“Modern Joy and Sorrow: Emotion, Affect, and Modernist Form in Pirandello and Beyond”
Saturday, January 6, 2024 @ 1:45-3:00pm
We invite you to join us for our sponsored panel at the upcoming MLA Convention in Philadelphia. The panel will feature presentations by four scholars examining Pirandello’s work:
“To Feel Otherwise: Pirandello between Philosophy and Affect”
Andrea Sartori (Nankai University)
In The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) and in many novellas, Pirandello used umorismo as both a cognitive and affective ‘tool’ useful to domesticate the torments of the poet and those of the philosopher, that is, of someone who wants to feel and at the same time to reason (“the poet wants to feel, the philosopher wants to reason […]. Therefore, his torment is ineffable”, wrote Federico De Roberto in Leopardi, Treves, 1898). This paper argues that Pirandello did not compartimentalize reason and affect in separate ‘boxes’, as instead a Cartesian and Kantian understanding of modernity would have suggested to do (on such a dualism see Remo Bodei’s book Geometria delle passioni, Feltrinelli, 1991). On the contrary, the paper argues that, in Pirandello’s narrative, humoristic contradictoriness left a mark of mobility and openness on the personalities of his characters. Pirandello achieved such a goal by working on the formal aspects of his stories, and, in particular, on their narratological structure. This was the case, for instance, of the two “Premises” introducing the 1904 novel, but also that of the use of both “free indirect speech” and “internal focalization” in the short-story entitled L’uomo solo (1911). The formal solutions adopted to convey a sense of contradictoriness and humor, that is, the feeling of the opposite, were not just a philosophical instrument of knowledge. Instead, they helped Pirandello to feel and to write otherwise, so as to dwell the threshold between positivity and negativity, sorrow and joy. In this way, the writer, on the one hand, tried to overcome the despairing “lie of feeling” that, for him no less than for Max Nordau (1849-1923) and Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910), characterized the inauthenticity of bourgeois society at the turn of the century (Vita Nuova, June 29-July 6, 1890). On the other hand, Pirandello’s focus on forms and narratological structures prevented him from merely equating the truth and authenticity of feelings to their immediate and instantaneous expression – a ‘galvanic’ one, as an affect theorist like Brian Massumi probably would say.
Andrea Sartori (Italian Studies PhD, Brown University) is associate professor of Italian at the College of Foreign Languages of Nankai University in Tianjin (China). He taught European and Italian Culture at the Politecnico of Milan, in Italy, between 2022 and 2023. Andrea is the author of a book on Euro-American contemporary culture, social media, and technology (Assaliti dalla mille luci del cielo. La cultura della percezione, Quodlibet, 2023), of another book on Darwinism and the modern Italian novel (The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and of a novel (Scompenso, Exòrma, 2010).
“Pirandello’s Retrospective Novels: The Sorrow of Grief”
Lorenzo Mecozzi (Columbia University)
Scholars who work on Pirandello's theory of humor typically emphasize its disruptive nature and its capacity to dismantle myths and preconceived truths. Specifically, the focus is on the deconstruction of ideas pertaining to the self, social norms, values, ideologies, and the novelistic form itself. However, it is important to acknowledge that reducing umorismo solely to its disruptive forces would represent a betrayal of Pirandello’s theory. The distinctive quality of Pirandello's humor lies in the sentimento del contrario - an emotion characterized by pitiful and melancholic sorrow, evoked when contemplating the criticized reality. This paper explores the significance of the sorrowful dimension within Pirandello's umorismo, particularly evident in two of his 'autobiographical' novels (The Late Mattia Pascal and One, No One and One Hundred Thousand). The argument posits that the first-person retrospecting narration in these texts should be interpreted as a tragic endeavor to preserve the individual self in the modern, postmetaphysical world. The hypothesis put forth is that retrospectivity, manifested through first-person narration and its inherent dialogism, serves as the formal equivalent of the sentimento del contrario.
Lorenzo Mecozzi is a Lecturer in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. He obtained his BA and MA in Italian and Comparative Literature from the University of Siena and completed his Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. During his time at Columbia, he taught Italian Language and Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy. His research primarily focuses on Italian and European modernism. His most recent publication is the chapter 'Il genere cadetto. Il romanzo di famiglia come forma simbolica,' featured in the collective volume "Non poteva staccarsene senza lacerarsi": Per una genealogia del romanzo familiare italiano (2020).
“Metafiction as the Expression of Crisis: Luigi Pirandello and Miguel de Unamuno”
Francesca Magario (Duke University)
The recurrence of metafictional trends has often been linked to the experience of social, political, and/or cultural crisis, allowing writers to experiment with a variety of genres and techniques to subvert previous literary models. Although self-referential productions are not a modernist novelty, figures like Luigi Pirandello and Miguel de Unamuno revolutionize their use as a literary response to the uncertainties brought on by modernity. These authors live through national crises that are concurrent and comparable: whereas Italy struggles to find national unity within its recently established borders, Spain deals with the loss of control over its colonies and longingly looks back at its imperial past; as the former experiences the rise of an authoritarian regime and has to cope with its peripheral position within Europe, the latter endures multiple political leaders that cripple the country’s economy and lead it into despair through a Civil War and WWII. The combination of these socio-political factors and the resulting perceived loss of agency become fertile ground for the emergence of extreme metafictional experimentation that shatters the boundaries between reality and fiction. The comparative analysis of Pirandello’s metafictional stories “Characters” (1906), “A Character’s Tragedy” (1911) and “Conversations with the Characters” (1915), and of Unamuno’s How to Make a Novel (1926) and El hermano Juan o el mundo es teatro (1929, untranslated) reveals how metafictional ploys are used to destabilize authorial power as a response to the preoccupations of the period.
Francesca Magario is a Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Studies at Duke University, focusing on comparative studies (Italian and Spanish). Her dissertation is a transnational study of metafictional trends emerging during the first three decades of the twentieth century in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, highlighting their relevance within analogous historical and socio-political happenings. Other research interests include literary Modernism in Southern Europe, theater and cinema, as well as Fascism and colonial Italy.
“Sciascia as Pirandello in La scomparsa di Ettore Majorana and Uno, nessuno e centomila”
Maria Rosaria Vitti-Alexander (Nazareth University)
The ties between the main characters in Pirandello's Uno, nessuno e centomila and Sciascia's La scomparsa di Majorana are at once very similar and very different. Pirandello’s Moscarda, a rich and spoiled heir without any aim in life, and the Sciascia's Majorana, an intellectual and man of science, are both introduced as young individuals surrounded by family and friends; yet both, after a series of events and happenings, find themselves estranged from everything and everybody. Likewise similar is the process that leads the two characters to their disappearance from society. For Pirandello's Moscarda the voluntary abandonment of life's engagements is acquired slowly through an unyielding process of analyzing the perceptions that others, including family, friends and acquaintances have of him. With Sciascia's Majorana, the estrangement is instead a premeditated and sudden disappearance, as an act of responsibility toward society. This presentation will analyze these similarities and differences.
Maria Rosaria Vitti-Alexander is professor emerita at Nazareth University, where she taught Italian language, literature and cinema. She was also the Director of Casa Italiana, Center for Italian Studies for the large Italian-American community of Rochester, NY. She is currently the Vice-President and Secretary of Gamma Kappa Alpha, the National Italian Honor Society. She continues to take part in the annual Convegno Pirandelliano in Sicily and participates in several international conferences in the States and in Italy.