Phd in CLASSICAL AND MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES

email: massimiliano.tortora@uniroma1.it
phone:
building: Lettere
room: III piano

Massimiliano Tortora is Associate Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature.

He is director of "L'Ellisse. Studi storici di Letteratura italiana" (journal in band A) and editor in chief of "Allegoria. Per uno studio materialistico della letteratura" (band A); he is also in the scientific committee of "Levia Gravia" and member of the editorial board of "OBLIO".

Together with Annalisa Volpone he directs the series "European Modernism" (Morlacchi editore), and is a member of the scientific committee of BITeS (Biblioteca Italiana Testi e Studi), of which he heads, together with Giancarlo Alfano and Paola Italia, the "Novecento" section (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura until December 2020; Ledizioni from January 2021); he is also on the scientific committee of "Scrittojo" (Prospero editore).

Together with Riccardo Castellana, he is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Federigo Tozzi (chaired by Romano Luperini), the first two volumes of which have already been published. Since 2015 he has been co-director (and co-founder together with Annalisa Volpone) of CEMS (Centre for European Modernism Studies), an international study centre involving about twenty Italian and foreign universities and dealing with European modernism (the biennial conferences of the whole organisation were held in Perugia in 2016 and Cluj 2018; the third, in Rome, has been postponed to 2021 for obvious reasons related to the pandemic). She has also collaborated with the Camillo Caetani Foundation since 1998, where she is the scientific head of its Literary Manuscripts Fund (deposited at Palazzo Caetani in Rome).

Finally, she has been working in the field of didactics for many years, and is responsible for MOD-Scuola.

2) RESEARCH LINES

Massimiliano Tortora deals mainly with twentieth-century Italian literature, with an approach that on the one hand touches on theoretical and comparative aspects, and on the other on philological aspects and those more related to the circulation of texts.

A) HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN NOVELLA

A first line of research concerns the novella and the short narrative. Within this large strand, an important part of the reflection is reserved for the early twentieth-century novella:

- His first book is dedicated to Svevo novelliere (Giardini, Pisa 2003), in which he reconstructs the chapter of the "great Svevian novellistic season", i.e. the one that stretches from 1923, the year in which La coscienza di Zeno was published, and 1928, the writing of Il vegliardo but also the year of the author's untimely death. In this volume, a chapter is devoted to the dating of the texts and the related philological problems (and he returns to philological issues on other occasions with essays that appeared in "Allegoria" and "Moderna").

- In 2009, however, he published the critical edition of Federigo Tozzi's Novelle postume (Pacini, Pisa 2009): the edition collects, with a genetic apparatus, about sixty novelle never published by Tozzi during his life.

- On the other hand, the papers on single early 20th-century texts are more hermeneutic, specifically those on Federigo Tozzi's Una gobba, Pirandello's La mano del malato povero, Italo Svevo's La madre, Tozzi's Pigionali, and Tozzi's novelle solariana, with particular attention to Quarantotti Gambini (these papers were published in journals or collective volumes).

- Aiming instead at an overall view, careful also to deal with the theoretical issues of the genre, the intervention on La novella (in Il modernismo italiano, edited by M. Tortora, Carocci, Rome 2018) or the essays dedicated to Le raccolte di racconti in età modernista: Pirandello, Tozzi, Svevo and to Novelle tra Otto e Novecento (both in collective volumes).

A second line of research that touches on the novellistica has instead concerned the second half of the twentieth century, to which a "historical-theoretical" essay is dedicated entitled Il racconto italiano del secondo Novecento (in Il racconto italiano del secondo Novecento, sezione tematica a c. di M. Tortora di "Allegoria", 69-70, 2014). However, even in this there are readings of individual texts such as - to cite one case above all - Il dancing contro la Shoah: l'istanza della memoria in Una lapide in via Mazzini (in Cento anno di Giorgio Bassani, a c. di G. Ferroni e C. Gurrieri, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2019).

2) LINES OF RESEARCH

Massimiliano Tortora's research focuses mainly on twentieth-century Italian literature, with an approach that on the one hand touches on theoretical and comparative aspects, and on the other on philological aspects and those more related to the circulation of texts.

A) HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN NOVELLA

A first line of research concerns the novella and the short narrative. Within this large strand, an important part of the reflection is reserved for the early twentieth-century novella:

- His first book is dedicated to Svevo novelliere (Giardini, Pisa 2003), in which he reconstructs the chapter of the "great Svevian novellistic season", i.e. the one that stretches from 1923, the year in which La coscienza di Zeno was published, and 1928, the writing of Il vegliardo but also the year of the author's untimely death. In this volume, a chapter is devoted to the dating of the texts and the related philological problems (and he returns to philological issues on other occasions with essays that appeared in "Allegoria" and "Moderna").

- In 2009, however, he published the critical edition of Federigo Tozzi's Novelle postume (Pacini, Pisa 2009): the edition collects, with a genetic apparatus, about sixty novelle never published by Tozzi during his life.

- On the other hand, the papers on single early 20th-century texts are more hermeneutic, specifically those on Federigo Tozzi's Una gobba, Pirandello's La mano del malato povero, Italo Svevo's La madre, Tozzi's Pigionali, and Tozzi's novelle solariana, with particular attention to Quarantotti Gambini (these papers were published in journals or collective volumes).

- Aiming instead at an overall view, attentive also to confront the theoretical issues of the genre, the intervention on La novella (in Il modernismo italiano, edited by M. Tortora, Carocci, Rome 2018) or the essays dedicated to Le raccolte di racconti in età modernista: Pirandello, Tozzi, Svevo and to Novelle tra Otto e Novecento (both in collective volumes).

A second line of research that touches on the novellistica has instead concerned the second half of the twentieth century, to which a "historical-theoretical" essay is dedicated entitled Il racconto italiano del secondo Novecento (in Il racconto italiano del secondo Novecento, sezione tematica a c. di M. Tortora di "Allegoria", 69-70, 2014). However, even in this there are readings of individual texts such as - to cite one case above all - Il dancing contro la Shoah: l'istanza della memoria in Una lapide in via Mazzini (in Cento anno di Giorgio Bassani, a c. di G. Ferroni e C. Gurrieri, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2019).

B) MODERNISM AND ITS AUTHORS

The study of the early twentieth-century novella is strongly intertwined with the other front of research that Massimiliano Tortora has been engaged in for some years: that on modernism. To the establishment of this critical category he has devoted several works, both individual and as editor of collective volumes and the result of group research (also PRIN): we refer in particular to Il modernismo italiano (Carocci, Rome 2018), Sul modernismo italiano (Liguori, Naples 2012; edited together with Romano Luperini) and the monographic issue of "Allegoria" entitled Il modernismo in Italia (also edited together with Luperini, in which appears the essay La narrativa modernista italiana). While they have a declared comparative perspective, Il romanzo modernista europeo, edited by M. Tortora and A. Volpone, Carocci, Rome 2019, and Borders of Modernism, edited by M. Tortora and A. Volpone, Morlacchi, Perugia 2019. Essays such as Debenedetti, Svevo e il modernismo; Modernismo e modernisti nelle riviste fasciste; Mezze maniche, mezza crisi. La figura dell'impiegato nel modernismo italiano (in addition, of course, to the other works related to the novel and already mentioned above). His latest essay (La condizione modernista: appunti per uscire dalle aporie di un dibattito, in "La modernità letteraria", 13, 2020) attempts to heal some contradictions that have emerged in the debate on modernism and in the very definition of a category that is not only historical, but also linked to a literary trend.

Some modernist authors have obviously been the object of more targeted research and more assiduous frequentation. This is the case of Svevo (in addition to Svevo the novelist, see the monograph Non ho scritto che un romanzo solo. La narrativa di Italo Svevo, Cesati, Firenze 2019; the companion Svevo, edited with Claudio Gigante, is also forthcoming from Carocci); Tozzi (see at least the monograph Un siepone pieno di roghi. Il percorso di Tozzi nel modernismo italiano, Morlacchi, Perugia 2019), Montale (to whom the monograph "Vivere la propria contraddizione" is dedicated. Trascendenza e immanenza in Ossi di seppia, Pacini, Pisa 2015).

C) JOURNALS AND CULTURAL POLICIES

A number of issues relating to cultural policies and the ways in which texts are published are addressed in the monograph Letteratura e politiche culturali (Morlacchi, Perugia 2012). Within this area of study, however, some journals have been the object of more specific interest, in particular:

- "Commerce", as evidenced by the edition of an unpublished Ungarettian correspondence (Lettere a Marguerite Caetani, Andrea Caffi, Roffredo Caetani, ed. by S. Levie and M. Tortora, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2012);

- "Botteghe Oscure", to which various essays published in books or magazines are dedicated ("L'Ellisse", "Italian Studies") and the curatorship of the Bassani-Caetani correspondence ("Sarà un bellissimo numero". Carteggio 1948-1959, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2011);

- "Solaria" (the reference is to the essay on the Solarian novel and Quarantotti Gambini);

- the magazines of the Fascist period (the work on Modernism and Modernists in Fascist Magazines, already mentioned).

D) Italian Neorealism (1929-1963)

Finally, an active research front is dedicated to the Italian novel with a realistic imprint that dominated the scene in the years between 1929 (a symbolic date suggested by the publication of Moravia's Gli indifferenti) and 1963 (a watershed year in Italian culture). In addition to numerous articles on Moravia, a number of essays are devoted to Bernari, Alvaro and Italian fiction in the 1930s, Primo Levi, Arpino, Mastronardi, Petroni, and Volponi, who in 1962, with Memoriale, heralded a new narrative season (these works were mostly published in journals: "Allegoria", "L'Ospite ingrato", "Filologia e critica", "Inverbis").