Ne Reflections on Primo Levi Before and after Auschitz [Paperback]

This book presents a baker's dozen of interpretative keys to Levi's output and thought.? It deepens our understanding of common themes in Levi studies (memory and witness) while exploring unusual and revealing byways (Levi and Calvino, or Levi and theater, for example).Introduction PART I: POLITICS, NATIONALISM AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY Primo Levi's Politics: Giustizia e libert?, the Partito d'azione and 'Jewish' Antifascism (Stanislao Pugliese) The Itinerary of an Identity: Primo Levi's 'Parallel Nationalization' (Nancy Harrowitz) Primo Levi and Holocaust Memory in Italy, 1958-1963 (Robert Gordon) PART II: UNBEARABLE WITNESS Trauma and Latency in Primo Levi's The Reawakening (Jonathan Druker) The Witness's Tape Recorder and the Violence of Mediation (Lina Insana) The Strange Case of the Muselm?nner in Auschwitz (Joseph Farrell) PART III: STRATEGIES OF COMMUNICATION AND REPRESENTATION Primo Levi and Italo Calvino: Two Parallel Literary Lives (Marina Beer) 'L'immagine di lui che ho conservato': Communication and Memory in Lil?t' (Elizabeth Scheiber) The Survivor as Author: Primo Levi's Literary Vision of Auschwitz (Lawrence Langer) PART IV: AUTHORSHIP AND FASHIONING THE TEXT?Appreciating Primo Levi: How It All Started (Nicholas Patruno) Levi's Western: 'Professional Plot' and History in If Not Now, When? (Mirna Cicioni) Mind the Gap: Performance and Semiosis in Primo Levi (Ellen Nerenberg) Works Cited Index

Critical study of Levi has surged recently, and this is a fine addition to that literature. Sodi and Marcus (both, Italian,

Yale) have assembled an international group of prominent and emerging scholars of Italian, Holocaust, and Levi

literary studies. The primary obstacles to early dissemination of Levi's Survival in Auschwitz were the belief, on the

part of leading publishers, that the Holocaust could not be assimilated into conventional literary genre studies and the

early postwar reprlS(