Motherhood, Fatherland, and Primo Levi : the hidden groundwork of agency in his Auschwitz writings / Robert Pirro.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pirro, Robert Carl, author.

Series:

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press series in Italian studies

The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Levi, Primo, 1919-1987--Criticism and interpretation.

Levi, Primo.

Levi, Primo, 1919-1987.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 161 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Madison : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; Lanham, Maryland : Copublished by the Rowman & Littlefield Pubishing Group, [2017]

Summary:

Motherhood, Fatherland and Primo Levi: The Hidden Groundwork of Agency in His Auschwitz Writings offers major new insights into the political dimensions of Levi's thought by using those texts conventionally thought to be marginal to his oeuvre (e.g., his science fiction stories and World War II novel) to deepen our understanding of the lessons he offered in his more well-known texts, Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved. Typically cast as a profound witness of the obliteration of human freedom, Levi appears in this book as an acute thinker of the sources and varieties of human agency who affirms a politics of active participation as an important means of achieving a fulfilled human life. This book highlights Levi's lifelong engagement with questions of agency by bringing to bear two literatures that have been previously missing from scholarly considerations of Levi's legacy: psychologically informed analyses of how infantile and toddler experience shapes later perceptions of self, and republican readings of Machiavelli in which major emphasis is placed on citizen participation and civic virtue. Avoiding academic jargon and entanglement in hyper-specialized academic debates, Motherhood, Fatherland, and Primo Levi offers a more comprehensive understanding of Levi's legacy to scholars across many fields (e.g., Italian studies, political philosophy and theory, intellectual history, Holocaust and Jewish studies, women's studies) as well as to educated readers of a humanistic bent. Book jacket.

Contents:

Levi's house as repository of domestic and civic virtues

The evil wet nurse agency and relationship in Levi's short fiction

Primo Levi's Machiavellian moment

resistance and foundation in his Partisan novel

Levi as storyteller

forms of agency in Auschwitz

Infantile regression and the camp as 'university'.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Pirro, Robert Carl, author. Motherhood, Fatherland, and Primo Levi

ISBN:

9781683930853

1683930851

OCLC:

992391882

Publisher Number:

40027526136