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David Ward (Wellesley College) – “Italian Terrorism in Contemporary Italian Literature: Laughing at History”
January 22, 2021 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
4:00 pm CT / 5:00 pm ET
What lies behind laughter? What is its agenda? What do we do when we laugh at something (or someone laughs at us)? The talk will seek to offer answers to these questions along two avenues: by examining, first, the debate on whether Jesus laughed that takes place between William of Baskerville and Jorge of Burgos in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose; and, second, the ridiculous–laughable–narratives that depart radically from the historical record concocted by contemporary Italian writers about the Italian terrorism of the 1970s.