. 2022.
Past (Im)Perfect Continuous. Trans-Cultural Articulations of the Postmemory of WWII, 2021.
Book Chapters
Introduction. "Scandalous Memories”, pp. 11 30, 2021.
“Anne Frank, Franz Kafka and Charles Lindbergh ‘at the kitchen table in Newark.’ Philip Roth’s Autofictional Holocaust”. 2020.
Institutional page: https://www.uniroma3.it/en/persone/Qmk3YklPYVhCY1JTR3A1NmlxMGZyTExHSHJPdXA1SUQ5Z1pRY09CQlhZWT0=/profilo/
Giacomo Traina
He holds a Ph.D. in English Literatures, Language and Translation from Sapienza Università di Roma, with a dissertation entitled The Voice that Carries Everything: History and Confession in Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The Sympathizer." The focus of his research is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, "The Sympathizer" (2015), in its double capacity of historical novel and confessional narrative. "The Sympathizer" does not deal with the war in Vietnam as much as with its afterlives in memory. It is not a war novel—it is a novel about war narratives and the power rationales that allow for their (unequal) dissemination. In Nguyen’s perspective, all cultural artifacts addressing the war’s memory are to be seen as fabrications that always convey partial perspectives. All kinds of Vietnam War narratives, says the scholar/novelist, are based on distortions, manipulations, and erasures. This study claims that Nguyen’s answer to this state of things was devising a fiction that was in turn based on distortions, but deliberately so. This fiction is informed by a logic according to which the only way to expose the power (un)balances underlying the industries of memory is to put together an implausible narrative that with its own existence questions the reliability of the others. In the case of "The Sympathizer," as this study demonstrates, this is accomplished via a patent rejection of realism. All of Nguyen’s creatives licenses, Traina argues, are part of an overall design. By bending the facts, by stuffing the story with historical impossibilities (and occasional anachronisms), Nguyen brings into question the power circumstances that make misrepresentation possible. By pairing the work with Nguyen’s essay/manifesto "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War" (2016), we derive a picture in which Nguyen’s fiction and nonfiction are part of one same “fict-critical” project. "The Sympathizer" is a self-labeled “thriller of ideas” thinly disguised as genre fiction—a piece of criticism written in form of a novel. Spy novel tropes are but screens concealing a more challenging class of narrative. Every oddity within "The Sympathizer" is thus to be explained as a “strategy of implausibility” meant to sew political discourses into the story. By having a spy protagonist from the 1970s that thinks like an ethnic studies professor from the 2000s, by merging plots of cinematic classics and B-movies, by showing Vietnamese communists dressed as mad scientists using CIA methods of torture, and a number of other such oddities, the novel goes far beyond the mere necessity of opposing hegemonic memories with suppressed histories, to embrace instead an aesthetic of distortion and infidelity meant to unsettle easy dichotomies of victims/victimizers typically found in other Vietnam War narratives.
Recent Research Products
11573/1709261 - 2024 - Stage Props, Distorting Mirrors, and the Aesthetics of Incompletion: Metafictional Turns in Pierre and Mardi. paper: LEVIATHAN (Oxford: Blackwell) pp. 49-65.
11573/1696853 - 2023 - Guerre, voci, confessioni. Due conversazioni con Viet Thanh Nguyen. paper: ACOMA (Roma; Bergamo : [s. n.]) pp. 188-212.
Institutional page:
https://phd.uniroma1.it/web/dottoredettaglio.aspx?s=&i=3564&m=1214363&l=EN&p=&a=
Kamelia Talebian Sedehi
Currently, she is an adjunct lecturer and she teaches American literature and culture and English for specific purposes at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she obtained her second Ph.D. in American literature, with a focus on Canadian Indigenous literature. She completed a doctorate in English literature at the University Putra, Malaysia, in 2016. She received her BA and MA in English literature from Isfahan University, Iran. She published a number of essays on Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Indigenous authors in Canada, and she participated in multiple academic conferences in Europe and Asia. Her main research interests are canadian Indigenous literature, American studies, trauma studies, melancholia, humor studies, and african-american literature. She was part of the research group, "Imagining Inclusive Communities in European and American Culture," conducted by Professor Emilia Di Rocco. She is part of the research group on "The Global Rise of Post-Truth," conducted by Professor Paolo Simonetti.
Recent Research Products
The Role of Religion in Shaping and Reshaping Inclusive and Exclusive Communities in Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023 - 117 pages)
Uncovering History through Testimony. A Traumatic Account of Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Residential Schools (Aracne, Roma, 2022)
Institutional page: https://corsidilaurea.uniroma1.it/it/users/kameliatalebiansedehiuniroma1it
Luca Valleriani
He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication and Social Research (Coris) and an adjunct lecturer in English Language and Translation at the same department and at the Departments of European, American and Intercultural Studies (SEAI) and the Institute of Oriental Studies (ISO). He obtained his Ph.D. in English Studies in 2021 from Sapienza University with a thesis titled "Upper-class English in Natural and Audiovisual Dialogue," published in the same year by Peter Lang. His other contributions, published in top-tier journals and as chapters in volumes (Routledge, Cambridge Scholars, Palgrave), pertain to the fields of English dialectology, the sociolinguistic analysis of audiovisual dialogue, and audiovisual translation. He is currently co-editing two volumes on audiovisual translation (English classics in AVT) and conducting research on the role of British English dialectal variants in audiovisual advertising texts. He is the co-coordinator of the "Dialects in Audiovisuals" project, founded by Irene Ranzato, and is a member of the editorial staff of "Status Quaestionis," the official journal of the SEAI department.
Recent Research Products
Upper-class English in Natural and Audiovisual Dialogue (2021, Peter lang, monographs,176 pages).
This volume deals with the language of the British upper class in natural face-to-face dialogue and how this is rendered fictionally in audiovisual media. Its main aim is that of reorganising the sparse information on the topic that is found in previous scholarly studies through a qualitative methodological approach. After focusing on the linguistic description and evolution of the upper-class sociolect, the study offers original insights on the language of the Royal Family and its representation in the TV series The Crown. The results from this research, which combines the disciplines of sociolinguistics and dialectology applied to the audiovisual text, will hopefully open a new path in the study of language of elite groups in Britain, arguably an under-researched topic.
Institutional page: https://corsidilaurea.uniroma1.it/it/users/lucavallerianiuniroma1it
Angelo Arminio
He is currently an adjunct professor at Università degli Studi di Bergamo at the Department of Human and Social Sciences. His research mostly concerns Veteran narratives. These narratives—much like other texts that promise a glimpse of otherwise inaccessible lives and activities—are highly valued on the contemporary truth-starved literary market. This, however, holds true for both nonfictional and fictional narratives, the latter of which are usually still presented as “truthful” accounts. His Ph.D. disssertaion focuses on the works of veterans of the Global War on Terrorism such as Phil Klay, Kevin Powers, Roy Scranton, Brian Van Reet, and David Abrams, whose books might be read as overtly fictionalized accounts of their time in country. He argues that several of the fictional narratives of the GWOT produced by veterans are configured as authofictions, a distinct literary phenomenon that exploits the rhetorical power of fictional discourse while maintaining the authority of nonfiction through claims of truthfulness linked to the author’s identity. In this way, authofictions present themselves as a trustworthy tool to understand the past while they eliminate questions of factual accuracy. Employing Paul Ricoeur’s concept of threefold mimesis, his dissertation highlights the process of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration that intertwines narrative fiction and historiography in these texts, which combine fictional truth-telling with the epistemic primacy of testimony. Coherently with Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approach, he stresses that, in order to achieve a comprehensive understanding of these narratives, it is necessary to consider not only the texts themselves, but also the circumstances of their production and reception. In order to better describe the way in which authofictions interact with the real world, he reads them with the aid of Richard Walsh’s rhetorical theory of fictionality, which sees fictional discourse as a distinct rhetorical resource that can be used to talk indirectly about reality, complicating veteran fiction’s place amongst the instruments of narrative-based historical understanding in the post- postmodern era.
Recent Research Products
11573/1657047 - 2022 - An Alternate History of the Warring States: Global War in a State of Exception and Democratic Short-circuit in Matt Gallagher’s Empire City
rivista: RSA JOURNAL
11573/1657335 - 2022 - Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature by Joshua Pederson (A Book Review)
rivista: REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES
11573/1662847 - 2022 - “To Cross into a War Should be Difficult”: Borderlands and Transcultural Identities in Elliot Ackerman’s "Dark at the Crossing"
rivista: IPERSTORIA
Institutional page: https://www.unibg.it/ugov/person/161380
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