Enrico Testa
Novecento in Saggio | Harvard 2015 Edition
Early Career Scholarly Work on 20thC Italian Creative Prose
Previous Winners Panel Judge
Enrico Testa (PhD Literary Sciences, Pavia) is Full Professor of History of the Italian Language at the Faculty of Liberal Arts of the University of Genova. He was Research Fellow of Italian Linguistics at the Italian University for Foreigners, Siena (1991-1998), and Associate Professor of History of the Italian Language (2000-2005).
Enrico Testa has published several books on the language of the novella in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Italian novel in the 19th and 20th centuries, the spoken Italian language (16th-20th centuries) and Italian poetry in the 20th century (with particular attention to Eugenio Montale, Giorgio Caproni, Vittorio Sereni and Edoardo Sanguineti). He has edited the Quaderno di traduzioni by Giorgio Caproni and an anthology of Italian poetry in the second part of the 20thc century (Dopo la lirica. Poeti italiani 1960-2000, Einaudi, 2005). He was the translator of Philip Larkin’s High Windows.
He was visiting professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, the University of Sao Paulo (USP) and Florianopolis in Brazil, and was Gastprofessor at Goethe Universität of Frankfurt am Main. He was also a member of the PhD commission at the Sorbonne-Paris III. He was keynote and guest speaker at several conferences in Italy and abroad. Between 2005-2008 he was on several committees in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Chair of the Master’s Degree in Modern Literatures and Civilisations.
His major fields of research include: the study of the spoken Italian language from a diachronic perspective and in its literary reproductions; the analysis of the Italian language in poetry and narrative in the 20th century; the investigation of compositional aspects and stylistic features within the categories of characters in the Italian novel. His book Eroi figuranti (Einaudi, 2009) was Overall Winner of the 2010 edition of Novecento in Saggio.
