Thomas J. Harrison,
Professor
Department of Italian, UCLA
abstract
The Defunct City
This lecture will analyze PasolinI's profoundly ambivalent rapport with the city. On the one hand, his studies of Rome are prophetic of the historical destruction of the once coherent, unified polis theorized by Aristotle and others up to Tonnies and Georg Simmel. The shanty towns of Rome reproduce and prefigure developments throughout the world's cities which in many cases have only become more acute since Pasolini's death. On the other hand, Pasolini shows enormous resistance to the very idea of the polis and fixes his attention on precisely what it excludes: marginal communities, mechanisms of social exile, and disinherited inhabitants. Indeed, it is with these that his deepest sympathies lie. Pasolini's aversion to the city is consubstantial with his aesthetic-erotic identity as outsider. Ultimately he is not an analyst of the city, but the herald of its demise.
short bio
Thomas J. Harrison, Professor with a PhD in Comparative Literature from C.U.N.Y., focuses his research on the 19th and 20th centuries. His interests cover poetry, the novel, aesthetic theory, philosophy, and film. He is the author of a multidisciplinary study of European expressionism called 1910: THE EMANCIPATION OF DISSONANCE (1996) and of ESSAYISM: CONRAD, MUSIL & PIRANDELLO (1992). Two of his edited collections are NIETZSCHE IN ITALY (1988) and THE FAVORITE MALICE: ONTOLOGY AND REFERENCE IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN POETRY (1983). He has written articles on D'Annunzio, Ungaretti, Montale, Zanzotto, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Stanley Fish, Alfredo Giuliani, Carlo Michelstaedter, and Georg Lukacs. Before joining the faculty of UCLA in 1994 he taught in Italian and comparative literature programs at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Utah.