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Eugenio Bolongaro
Professor Eugenio Bolongaro teaches contemporary Italian literature and film at McGill University. His research has focused on the work of Italo Calvino, a central figure in twentieth-century Italian literature and culture. In his book Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature, Bolongaro examines the fictional works published by Calvino during the 1950s and early 1960s and relates them to the intellectual debates that took place in Italy at the time, such as the debate surrounding neorealism and the commitment of intellectuals. More recent work on Calvino has focused on ethics and in particular on the ‘question of the animal’ as it emerges in the Italian author's later work.
A growing interest in the ethical function of literature has led to an ongoing, wide-ranging study of post-1995 Italian writers that attempts to situate contemporary Italian prose fiction within a post-structuralist ethical questioning originating in the work of Deleuze, Levinas and Derrida.
A book-length manuscript on these topics should be completed shortly. Bolongaro's work on film has focused on the theory of adaptation, on the exploration of history and narrative in Italian cinema (specifically, in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider Stratagem), and, most recently, on the representation of homosexual desire in Luchino Visconti's films.