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Department of
French and Italian

Andrea Mirabile

Associate Professor of Italian
Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts

My research interests focus primarily on three areas: relationships between verbal and visual arts in Italian culture; cultural interplays between Italy, France, and the United States; and literary theory.

Early in my career, I studied literature from a philological perspective, with attention to how texts are shaped by historical backgrounds. My first book, Le strutture e la storia (2006), deals with the evolution of theory from structuralism to semiotics, particularly in Avalle, Corti, Eco, and Segre. These scholars moved beyond the classic opposition between historicism and semiotics, by mediating between the historical, the philological, and the theoretical. In Le strutture e la storia I used the same approach, to reveal both the achievements and the contradictions of several protagonists of contemporary critical discourse. Taking this exploration further, in articles on Barthes, Benjamin, and De Man, I examined the aporias and contradictory tensions that break down the accepted borders between national traditions and question the boundaries between academic fields.

I applied these findings to the interrelations between the textual and the visual in a series of articles on Calvino, Celati, and Chiara. The parallels between visual and verbal arts are best summarized by the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, so several of my articles relate to Longhi and his followers (Arbasino, Banti, Bertolucci, Pasolini, and Testori). In these articles, I used Longhi’s notion of “equivalenze verbali” to interpret post-WWII Italian poets, novelists, and filmmakers. Through archival research in Italy, I found several unpublished letters between Longhi and his followers, some of which I included in my second book, Scrivere la pittura (2009).

After Scrivere la pittura, I looked for other connections among modern Italian and French authors who were inspired by the visual arts. Gabriele D’Annunzio—one of Longhi’s aesthetic forebears—created several works in both Italian and French that blurred the boundaries between writing, reading, and seeing. Thanks to the generosity of D’Annunzio’s museum-home and archive, the Vittoriale degli Italiani, I was able to study many unpublished documents that show how some of D’Annunzio’s plays, in particular Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and La Pisanelle, resulted from intense dialogue between the poet and several of the period’s major figures across the arts, including Brooks, Canudo, and Rubinstein. My third book, Multimedia Archaeologies (2014), examines how, in anticipation of present-day multimedia creations, D’Annunzio conceived of his

French-Italian plays as works that could be simultaneously read as poems, performed as theatrical experiments in more than one language, or adapted into films.

While writing Multimedia Archaeologies, I realized that the interanimation between the verbal and the visual is highly complex. I noticed a recurrent paradox: images and words communicate more strongly when sight is reduced or suspended. Ironically, the reduction of vision strengthens both the awareness of its limitations and the exchanges between words and images. My fourth book, Piaceri invisibili (2017), pursues this paradox through a survey of the metaphor of blindness in modern and contemporary Italian culture. Focusing on D’Annunzio, Pasolini, and Calvino, I address how the cross-fertilization between frailty of vision and the horizons of writing models and is modeled by other aesthetic realms, including pictorial, filmic, and mixed media practices.

D’Annunzio continues to be at the core of my current research, which analyzes the influence of the Italian author on the American poet Ezra Pound. Pound lived mostly in Italy, and his verses reflect both the writer’s love for Italian art (especially the Quattrocento) and his admiration for D’Annunzio (mostly his writings on Venice). In Ezra Pound e l’arte italiana: Fra le Avanguardie e D’Annunzio (2018), I stressed D’Annunzio’s importance for Pound, and explore the ambivalences of Pound’s ekphrastic poetry, which fluctuates between Decadent and Modernist tropes.

Ezra Pound e l’arte italiana considers both the art writings by the two poets and the avantgarde ideal of combining different artforms and temporalities, modern sensibility and ancient rhetorical strategies, for example ekphrasis, the verbal description of a visual experience. This book was followed by Raccontare immagini (2019), which traces a theoretical genealogy of ekphrastic literature from antiquity to the present, and Alberto Burri: Parole e immagini (2022), which observes specific instances of ekphrasis for one of the most important painters of postwar Italy. Burri and other abstract artists pose significant challenges to writers, who try to produce texts based on complex artworks, which apparently reject any figurative and narrative content. My current work on Lucio Fontana (generously supported by a Ragusa Foundation for the Humanities research grant) explores precisely this conundrum.


Representative Publications

Books:

  • Alberto Burri. Parole e immagini. Città di Castello: Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, 2022.
  • Raccontare immagini. Milano: Editrice Bibliografica, 2019
  • Ezra Pound e l’arte italiana. Fra le Avanguardie e D’Annunzio. Firenze: Olschki, 2018. [For reviews and more information click here.]
  • Piaceri invisibili: Retorica della cecità in D’Annunzio, Pasolini, Calvino. Roma: Carocci, 2017.
  • Multimedia Archaeologies: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Belle Époque Paris, and the Total Artwork. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2014.
  • Scrivere la pittura. La ‘funzione Longhi’ nella letteratura italiana. Ravenna: Longo, 2009. (Winner of the AAIS prize – 2009), Cited with context on Longhi [here].
  • Le strutture e la storia: La critica italiana dallo strutturalismo alla semiotica. Milano: LED, 2006.

Edited Books:

  • Segre, Cesare. Opera critica. A cura di Alberto Conte e Andrea Mirabile. Milano: Mondadori, 2014.

Articles:

  • “Giorgio Manganelli e l”ironia teologica’ di Lucio Fontana.” Paragone Letteratura, LXXV, Terza Serie, Numero 171-172-173 (888-890-892), Febbraio-Giugno (2024): 113-129.

  • “‘In mutande corte e maglietta’: Leonardo Sinisgalli e l’Ode a Lucio Fontana.” MLN 138-1 (2023): 145-166.

  • “Piero Manzoni. Libera dimensione.” Predella. Journal of Visual Arts, 53 (2023): 87-109.

    www.predella.it/andrea-mirabile/

  • “Un dandy all’Incoronata. Walter Pater e il Bergognone.” Archivio Storico Lodigiano, CXLI (2022): 251-268.
  • “Valentino Zeichen e Alberto Burri fra poesia, narrativa, e arti visive.” L’anello che non tiene. Journal of Modern Italian Literature, Vols. 29-32, NN. 1-2, Spring-Fall 2017-2020 (2021): 135-151.
  • “Frammenti, rovine, ‘immaginazione ermeneutica’: Mantegna e il Novecento.” Italica 97.3 (2020): 522-538.
  • “Trecentisti senesi: un dialogo critico fra Cecchi e Berenson.” Ermeneutica letteraria XVI (2020): 77-85.
  • “Sanguineti, Mantegna, e l’ekphrasis tra omaggio e dissacrazione.” MLN 135-1 (2020): 281-301.
  • “Fra il romanzo-saggio e l’ekphrasis: Arbasino su Mantegna.” Polifemo 17-18, Ton sur Ton. Lo stile della saggistica critica sulle arti I (2019): 33-44.
  • “Giorgio Bassani tra Longhi e Morandi.” Dal particolare all’universale. I libri di poesia di Giorgio Bassani. A Cura di Valerio Capozzo. Firenze: Giorgio Pozzi Editore, 2020. 149-166.
  • “‘Fili d’oro’: Literature, Painting, and Blindness in D’Annunzio’s Notturno.” Forum Italicum, 51 (2017): 356-377.
  • “Pound e Pasolini: tra polemica ideologica e magistero formale.” Letteratura e letterature 11 (2017): 13-20.
  • “Visione endogena e visione esogena in Palomar di Italo Calvino.” Il testo e l’opera. Studi in ricordo di Franco Brioschi, a cura di Laura Neri e Stefania Sini, Milano, Ledizioni, 2016, 507-533.
  • “Lorenzo Lotto di Anna Banti: fra Longhi e Berenson.” Italica 93.2 (2016): 262-273.
  • “Fili d’oro”: le arti figurative nel Notturno di Gabriele D’Annunzio. MLN 131-1 (2016): 119-138.
  • Preface to “Cultural Modernism in the Americas.III: The French and Italian Avant-Garde.” AmeriQuests 12-1 (2015) http://ameriquests.org/index.php/ameriquests.
  • “‘Una superficie dipinta di azzurro:” Cecità e Visione in Teorema di Pier Paolo Pasolini.” L’anello che non tiene. Journal of Modern Italian Literature 25-26 (2014): 25-52.
  • Andrea Mirabile and Lynn Ramey. “Real” Bodies?  Race, Corporality, and Contradiction in The Arabian Nights and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974).  Attar, Katrina F. and Lynn Shutters Eds. Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.  141-158.
  • “Il fiore delle Mille e una notte: il cinema di Pasolini fra scrittura e pittura.” Contaminazioni culturali. Musica, teatro, cinema e letteratura nell’Italia contemporanea. A cura di Fulvio Orsitto e Simona Wright. Roma: Vecchiarelli, 2014. 197-212.
  • “Piero Chiara scrittore d’arte.” Il «mago del lago». Piero Chiara a cent’anni dalla nascita. A cura di Mauro Novelli. Atti del Convegno internazionale. Varese-Luino, 27-28 settembre 2013. Francesco Nastro Editore, 2014: 137-155.
  • “La morte del dio. Mito e soggettività in Gabriele D’Annunzio.” Italienisch. Zeitschrift für italienische Sprache und Literatur 69 (2013): 18-33.
  • “Visual Intertextualities in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien” Modern Language Notes 128-1 (2013): 124-150.
  • “La semiotica in Italia: i primi quarant’anni.” Italianistica. Rivista di letteratura italiana, XLI, 1, (2012): 107-116.
  • “Allegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to Benjamin in Paul de Man.” German Studies Review 35.2 (2012): 319-333.
  • “Documentary film as equivalence: Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006).” Studies in Documentary Film 5 (2011): 133-144.
  • “Rhetoric of Sedution and Seduction of Rhetoric in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading.” Enthymema 2 (2010). http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/enthymema/article/view/757
  • Interview. “Il Sussidiario.” 12-17-2010. “Nessun analisi potrà mai sostituire il piacere della lettura.” http://www.ilsussidiario.net/articolo.aspx?articolo=134920
  • “Per un dialogismo figurale: Alberto Arbasino ed Enrico Palandri tra letteratura e film.” Generazione in movimento. Viaggio nella scrittura di Enrico Palandri. Ravenna: Longo, 2010. 79-86.
  • “Ricordi figurativi ne La Stanza del Vescovo di Piero Chiara.” Modern Language Notes 124-1 (2009): 254-268.
  • “Ekphrasis e ironia ne Le Muse a Los Angeles di Alberto Arbasino.” Stumenti critici 2 (2008): 313-326.
  • “Scacchi, cristalli, orologi: aporie della decostruzione.” Per Franco Brioschi. Saggi di lingua e letteratura italiana. A cura di Claudio Milanini e Silvia Morgana. Milano: Cisalpino, 2007. 447-453.
  • “Dallo strutturalismo al poststrutturalismo: Michel Foucault.” Letteratura e letterature 1 (2007): 139-153.
  • “Discreti messaggeri del fuori. Appunti su Italo Calvino e le arti figurative.” Sul ri-uso. Pratiche del testo e teoria della letteratura. A cura di Edoardo Esposito. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2007. 79-96.
  • “Retorica della seduzione e seduzione della retorica nelle Allegories of Reading di Paul de Man.” Strumenti critici 1 (2006): 145–158.
  • “Gli affreschi di Piero ad Arezzo: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra Longhi e Gramsci.” Il lettore di provincia 123 (2006): 121–132.
  • “Peccato e salvezza nella poesia di Giovanni Testori: Crocefissione tra figurazione ed ineffabile.” La Fusta 13 (2005): 1–8.
  • “Roland Barthes tra ‘morte dell’autore’ e biografia.” Intersezioni 1 (2005): 117-32.
  • “Equivalenze pittorico-verbali in Roberto Longhi e Anna Banti.” Romance Notes 43 (2003): 271–278.