Event Details:

"Vico, in Theory" lecture by Sabrina Ferri

"All the giants of criticism," Jules Michelet declared, "are already contained, with room to spare, in the little pandemonium of the Scienza nuova." This talk explores the reception of Giambattista Vico's New Science (1744) in literary theory and cultural criticism. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which Vico's understanding of history and his modes of analysis have have been appropriated to rethink the theory and practice of historical interpretation, from Eric Auerbach's new philology and Hayden White's metahistory to the most recent theorists who use Vico to redefine the sense of history in the Anthropocene.

 

Sabrina Ferri is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Notre Dame. Her research encompasses Italian literature, philosophy, science and visual arts of the long eighteenth century, with a focus on the transition to modernity and Italy's place in both European and transatlantic contexts. Her work on Giacomo Casanova, Lazzaro Spallanzani, the late eighteenth-century Picturesque, Vittorio Alfieri, and Giambattista Vico has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals. Her first book, Ruins Past: Modernity in Italy, 1744-1836, was recently published in the Voltaire Foundation's series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Through analyzing the representation of ruins by Italian writers, scientists, and artists between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Ruins Past explores the culture of the period and traces Italy's uneasy transition into modernity. She is currently working on Giacomo Leopardi as a modern thinker and on a long-term project on anachronism and historical thought during the long eighteenth century.