Ezio Puglia

Università di Bologna

Pathos formulas and abstraction in Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s and Giambattista Basile’s fairy tales

2017-2018: Spring

Ezio Puglia received his Ph.D. in Italian Studies at the University of Bologna in 2012 with a comparative study about the image of things in 19th and 20th Century literary fantastic. He recently completed a post-doc at the University of Luxembourg (AFR Marie-Curie Post-Doctoral Research Grant). His project investigated, on the one hand, the so-called dematerialization process through concrete configurations of objects and spaces, and, on the other, the numerous references to a fantastic or magic dimension of reality appearing in contemporary philosophical analyses of hyper-industrial societies.

His research relates mostly to fantastic literature, imagination, literary theory, thing theory, spectrality, and philosophical archaeology. 

At the Italian Academy, he will inquire into the first specimens of written fairy tales. In particular, considering the genre as an inestimable heritage of pathos formulas and “verbal gestures” (Jolles), he will focus on the contrast between abstraction and empathy in fairy tales’ expression of emotions, as well as on the relationship between the popularity of fairy tales and the renewal of ancient beliefs in Italian Renaissance and Baroque.