Roberta Ricci
Associate Professor and Chair
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University
Office: Thomas Hall 134
Office phone: 610 526-5048
Office fax: 610 526-7479
rricci@brynmawr.edu
Roberta Ricci received her Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Johns Hopkins University, after a Laurea in Lettere Moderne (summa cum laude) at the University Pisa with an interdisciplinary study in the Twentieth-Century European Avant-Garde. Her academic interests are Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies, Late Ancient Literature, Women's Studies, Modern Italian Fiction. She has published articles on the Latin Elegy, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Female Renaissance Epistolography, and on 20th century Italian authors, such as Alberto Savinio, Italo Svevo, and Carlo Emilio Gadda, among others. Among her current projects are a new manuscript on Florentine Humanism and the completition of “Teaching Primo Levi” forthcoming with the MLA Teaching Series.
Her book, entitled “Scrittura, riscrittura, autoesegesi: voci autoriali intorno all’epica in volgare. Boccaccio, Tasso” is forthcoming with the ETS Press (University of Pisa). In this study she analyzes morphologies of authorial interpretations in epic poems that differ in placement (internal and external to the literary text), in their official status (public and private), and finally in the date of their appearance (contemporary to the literary texts themselves or published after the literary work had been circulated). Yet these examples are systematic expressions of self-criticism that often avoid straightforward explanations of the meaning of the poetry itself, while attempting to shape future interpretations of the literary work, either within or outside the literary production, either in private or public form, either during or after its circulation. The book researches how liminal devices (such as dispositions, inscriptions, incipit, glosses, indexes, prologues, and letters) constitute part of the multifaceted mediation among book, author, publisher, and reader. Just as the presence of paratextual devices is a heterogeneous group of practices, so can the public bring their own diverse perspectives to the process of reading and employ different modalities of decoding paratexts—even to the point of disregarding their very existence and essence.
For this book Roberta Ricci has been awarded national grants (NEH, Renaissance Society of America), as well as fellowships (Bogliasco Foundation) and summer research grants from Bryn Mawr College (Faculty Grant, Center for International Studies).
“ I believe my book makes an important contribution to the field of Medieval and Renaissance literary studies because auto-exegesis opens issues concerned with critical inquiry, authorship, readership, and reception. Such issues are especially relevant in a literary genre, the epic poem, which has been particularly authoritative through the centuries and yet particularly problematic and fertile in the first centuries of the Italian language. Both Boccaccio, the author of the first epic poem in Italian, and Tasso, the author of the last canonical Renaissance Italian epic, face difficulties to reconcile theory and practice, imitation of classical texts and innovation of that same tradition: difficulties which they both attempt to solve with the writing of a self-commentary.”