Fabio A. Camilletti

Vita

Fabio Camilletti studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (MA, BA, PhD), at St John's College, Oxford (visiting studentship), at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne (Masters, PhD) and at the University of Birmingham (PhD). He has recently been appointed as Assistant professor in Italian at the University of Warwick (starting September 2010). His specialization is nineteenth-century European literature from a comparative point of view. He mostly worked onthe metamorphoses of Dante's 'Vita Nova in European culture and on the semantization of memory and historical time in Leopardi. His research interests include Dante, Leopardi, Aby Warburg, courtly/romantic love, literature and psychoanalysis, the uncanny, quotations and literary theory. He is currently working on his second book, titled 'Dante’s Book of Youth: The Vita Nova and the Nineteenth century (1840-1907)' (London: igrs books, forthcoming 2011).

ICI Project (2008-10)

The Visual Uncanny. Stendhal Syndrome as a Tension

The notion of ‘Stendhal Syndrome’ emerged in the late 1970s to describe the psychosomatic and anxious disease one experiences in beholding a work of art. My research project investigates precisely such an uncanny relationship between image and 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 aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 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 uncertainty.

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.

‘Dante’s Vita Nova and the Victorians: the Hidden Image Behind Rossetti’s Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante’, in Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, Paul Vita (eds.), The Victorians and Italy. Literature, Travel, Politics and Art, Monza: Polimetrica, 2009), pp. 181-92.

 ‘Veils. A Reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s St. Agnes of Intercession’, Ravenna, III (Spring 2010);

‘Present Perfect. Time and the Uncanny in American Science and Horror Fiction of the 1970s (Finney, Matheson, King)’, in Fabio Camilletti, Martin Doll, Rupert Gaderer, Jan Niklas Howe (eds.), Image & Narrative (special issue on the uncanny, forthcoming 2010).

‘Oblique Gazes. Je ne sais quoi and the Uncanny as Forms of Undecidability in post-Enlightenment Aesthetics’, in Christoph Holzhey (ed.), Tension/Spannung, Wien-Berlin: Turia & Kant (forthcoming 2010);

‘Il passo di Nerina. Memoria, storia e formule di pathos ne Le ricordanze’, Italianistica (forthcoming 2010).

‘Human Desire, Deadly Love. The Vita Nova in Gide, Delay, Lacan’, in Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, Fabian Lampart (eds.), Metamorphosing Dante, Wien-Berlin: Turia & Kant (forthcoming 2010)

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

Edited volumes

 Beatrice nell’inferno di Londra. Saggio su Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Trento: La Finestra, 2005.

(co-edited with Manuele Gragnolati and Fabian Lampart), Metamorphosing Dante, Wien-Berlin: Turia & Kant, forthcoming 2010.

Dante's Book of Youth. The Vita Nova and the Nineteenth Century (1840-1907), London: igrs books, forthcoming 2011.

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)

Conference papers

‘I sospiri della santa. La donna e la malinconia nell’opera di Dante Gabriele Rossetti da The Blessed Damozel a Bocca Baciata’, Convegno Nazionale della Società per lo Studio della Teoria e della Storia comparata della letteratura, “La letteratura e le altre arti”, L’Aquila (February 12-13, 2004);

‘La verginità funesta. Forme della sopravvivenza letteraria di un’interdizione sacra’, Convegno Nazionale della Società per lo Studio della Teoria e della Storia comparata della letteratura, “Letteratura e antropologia”, Siena (February 24-25, 2005);

‘Dante’s Vita Nova and the Victorians’, “Dickens, Victorian Culture, Italy”, University of Genoa (June 13-17, 2007);

‘Quotations and Semantic Memory in Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone’, Birmingham-Warwick Postgraduate Forum, University of Warwick (May 22, 2008);

‘From Medieval Stilnovo to 19^th Century flânerie: The Salutation of Beatrice in the Modern Metropolis’, “Dante in the Nineteenth century”, University of York (July 15-16, 2008);

‘Quotations and Fragmentariness in the Zibaldone’, “Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri:  Meaning, Aim(s), Readings”, University of Birmingham (February 11, 2009);

‘The Bipolarity of Angélisme: Beatrice, Desire and Sublimation from Gide to Lacan’, “Metamorphosing Dante”, ICI Berlin (September 24-26, 2009);

‘Non timebis a demonio meridiano: Greek Irrational and the Construction of Modernity’, “How Dangerous is the Ir-rational?”, ICI Berlin-Humboldt Universität (October 30, 2009);

‘D.G. Rossetti tra “religione della mente” e decostruzione dell’Io’, “I Rossetti e l’Italia”, Rossetti European Center (December 10-12, 2009);

‘Citazione ed esperienza dell’effimero in Leopardi’, “Con voce d’altri: scrittura, riflessione, citazione”, Facoltà di Studi Orientali, Università La Sapienza, Rome (May 21, 2010);

‘Dante Painting an Angel. Simulacra, Double-Oriented Sonnets and Sublimation in the Vita Nova’, “Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages”, University of Oxford (June 28-29, 2010).

Co-organized events

− (with Michael Caesar) Thinking in Fragments: Romanticism and Beyond (conference, funded by the AHRC), University of Birmingham (December 16-17, 2010);

− (with Martin Doll and Catharine Diehl) Un-titled. Affirming Negations - Negating Affirmations (conference, funded by the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry), ICI Berlin (June 17-19, 2010);

− (with Franco D’Intino and Elisabetta Brozzi) Con parole d’altri: scrittura, riflessione e citazione (seminar, funded by the AHRC), Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Rome (May 21, 2010);

− (with Paola Cori and Cosetta Veronese) Mind and Psyche. Writing and the Self in Giacomo Leopardi (study day, funded by the Leopardi Centre), University of Birmingham (March 23, 2010);

− (with Manuele Gragnolati and Fabian Lampart) Metamorphosing Dante (conference, funded by the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry), ICI Berlin (September 24-26, 2009);

− (with Martin Doll, Rupert Gaderer, Jan Niklas Howe) Phantasmata. Techniques of the Uncanny (workshop, funded by the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and the Friedrich Schelgel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin), ICI Berlin (April 6-8, 2009);

− (with Paola Cori and Cosetta Veronese) Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri: Meaning, Aim(s), Readings (study day, funded by the College of Arts and Law Graduate School and the Leopardi Centre), University of Birmingham (February 11, 2009).