The Faculty are delighted to welcome Dr Luigi Pinton who has secured a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Faculty.
The Leverhulme scheme is highly competitive and funds early career scholars to undertake a three year research project. The funding is matched by the University’s John Fell Fund – an internal research fund financed by Oxford University Press.
Dr Pinton’s project (Relational Fiction(s): Lessons from the Contemporary Italian Novel) will explore the ‘relational vision’ that operates beneath contemporary fiction, shaping plot and language and constructing its audience.
He explains “If a painter thinks in colours and a musician thinks in notes, a novel – it has been argued – ‘thinks in relation’ (Bewes 2022). Similarly, according to Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, today’s fiction should be understood ‘as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world’ with the ambition ‘to represent the multiplicity of relationships, both in effect and in potentiality.’ Such a relational understanding of narrative fiction has become pervasive today, but lacks a coherent framework. Despite literary theory’s contemporary obsession with relations and interconnectedness, which challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries and informs major interdisciplinary projects, a clear systematisation of what relationality is and does is lacking.
Dr Pinton’s project will address this gap by focusing on contemporary Italian fiction (1990-present) to understand the contemporary imperative to work on relations. Italy’s history of migration and linguistic diversity has made its literary tradition inherently relational and, thus, an ideal lens through which to investigate contemporary fiction’s complex relationality.
