Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921-2021)
A celebration for the 100th anniversary of the first performance in Rome in 1921 of Luigi Pirandello‘s seminal play:
Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of An Author)
Registration required
Limited capacity. Guests will be asked to show proof of vaccination upon entry.
Speakers:
- Lisa Sarti, Ph.D. – The City University of New York
- Pietro Frassica Ph.D – Princeton University
- Michael Subialka – University of California, Davis
Pietro Frassica, Lisa Sarti, and Michael Subialka in conversation with Fabio Finotti, will discuss the production of the play, from its stormy debut in Rome in 1921 to its international recognition as a masterpiece that still resonates with audiences today. The event will also be the occasion to present the latest issue of PSA – The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America, a special edition entirely devoted to acknowledge Six Characters in Search of An Author as the greatest of the Nobel Prize-winner’s dramas.
Lisa Sarti received her Laurea degree in Modern Languages from the University of Florence, Italy and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Graduate School of The City University of New York. Sartis is Associate Professor of Italian at BMCC of The City University of New York in Manhattan. Her main field of research is fin-de-siècle visual culture, early cinematography, and the intersection of literature with the performing arts. She has published articles on Arrigo Boito, Melodrama, Annie Vivanti and the Female artists of the Cafè Chantant, American musical theater, and Pirandello’s storytelling and theatre, as well the cinematic adaptation of his short stories. She co-edited (with Michael Subialka) the volume Pirandello’s Visual Philosophy: Imagination and Thought Across Media (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2017) and she co-authored (with Carlo Di Lieto and Michael Subialka) the book “Scrittura d’immagini: Pirandello e la visualità tra letteratura, filosofia e psicanalisi”(Rubbettino 2021). She is the author of the critical edition of Pirandello’s The Coazze Notebook (2022), which she translated from the Italian. Professor Sarti is also the co-editor of PSA-The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America (together with Michael Subialka) and of the digital edition of Pirandello’s Short Stories for a Year.
Editor of PSA – The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America
https://www.pirandellosociety.org
Digital Edition:
https://www.pirandellointranslation.org
Pietro Frassica, a native of Italy, earned his Ph.D. in Italian literature from Boston College (1976) and has taught at Princeton since 1976, when he joined the Princeton faculty. His interests include Italian literature of the Renaissance, interdisciplinary relations between literary and visual traditions in the eighteenth century (Parini), contemporary literature (Primo Levi, Marinetti, Soldati, Lagorio), theater (Pirandello), and gastronomy in literature. He is the author of more than eighty published articles about every century of Italian literary history, and his books include: Chroniche de la città de Anchona (critical edition), 1979; A Marta Abba per non morire, 1991; Romanzo europeo tra Otto e Novecento, 1992; Caro Maestro (letters by Marta Abba to Luigi Pirandello), 1994; Varianti e invarianti dell’evocazione, 2004. He has also edited several volumes, such as Primo Levi as Witness, 1991; Studi di filologia e letteratura italiana, 1992; Salvatore Quasimodo. Nel vento del Mediterraneo, 2001; Ercole Patti e altro novecento siciliano, 2004; Magia di un romanzo, Il Fu Mattia Pascal prima e dopo, 2005; and La Cucina Futurista, (by Marinetti and Fillìa), 2007. He has been awarded the 2006 Val di Comino Prize for Varianti e invarianti dell’evocazione, and has been appointed by the Italian government as an editor of the Edizione Nazionale of the works of Parini.
Professor Frassica has recently completed a book on Pirandello’s collaboration with the actress Marta Abba and on Marta’s career in America, Her Maestro’s Echo (forthcoming). His long-term project is a book examining the relationship between the poetry of Parini and the visual arts.
Michael Subialka taught at the University of Oxford, where he was the Powys Roberts Research Fellow in European Literature at St Hugh’s College, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He received a PhD from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.
His fileds of interest: modern performance and film studies, focusing especially on the avant-garde period of the early 20th century in Italy, and with an interest in critical theory responding to that period. His research in this area is coupled with practical involvement in theatre. At Oxford, Subialka co-directed two Italian plays, Serata Futurista! (Futurist Soiree!) and Fiabe Italiane (Italian Fairy Tales). When he was a student, also acted in foreign-language theatre in plays by writers like Dario Fo. He continues to be interested in how practical involvement in making art relates to research on the meaning of artistic production.
With a strong interest in collaborative work – from co-translating a contemporary novel to co-editing volumes and co-directing theatre, he co-authored the book, Scrittura d’immagini: Pirandello e la visualità tra arte, filosofia e psicoanalisi (Rubbettino, 2021), written with Carlo Di Lieto and Lisa Sarti. The book offers the first sustained examination of Pirandello’s theory and practice of visual writing. He is currently working with Elisa Segnini on a collaborative project to produce a new study of D’Annunzio as World Literature.
Reservation no longer available