Visual Storytelling - The Society for Italian Studies

Visual
Storytelling
Examples
from Italy

Wednesday, 2 March 2016
3.00 pm - 7.30 pm

Institute of Advance Studies
University College London
South Wing, Room G09
Gower Street, London
	
  
Organized by the AHRC-funded research project “Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020:
Interart/Intermedia” and hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, this
multidisciplinary symposium explores the rich diversity of visual and verbal art in
contemporary Italy. We are delighted to welcome the illustrator and painter Tullio
Pericoli, one of Italy’s most distinguished contemporary artists, who will speak, in
conversation with Prof. Simona Corso (Roma Tre), about how literature has shaped
his artistic imagination. Interartistic creativity will be envisaged as a constantly
changing, dynamic field of investigation, which has been, and continues to be, a
driving force of modern art. We will begin with a plenary lecture by the poet and
scholar Prof. Jan Baetens Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven
and a leading authority on literature and the visual arts. The afternoon will end with a
roundtable, chaired by Dr Florian Mussgnug (UCL), which will include contributions
by Dr Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge), Prof. Timothy Mathews (UCL) and Dr
Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway).

For further information, please contact the organizer: f.mussgnug@ucl.ac.uk.

PROGRAMME

3.00 pm      Welcome and Opening
             Clodagh Brook (Birmingham; Principal Investigator of
             “Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia”)
             and Florian Mussgnug (UCL)

3.15 pm      Jan Baetens (Leuven)
             ‘Hybridized popular literature:
             fotoromanzi and cineromanzi In postwar Italy’

4.30 pm      ‘Painting and Drawing Literature’
             Tullio Pericoli in conversazione
             con Simona Corso (Roma Tre)*

5.45 pm      Roundtable ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
             Visual and Verbal Art’
             Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge)
             Timothy Mathews (UCL)
             Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway)
             Chair: Florian Mussgnug (UCL)

7.00 pm      Concluding Remarks and Reception

* This conversation will be in Italian. We will provide a written summary in
English detailing major points for discussion.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Pierpaolo Antonello is Reader in Italian Literature and Culture at the
University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. He specializes in
20th Century Italian culture and intellectual history. He has published widely
on literature, philosophy, film, and visual art. He has also published on Pier
Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Moretti, Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Garrone, Daniele
Vicari, Quentin Tarantino, among others. Recent publications include
Dimenticare Pasolini: Intellettuali e impegno nell’Italia contemporanea (Milan,
2012); Contro il materialismo. Le ‘due culture’ in Italia: bilancio di un secolo
(Turin, 2012; winner of the 2013 AAIS Book Prize; and the Viareggio-Répaci
Jury Prize 2013); Il ménage a quattro. Scienza, filosofia, tecnica nelle
letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence, 2005). Co-edited volumes include
Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism (2015,
with H. Webb); How We Became Human: Mimetic Theory and the Science of
Evolutionary Origins (2015, with P. Gifford); Can we Survive our Origins?
Readings in Rene Girard’s Theory of Violence and the Sacred (2014; with P.
Gifford).

Jan Baetens is Professor of Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of
Leuven (KU Leuven). He has written widely on contemporary French poetry,
literary theory and history, and on the relation between word and image. He is
a leading scholar of so-called minor genres: novelizations, comics,
photonovels. His most recent scholarly publications include The Graphic
Novel (Cambridge: 2014, with H. Frey); Correspondance: The Birth of Belgian
Surrealism (Peter Lang, 2016, with M. Kasper); "Conversation in Sicily: A
Contextual Reading", with B. Van Den Bossche, in Italian Studies 70/1, Feb.
2015, pp. 117–30. He also co-guest-edited the latest issue of Fabula LHT on
"Crises de lisibilité (http://www.fabula.org/lht/16/). He is the author of several
important collections of poetry, including Pour une poésie du dimanche
(Brussels, 2009) and Le Problème du Sud (Brussels, 2013). In 2007, he
received the Prix triennal de poésie de la Communauté française de Belgique
(2007) for his collection Cent fois sur le metier (2004). In 2015 he was
awarded the Prix Elie Rodenbach.

Clodagh Brook is Reader in Contemporary Cinema and Culture at the
University of Birmingham and Principal Investigator for the Interdisciplinary
Italy project. She has published widely on twentieth and twenty-first century
Italian culture, on cinema, poetry and interartistic practice, on cultural
expressions of dissent, on identity, and on religion and cinema. She is author
of Marco Bellocchio: The Cinematic Eye in the Political Sphere (2009) and
The Expression of the Inexpressible in the Poetry of Eugenio Montale:
Metaphor, Silence, and Negation (2002), as well as co-edited books such as
Transmedia: Storia, memoria e narrazioni attraverso i media (2014) and
Resisting the Tide: Cultures of Opposition under Berlusconi (Continuum
2010). She is on the Executive Board of the Society for Italian Studies and
holds its research portfolio. She is also on the editorial board of the
international journal Italian Cinema and Media and is co-director, with Rob
Stone, of B-Film, the new Centre for film research at the University of
Birmingham.

Simona Corso is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department
of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Rome –
Roma Tre. Her research interests include eighteenth century English
literature, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, narratology and visual
and material cultures. Her publications include Postcolonial Shakespeare, co-
edited with M. d’Amico (2009), Letteratura e Antropologia, co-edited with M.
Bonafin (2008), Automi, termometri, fucili: L'immaginario della macchina nel
romanzo inglese e francese del Settecento (2004) and articles on
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Martin Amis, Derek Walcott, V.S.
Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, on the myth of Robinson Crusoe, and works of
thematic criticism. Passions: New perspectives from Modern and
Contemporary Literature, co-edited by Simona Corso and Beth Guilding, is
forthcoming with Peter Lang, Oxford. Her novel Capodanno al Tennis Club
(Sellerio 2002) was awarded the Premio Mondello Opera Prima in 2003.

Timothy Mathews is Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at UCL.
He has written widely about 20th and 21st century French Literature,
comparative literature and comparative approaches. His research interests
include translation, literary theory, creative critical writing, French poetry from
Baudelaire to the present, avant-garde aesthetics, relations of literature and
visual art. He has published on Guillaume Apollinaire, Aimé Césaire, Roland
Barthes, Michel Houellebecq. W G Sebald, Cees Noteboom, Orhan Pamuk.
Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Alberto Giacometti. His most recent book, Alberto
Giacometti: the Art of Relation (2013) explores what relating to art can tell us
about relating to others. Other publications include Reading Apollinaire (1990)
and Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth- Century France
(2006). He is co-translator with Delphine Grass of Michel Houellebecq, The
Art of Struggle (2010) and co-editor with Jan Parker of Tradition, Translation,
Trauma (2011). He is a member of the Academy of Europe, and Officier dans
l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature at UCL
and Director of the UCL Comparative Literature Programme. He has
published widely on 20th and 21st Century literature, with a particular focus
on narrative prose fiction in Italian, English and German. His research interest
include literary theory, experimental writing, postmodernism, animal studies,
environmental literature, cultural representations of catastrophe and
apocalypse. Recent books include The Eloquence of Ghosts: Giorgio
Manganelli and the Afterlife of the Avant-Garde (2010, winner of the 2012
Edinburgh Gadda Prize) and The Good Place: Comparative Perspectives on
Utopia (2014, with M. Reza). He has been Visiting Professor of Comparative
Literature at the University of Rome (2010-11) and has served on the
executive committees of the British Comparative Literature Association
(BCLA) and the Réseau Européen d’Etudes Littéraires Comparées. He is co-
founder of the London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies
(LINKS), and co-investigator of “Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020:
Interart/Intermedia”.

Tullio Pericoli is one of Italy’s most distinguished contemporary artists.
Painter, cartoonist and illustrator, he is well known for his life-long interest in
literature and for his iconic portraits of writers. Born in Colli del Tronto and
resident in Milan since 1961, he has been a regular contributor to many of
Italy’s leading daily newspapers and weekly magazines, including Corriere
della Sera (from 1974), L’Espresso and La Repubblica (from 1984). Large-
scale exhibitions of his works have been held in numerous cities in Italy,
Germany, Austria, France, USA, and Ireland. He designed the scenery and
costumes for two productions of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (1995) the Zurich
Opernhaus (1995) and at La Scala in Milan (1998). In 2001 he was director,
scenographer and costume designer for Ionescu’s Le chaises at the Piccolo
Teatro Studio in Milan, and in the same year designed sets and costumes for
Rossini’s Il turco in Italia, again for Zurich Opernhaus. His publications include
Woody, Freud e gli altri (1988); Ritratti Arbitrari (1990); Attraverso il disegno
(1991); Die Tafel des Königs (1993); Colti nel segno (1995); Terre (2000); I
ritratti (2002); Otto scrittori (2003); La casa ideale di Robert Louis Stevenson
(2004); L’anima del volto (2005); Robinson Crusoe di Daniel Defoe (2007);
Attraverso l’albero (2012); 80 ritratti per 10 scrittori (2012); I paesaggi (2013);
Pensieri della mano (2014). He was awarded the Gulbransson Prize from the
Olaf Gulbransson Museum at Tegernsee (1993), an honorary degree in
architecture by the University of Camerino (2002) and the Premio Nazionale
Gentile da Fabriano for art and culture (2002). The theme of landscape
features prominently in many of his recent exhibitions: Lineamenti, volto e
paesaggio (Rome, Museo dell’Ara Pacis, 2010); L’infinito paesaggio (Milan,
Villa Necchi Campiglio, 2010); Areonatura (MAG, Riva del Garda, 2014);
Ritratti (Spazio Don Chisciotte, Turin, 2014); I paesaggi (MART, Rovereto,
2014); Sulla terra (Palazzo Fava, Bologna, 2015).

Giuliana Pieri is Reader in Italian and the Visual Arts at Royal Holloway
University of London and Head of the School of Modern Languages,
Literatures and Cultures. She has published widely on 19th and 20th century
visual culture, cultural history and popular literature. Her research interests
are firmly in the area of comparative and interdisciplinary studies, especially
the intersection of the verbal and the visual, and the role of Italian visual
culture in the construction of Italian identity both in Italy and abroad. Recent
volumes include The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians from 1914 to
the Present (2013, with S. Gundle and C. Duggan), and Italian Crime Fiction
(2011). In 2010 she co-curated the exhibition Against Mussolini: Art and the
Fall of a Dictator (London, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art) as part of
the     AHRC-funded       research     grant    The     Cult    of   the    Duce
(www.mussolinicult.com). She is member of the executive committee of the
Society of Italian Studies, and co-investigator of “Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-
2020: Interart/Intermedia”.