After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth-Century Italy
© 2010
Focusing on four twentieth-century Italian writers (Guido Morselli, Amelia Rosselli, Cesare Pavese, and Primo Levi), Elizabeth Leake examines their personal correspondence, diaries, and obituaries as well as popular and academic commemorative writings about them and their works in order to elucidate the ramifications of their suicides for their readership. Arguing that authorial suicide points to the limitations of those critical stances that exclude the author from the practice of reading, Leake's insightful re-reading of these authors and their texts shows that in the aftermath of suicide, an author's life and death themselves become texts to be read.
Product Details
- Series: Toronto Italian Studies
- World Rights
- Page Count: 288 pages
- Dimensions: 6.3in x 0.7in x 9.4in
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Author Information
Elizabeth Leake is an associate professor in the Department of Italian at Rutgers University. -
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Death of the Author
- The Posthumous Author: Guido Morselli, Giuseppe Rensi, Jacques Monod
- The Corpus and the Corpse: Amelia Rosselli, Jacques Derrida, Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kofman
- The Post-Biological Author: Cesare Pavese, Gianni Vattimo, Emanuele Severino
- Commemoration and Erasure: Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, Avishai Margalit
Postscript: Learning from the Dead
Notes
Works Consulted
Index
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Subjects and Courses