Description: Examines the narrative articulation of social invisibility in works by two of the most influential Italian cultural producers of the twentieth century.
Brief description: Achille Castaldo is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University.
Review Quotes:
"Ascetic Images stands out as a highly original, rigorously researched, and cogently argued intervention in the fields of Italian studies, film/visual studies, and literary theory. Castaldo pursues the elaboration of a reading method attuned to both the formal complexities of the aesthetic object and the specificities of the historical context with remarkable lucidity. His formal analyses of Ortese and Rossellini are impeccable and inspiring. Even more remarkably, Castaldo devotes the same kind of attention to theoretical texts that too often are read only for their 'content, ' carefully combining narrative semiotics (Greimas), Marxist critique of ideology (Jameson), and phenomenology (Ingarden, Merleau-Ponty)." - Domietta Torlasco, author of The Rhythm of Images: Cinema beyond Measure