Francesca Savoia, Associate Professor of Italian, Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures, presents, “Eighteenth-Century … ‘Blogging’? Notes on Common-Placing and Giuseppe Baretti’s zibaldone.”
Monday, September 26, 4 p.m., Humanities Center, CL 602
Over a period of more than 20 years, while residing mostly in England, the Italian writer, literary critic, and lexicographer Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789) kept a personal reading and writing log. Surveying this 270-page zibaldone has helped Professor Savoia to map out the cultural itinerary followed by this eighteenth-century intellectual immigrant, and led her into the exploration of such topics as the psychology of authorship, the role of memory in literature and in second language learning, the practice of translation and its uses and purposes. Baretti’s notebook offers itself as an interesting case study in the prevalent practice of assembling, recording, and storing acquired bits of knowledge, a practice that—in the eighteenth century—was also stimulated by advancements in printing and consequent wide circulation of printed materials.