Simona Bondavalli

Fictions of Youth: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Adolescence, Fascisms - Toronto Italian Studies Simona Bondavalli

Commendation Quotes: "Fictions of Youth adds a vital new chapter to the formidable body of scholarship on Pier Paolo Pasolini. Readers of this book will never again be able to watch a Pasolini film, or read his writings, without a heightened awareness of the fraught presence of his ragazzi and the social, existential, and poetic issues that they raise." - Millicent Marcus, Department of Italian, Yale UniversityTable of Contents: Introduction1. Giovinezza, or The Best of Youth2. Being Young: Bildung, Development, and Growing Up Ragazzi3. Looking Back in Longing: Lost Youth, Teddy-Boys, and Il sogno di una cosa4. Revolutionary Youth: From the Page, to the Streets, to the Screen5. Fatherless Youth: Fathers, Children, Orphans6. Giovani Infelici Consumer, Disobedient, Unhappy YouthEpilogue: Coming of Age as Sadists: SalO and the Repudiation of YouthCommendation Quotes:"Simona Bondavalli offers a fresh and compelling perspective on Pasolini's cultural legacy through the prism of his evolving engagement with the discourse of youth over the course of his career as writer and filmmaker. Painstakingly researched, astutely argued, and rich in sociohistorical context, this book is an indispensable guide to Pasolini's artistic process and to the social world he inhabited." - Aine O'Healy, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Loyola Marymount UniversityCommendation Quotes:"This is a rich, rigorous, and engaging book, both easy and enjoyable to read. Bondavalli has done outstanding work following her subject across so many different written and artistic genres: poetry, narrative, newspaper columns, philosophical essays, pedagogical treatises, films, and more." - Colleen Ryan, Department of French and Italian, Indiana UniversityPublisher Marketing: Fictions of Youth is a comprehensive examination of adolescence as an aesthetic, sociological, and ideological category in Pier Paolo Pasolini's prose, poetry, and cinema. Simona Bondavalli's book explores the multiple ways in which youth, real and imagined, shaped Pasolini's poetics and critical positions and shows how Pasolini's works became the basis for representations of contemporary young people, particularly Italians. From Pasolini's own coming of age under Fascism in the 1940s to the consumer capitalism of the 1970s, youth stood for innocence, vitality, and rebellion. Pasolini's representations of youth reflected and shaped those ideas. Offering a systematic treatment of youth and adolescence within Pasolini's eclectic body of work, Fictions of Youth provides both a broad overview of the changing nature of youth within Italian modernity and an in-depth study of Pasolini's significant contribution to that transformation.

Contributor Bio:  Bondavalli, Simona Simona Bondavalli is an associate professor in the Department of Italian at Vassar College.