Signs – Conference Schedule

2:00-3:00 Registration and Coffee

3:00-3:10 Welcome

3:10-4:30 Panel I – The Sign between Mind and Body
Chair: Salvatore Taibi

Andrea Quaini, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Damnation, Love, Salvation: three examples of the value of the body as a ‘sign’ in Dante’s Comedy

Paolo Scartoni, Rutgers University
Mediated individualities: Dante’s linguistic Signum and Rhetorical Causarum Genera

Alexander Brock, Princeton University
Calandrino and Il Grasso: Beffe, Language, and the Aristotelian Soul

4:30-5:00 Coffee break

5:00-6:00pm Keynote Speaker
Prof. Jason Stanley, Yale University

6:00-8:00pm Dinner

9:15-10:00 Breakfast

10:00-10:50 Panel II – Interactions among Signs
Chair: Steven Jacobs

Luca Abbatista, Columbia University
Language as line. Reading linguistic signs as visual art

Michael Bennett, Stonybrook University
After Neorealismo: The Musical Fables of Luciano Berio

11:00-11:50 Panel III – Signs and the City
Chair: Federica Soddu

Lauren Treihaft, New York University
Una risata seppellirà Roma: Paolo Sorrentino’s Deadpan Pathos

Tseng Wen-Yi, University College London
The Symbolic City of Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

12:00-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:20 Panel IV – Signs: Theory, Interpretation, Critique
Chair: Marius Rusu

Christopher Carlton, Binghamton University
Paul de Man on Truth in Literature: The Reception of Benjamin and Adorno in American Deconstruction

Deion Dresser, University of Pennsylvania
Primo Levi, the Signifier/d: an analysis of the Muselmann in the works of P. Levi and G. Agamben

2:20-2:30pm Coffee Break

2:30-3:30pm Keynote Speaker
Prof. Sabrina Ferri, University of Notre Dame

3:30-3:35 Closing remarks