The Art of Fictional Encyclopedism

In collaboration with
NYU Department of Italian Studies

John Freccero Lecture Series

The Art of Fictional Encyclopedism

A lecture by
Pierpaolo Antonello, Yale University

In ENGLISH

Critics have observed that an “encyclopedic complex” or “encyclopedic impulse,” frequently marked by irony and satire, has informed both modernist and postmodernist literature, from Joyce to Pynchon. While usually linked to the vast architecture of maximalist novels or opere-mondo, this lineage also runs through short, fragmentary, and eccentric texts that resist clear generic classification. In such works, the encyclopedic is refracted through epigrammatic form, with flashes of taxonomic excess, where the discursive frameworks of the sciences are repurposed for arbitrary, imaginary, and parodic schemes of classifications. Jorge Luis Borges emerges as a central precursor, whose fictional encyclopedias anticipated subsequent explorations by Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Italian experimentalists such as Giorgio Manganelli, Rodolfo Wilcock, and Edoardo Sanguineti. This lecture examines this genealogy through intermedial instances of fictional encyclopedism, concentrating on Leo Lionni’s Parallel Botany (1976) and Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus (1981). Both works conjoin scientific discourse, visual art, and imaginary taxonomy, and interrogate the fantastic through parodic and satirical registers. They exemplify not only the ekphrastic tendencies of contemporary encyclopedism but also a form of “rational fantastic” that exceeds Tzvetan Todorov’s genre definition, reconfiguring encyclopedism as an open, generative aesthetic: a combinatory mechanism for the invention of possible worlds.

About the Speaker
After teaching at the University of Cambridge for numerous years, Professor Pierpaolo Antonello has recently joined Yale University. He specializes in 20th century Italian literature, culture, and intellectual history. He wrote extensively on the relationship between literature and science, Futurism and the Avant-Garde, Italo Calvino, contemporary Italian cinema, and Postmodern Italian culture. He also published on French philosophy and epistemology (René Girard, Michel Serres). His books include Science and Literature in Italian Culture: From Dante to Calvino (2004), co-edited with Simon Gilson; Il ménage a quattro. Scienza, filosofia e tecnica nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (2005); Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2009 (2009), co-edited with Alan O’Leary; Postmodern impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture (2009), co-edited with Florian Mussgnug; Contro il materialismo. Le ‘due culture’ in Italia: bilancio di un secolo (2012; AAIS Prize 2013); Dimenticare Pasolini. Intellettuali e impegno nell’Italia contemporanea (2013). With Robert Gordon, Antonello is the co-editor of the series “Italian Modernities” for Peter Lang, Oxford.

The John Freccero Lecture Series is a series of distinguished lectures that showcase important and innovative research in the field of Italian Studies. Co-sponsored and co-organized by NYU’s Department of Italian Studies and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, this series honors the memory of Professor John Freccero, one of the most influential figures in the field of Italian Studies. A world-renowned scholar of Dante, among other subjects, Professor Freccero, after teaching at Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, Yale University, and Stanford University, was Professor of Italian Studies at New York University from 1992 to 2015, where his intellectual and educational vision was instrumental in the founding and growth of our Department of Italian Studies. The John Freccero Lecture Series is supported by a generous gift from the late Dr. Thomas Bellezza and Mr. John Jensen.