Luca Briasco

Interview

• "From the Pynchon plot to the Net" (Rome 23 November 1997)

Biography

Luca Briasco was born in Rome 23 February 1964. He graduated in Anglo-American literature in 1988 with a thesis on Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. After graduating he continued studying Melville, publishing his essay "La ricerca di Ishmael" in 1993. That same year he became a research assistant in American Studies at the Terza Università of Rome and contributed to the first volume of a project on the history of American literature, with essays on colonial history and literary and para-literary production in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1994 he was a Fullbright Scholar at Harvard University and a guest of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he held a conference on Herman Melville and American studies in Italy. In 1996 he was awarded a PhD with a thesis on the relationship between the post-modern American novel and history, with an analysis of philosophical-literary theory in the last decade (from deconstructionism to neo-historicism) and the novels of Pynchon, Coover and DeLillo. During his doctorate he also contributed to various books, with essays on Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy.

In early 1998 he participated in the convention "Sulle tracce di Thomas Pynchon" (On the trail of Thomas Pynchon), which was held at the Centre of American Studies in Rome, with a contribution "Pynchon nostro postcontemporaneo" (Pynchon our post-contemporary), later published in the quarterly review "Praz!"

He continues to work on the contemporary American novel and has begun to work with a number of publishers (Einaudi, Fanucci) with the aim of publishing some of the best of new writers on the new American literary scene. He is writing a monograph on Hemingway, which will be published in 1999 by Nuova Italia Scientifica.

In 1993 he published several short stories in the underground review "Per Terra" (subsequently republished in Costa & Nolan's volume Culture di conflitto, in 1996).

Bibliography

Among his publications:

• Paul Auster e Cormac McCarthy, in Ricciardi, Caterina (a cura di), "Letteratura americana: i contemporanei, Semar, Roma", di prossima pubblicazione.
• Interpretazione e rappresentazione della storia nel romanzo postmoderno americano, 1996, Tesi di dottorato, Roma.
• Le metamorfosi dell'arte in Pale Fire di Vladimir Nabokov, in Lombardo, Agostino (a cura di), "La figlia che piange: saggi su poesia e metapoesia", 1995, Bulzoni, Roma.
• Introduzione storica, Cotton Mather e Jonathan Edwards, in Cabibbo, Paola (a cura di), "La letteratura americana dell'età coloniale", 1994, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, Roma.
• La ricerca di Ishmael: "Moby-Dick" come avventura dell'interpretazione, 1993, Bulzoni, Roma.