2023 Theses Doctoral

Styles of Existence, Italy 1961-1982

Scarborough, Margaret

Styles of Existence, Italy 1961–1982 offers a new genealogy of the field known as Italian thought that argues for philology’s instrumental role in transforming conceptions of self in postwar Italy. Approaching philology as a rigorous historical-critical method, the dissertation explores its often surprising “afterlives” in the Italian context, and applies its methods—particularly textual, visual, and discursive analysis—to an examination of the projects of self of poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and the art critic and feminist Carla Lonzi. It places these two seminal figures in Italian letters into conversation for the first time, and establishes the lineage and importance of Lonzi’s theory and practice of autocoscienza, a relational process of self-consciousness-making, for English-language readers. Addressing concerns in comparative literature, critical theory, Italian studies, and gender studies, Styles contributes to debates about the history and scope of philology; to the historiography of the long 1968 in Italy; and to the historiography of radical feminism.