Fabio Camilletti

Vita

Fabio Camilletti studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (MA, BA, PhD), at St John's College, Oxford (visiting studentship) and at the University of Paris 4-Sorbonne (Masters, PhD). He is teaching assistant at the University of Birmingham, where he collaborates with the Leopardi Centre at the first English translation of the "Zibaldone". His specialism is 19th-century literature European literature from a comparative point of view. He has mostly worked on D.G. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites and on the metamorphoses of Dante's Beatrice as an image of feminine purity in Decadent culture. His research interests include Dante, Leopardi, Aby Warburg, courtly/romantic love, literature and psychoanalysis, quotations and literary theory, studies on memory. Together with his research activity at the ICI, he is currently working on his second book, titled "Dante’s Book of Youth: The Vita Nova and the Nineteenth century (1840-1907)", which has recently been accepted for publication by igrs books (London).

ICI-Project

The Visual Uncanny. Stendhal Syndrome as a Tension
The notion of ‘Stendhal Syndrome’ emerged in the late 1970s to define the psychosomatic and anxious disease experienced in front of a work of art, and was named after an experience referred by the French novelist in his travel writings. My research project investigates precisely such an uncanny relationship image-viewer from a cultural point of view, especially considering how the crucial concepts involved by the notion of ‘Stendhal Syndrome’ – art, image, viewer, uncanny, anxiety – have been questioned and dissected by contemporary theory. I am therefore focusing on the ambiguous role played by images at the intersection of literature, psychoanalysis and the aesthetics in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, from the Romantics to Freud and Aby Warburg. While considering the complex genealogy of the notion of 'imago' in Western European cultural history, I analyze how the supernatural traditionally connected with images is metamorphosed, after the paradigmatic break known as the Enlightenment, in an uncanny and disturbing 'je ne sais quoi'.

Publications

Articles

«La morta, l’amante, il dio. Il dio d’Amore nell’opera di Dante Gabriel Rossetti», Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, serie IV, vol. VII, 2 (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 2002): 399-425;

«The Golden Veil. Purezza e malinconia in un racconto di Dante Gabriel Rossetti», Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, a. VIII, fasc. 15 (Pescara: Edizioni Tracce, 2003): 77-93;

«Cartoline e “idea di Dante” fra fine Ottocento e primo Novecento», in Battaglia, Giuseppe, ed., Immagini dantesche. Catalogo della mostra “Verona… lo primo tuo rifugio”. Urbana [PD]: F.lli Corradin Editori, 2004, p. 17-32;

«I sospiri della santa. La donna e la malinconia nell’opera di Dante Gabriel Rossetti dalla Blessed Damozel a Bocca Baciata», Contemporanea, n. 3 (Pisa-Roma: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2005): 77-83.

«La muse antimoderne. La Béatrice de Dante dans la culture bourgeoise de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle», Silène. Littérature et poétique comparées (online).

«'On pleure les lèvres absentes'. 'Amor di lontano' tra Leopardi e Baudelaire», Italian Studies, vol. 64, n. 1 (London: Maney Publishing, 2009), p. 77-90.

Edited volumes

 Beatrice nell’inferno di Londra. Saggio su Dante Gabriel Rossetti. La Finestra editrice, Lavis (TN) 2005 (II edition 2007).

Reviews

Alessandro Raffi, La gloria del volgare. Ontologia e semiotica in Dante dal «Convivio» al «De Vulgari Eloquentia», Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli (CZ) 2004 (Italianistica, n. 1, 2006, p. 127-29);

Jean Bessière/Franca Sinopoli (eds.), Storia e memoria nelle riletture e riscritture letterarie/Histoire, mémoire et relectures et réécritures littéraires, Bulzoni Editore, Roma, «Quaderni di storia della critica e delle poetiche» 25, 2005 (Revue de littérature comparée, n. 326, 2008/2, p. 259-60)

John Woodhouse, Il generale e il comandante. Ceccherini e D'Annunzio a Fiume, Gedit, Bologna 2004 (to be published in Italian Studies)

Forthcoming

«Il passo di Nerina. Memoria, storia e formule di pathos ne Le ricordanze», Italianistica (submitted).

«Dante's Vita Nova and the Victorians: the Hidden Image Behind Rossetti's Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante», in Luisa Villa, Paul Vita, Alessandro Vescovi [eds.], The Victorians and Italy (accepted).

«Ninfa fiorentina. The Falling of Beatrice, from Florence to Modern Metropolis», in Nick Havely (ed.), Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Reception, Portrayal, Popularization, Peter Lang (accepted).