Narrative and Imperative

Narrative & Imperative is the first book in English on Italian Holocaust writing as a whole. Risa Sodi explores the work of eight representative authors, including the internationally famous (Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, and Elsa Morante) and the lesser known (Giacomo Debenedetti, Paolo Maurensig, Liana Millu, Bruno Piazza, and Giuliana Tedeschi). She examines issues of genre, language, gender, and facticity while situating the works studied within the fields of European and Holocaust letters. A brief history of the Italian Jews the oldest Jewish community in Europe opens the book, and the conclusion brings the study up to recent times.

Autorentext

The Author: Risa Sodi is Senior Lector in Italian at Yale University, Director of Undergraduate Study, and Director of the Italian Language Program. She received her M.Phil. and her Ph.D. in Italian language and literature from Yale University, and her M.A. in French and Italian literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals on Italian-Jewish authors and the Italian Holocaust in literature and film, she is the author of A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz (Peter Lang, 1990) and has interviewed Primo Levi, Liana Millu, and Giuliana Tedeschi.