Professor Federica G. Pedriali

Details of Professor Federica G. Pedriali's inaugural lecture.

Event details

Lecture title: "Gadda Goes to War"

Date: 20 September 2012 at 5.15pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre 5, Appleton Tower

Lecture abstract

There is something about Gadda. The press is in no doubt, in the wake of box office success: ‘Tutti pazzi per Gadda’. The Italian newspaper Repubblica cannot hold back: ‘Fabrizio Gifuni’s Gadda va alla guerra is our mirror’. It is good to know that the nation in tatters still tolerates the mirror. It is even better, for those who are militant about culture, that it should be Gadda, our most exuberant modernist writer, to provide the emergency rations.

The state of public life imposes that we take such so-called luxuries and dispensables in earnest, the message could not be sharper or more timely - thank goodness for Fabrizio Gifuni. One hundred twenty one performances in two seasons have not just fuelled huge media interest: they do make an urgent statement of the collective need. Denmark, after all, was once the prison, and from there Hamlet, the most isolated, the most singular of us all, indeed talked to us all. Past and present day Italy has got plenty of the desperate global place about it.

From this latest immortal theatre, from the Italian-ness of the world as it were, our utterly compromised writer - traumatised World War I veteran, diligent supporter of the fascist regime and daring experimentalist of negation - handles the specifics of his times, soil and anthropology in the rabid hope to serve one day as man and citizen. The message couldn’t be more serious or more suited to our present day world circumstances - there is none of the lightness of postmodernity in pre-postmodernist Gadda. And now, Italy’s best kept literary secret is even packaged for emergency export - again, thank goodness for the visionarism of those resisting in the world of the arts.

Lecture video