P. M. Pasinetti will
deliver a talk titled "From Venice to LA and Back: Cosmopolitanism,
Writing, and Memory" on Tuesday, April 18, in Pratt Hall's Warbeke
Room at 7:30 pm. Novelist, journalist, and
professor of comparative literature and Italian at University of
California, Los Angeles, P. M. Pasinetti will deliver a talk titled
"From Venice to LA and Back: Cosmopolitanism, Writing, and Memory" on
Tuesday, April 18, in Pratt Hall's Warbeke Room at 7:30 pm. The
lecture is sponsored by the Five College Italian Seminar and the
Mount Holyoke College Department of Spanish and Italian. Gore Vidal has written of
Pasinetti's work: "Venice has had to wait until the twentieth century
to claim its own novelist: P. M. Pasinetti. The world he recreates
(or perhaps creates) is no less complex than that of Proust, Joyce,
or Mann. But his passions are different, and so is the city. Venice
is neither Paris, Dublin, or Lubeck, nor is it Calvino's stunning
invisibility." A recipient of the Fiction Award of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, Pasinetti is the author of numerous
articles, reviews, and film scripts, as well as several novels,
including Venetian Red (1960), From the Academy Bridge
(1970), and Dorsoduro (1983). P. M. Pasinetti was born and
grew up in Venice. In 1935, he came to study in this country, where
his first published fiction appeared in the Southern Review.
He had been writing pieces for magazines and newspapers in Italy
since the age of eighteen. His first book, three novelettes, was
published in 1942. After lectureships at Goettingen and Stockholm,
where he spent most of the war years, Pasinetti returned to the
United States in 1946. He taught briefly at Bennington College before
receiving a doctorate in comparative literature (the first ever
awarded) from Yale. In 1949, he arrived in Los Angeles to take a
position as professor of comparative literature and Italian at UCLA.
In 1964, he was appointed to the Institute for Creative Arts at UCLA.
Since 1958, he has divided his time between Venice and Beverly
Hills.
photo by Glenn P.
Pierce
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