A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini

David Ward

Jan 1995 · Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

About this ebook

Since his murder in 1975 - and especially in the last eight years - Pasolini has been the object of growing critical attention, especially in the United States. For the most part, this new attention has been directed at Pasolini's cinema, the part of his multifarious cultural activity for which he is best known outside Italy. Pasolini, however, was extremely active in different areas of Italian cultural life. Before dedicating himself to cinema, he had made his name as a poet, novelist, and theorist of language and literature, and in the course of his career also achieved fame as a film theorist, dramaturg, and journalist. This book aims to redress this imbalance by directing critical attention to these relatively neglected areas of Pasolini studies. In particular, the book focuses on the question of narrative form that invests all of Pasolini's writings.

About the author

Currently vice-chancellor for academic affairs and professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, David Ward received his Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of Wisconsin. He was one of a large number of Wisconsin students who, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, led a major research thrust in historical geography, much of which had a solid theoretical and analytical orientation. Over the past two decades, Ward has published a set of important books on North America, particularly its cities. His Cities and Immigrants (1971), historical geography at its best, set a research agenda for scholars for more than a decade after its publication. Although some of this research relates to broad themes relevant to the evolution of the human landscape, it also includes detailed examinations of selected cities, notably Boston and New York.