Queering Quickness: Not Straight to the Point with Calvino and Ariosto

Alessandro Giammei (Yale University) 

This is the second meeting of Six Memos for the Present, a lecture series celebrating Italo Calvino's centennial.

This series offers undergraduate and graduate students at USC an interdisciplinary perspective on Italo Calvino's legacy, taking as a point of departure Six Memos for the Next Millenium, the collection of essays he wrote for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard.

Alessandro Giammei is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. He specializes in modern and contemporary literature and art, questioning their fantasies of genealogical roots in early modern and classical cultures. Trained as a philologist and a literary historian in Italy, he moved to the US to hybridize his research and pedagogy with Queer theory, speculative realism, trans-historical and trans-national perspectives. He is the author of Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press, 2024), a study of how the most influential poet of the Renaissance was conjured or appropriated to shape magical realism, avant-garde painting, fascist cultural propaganda, and cinema in modern Italy between the birth of Futurism and the end of World War II. His latest books are Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (with Ara Merjian, Verso 2023), and Cose da maschi (Einaudi 2023).