Pellegrino D'Acierno

Hofstra University

Spectacle Culture(s): The Aesthetics of Exorbitance from the Baroque to Postmodernity

2002-2003

Pellegrino D'Acierno is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Italian Cultural Studies at Hofstra University. Educated at Columbia University, he has a long history of teaching there, having held an assistant professorship in Italian (1973-1981) and, more recently, visiting appointments in three different departments: Italian; Architecture, Planning and Preservation; and Comparative Literature and Society. He has also served as visiting professor at Cornell and New York University and as visiting critic at the graduate schools of architecture at Yale and Rice Universities and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
His publications include: "F. T. Marinetti and the Freedom of Poetry" (Scribners), "The Itinerary of the Sign: Scenes of Seeing in Giotto's Fresco Cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel" (SCI-Arc Press), "C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture" (co-editor, Princeton University Press), M. Tafuri's "The Sphere and the Labyrinth" (translator, the MIT Press), and "(In)Visible Cities: From the Postmodern Metropolis to the Cities of the Future" (co-editor, in press). He is also the editor and primary author of "The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts" (Garland Publications). In 1989 the American Academy in Rome awarded him a Prix de Rome in Post-Classical Humanistic Studies; in 1996 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete the writing of "Strange Loops: Cinema and Architecture as Spatial-Temporal Practices" (forthcoming).
The project he will undertake at the Italian Academy during the fellowship year 2002-2003 is the writing of Spectacle Culture(s): The Aesthetics of Ex-Orbitance from the Baroque to Postmodernism (working title), a post- and, in some respects, anti-Debordian study of the mechanisms and ideological effects of spectacle culture and the aesthetics of exorbitance that governs its textual productions and its attempt to spectacularize all dimensions of the life-world from the environment to self-fashioning.