Seventh Lecture
The seventh Primo Levi lecture was given by Francesco Cassata – historian of Science and Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Genoa – on October 290, 2015, at the Centro Incontri della Regione Piemonte in Turin to a large audience including some classes of the Liceo Scientifico di Scienze Applicate (Secondary school for Applied Science) “Giordano Bruno” in Turin.
Fantascienza? Due avventure narrative / Science fiction? Two adventures in writing has been published by Einaudi in spring 2016.
What kind of tales are the fifteen science-fiction stories Primo Levi published in 1966 under the ironical title Natural Histories? And why did he sign them with the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila? What links did they have with his debut books about the destruction of Europe’s Jews? And when, five years later, he published under his own name a new collection of fiction stories entitled Flaw of Form, was it a similar collection of stories or an entirely different narrative construct? A broad and fairly unfrequented – yet essential – area of Levi’s opus appears studded with question marks. A brilliant historian of science transforms them, one after another, into incisive answers, showing us what lies inside, behind, and beyond those stories, so estranging, so unusual in European literature, and so forceful.
Francesco Cassata reconstructs these two narrative adventures in all their aspects: historical events, scientific sources, literary, political, moral, mythological implications.
What kind of tales are the fifteen science-fiction stories Primo Levi published in 1966 under the ironical title Natural Histories? And why did he sign them with the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila? What links did they have with his debut books about the destruction of Europe's Jews?
In occasione del Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, il 13 maggio 2016 è stato presentato Fantascienza? il volume di Francesco Cassata tratto dalla settima Lezione Primo Levi.