This talk presents research that is at the intersection of Julianne’s dissertation and book project. The dissertation examines the relationship between Italian countercultural singer-songwriters and four modern mythologies, while her book project takes up one of those myths, that of the frontier American West, to look at its manifestations, across various media, in the Italian imaginary. The project sheds light on some of the barriers to nationhood that have affected Italy, particularly since the second postwar period saw the start of a collective amnesia that continues to strain the country’s maturation. At the core of the project is the idea that the cultural centrality of the foreign myth is symptomatic of this desire to forget and that, additionally, these stories may serve not only as representations of the national mood, but as intentional or unintentional myth-building for ideological components that underlay the myth and hide historical truths of colonization, unmitigated development, and genocide. The talk will highlight one aspect of the larger project as it considers how ostensibly subversive countercultural song from the U.S. may, through Bob Dylan, have infiltrated the long Italian youth-resistance on the left and undermined its political goals. Through an investigation and historical mapping of certain singer-songwriter heroes, the talk suggests that the problematic re-configuration of the 1968 student revolutionaries in the 1977 movement may be seen as largely influenced by the far-west mythologizing of the generation’s singer-songwriters.

主讲人：Julianne VanWagenen

In May 2017, Julianne completed her PhD in Italian Studies, specializing in the 20th-century, at Harvard University, where she was also a principal at metaLAB, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society’s research lab in Digital Humanities. As well as a fellow with the Tsinghua-Michigan program, Julianne is the managing editor of the Pirandello Society of America Journal and has forthcoming publications in the South Central Review and the Italian Quarterly.

主持人：Stephanie Anderson

时间: 2019年4月4日周四 11:45-12:45

地点: 文南楼204会议室