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Department of Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese

Robert Rushing

Disciplines:

The Department:

Robert Rushing's picture
Associate Professor of Italian & Comparative Literature

Affiliated Faculty: Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Unit for Cinema Studies

Director of Graduate Studies, Program in Comparative & World Literature

Education
  • Ph.D. (1998) University of California, Berkeley
  • M.A. (1994) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • B.A. (1991) University of California, Santa Cruz
Contact information
  • Office: 4150D FLB
    (217) 244-3242
    rrushing@uiuc.edu
  • Comparative and World Literature
    3072 FLB, MC-160
    707 S. Mathews Ave.
    Urbana, IL 61801
    tel. (217) 333-4987 fax (217) 244-4019
  • Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
    4080 FLB, MC-176
    707 S. Mathews Ave.
    Urbana, IL 61801
    tel. (217) 333-3390 fax (217) 244-8430
Areas of Specialization
  • 19th and 20th century Italian literature; contemporary Italian fiction; Italian film; critical and interpretive theory, especially psychoanalysis; comparative literary studies; and genre, including detective fiction.

Current Project:

•What We Desire, We Shall Never Have: Calvino & Psychoanalysis: this project challenges many of our basic assumptions about Calvino and his writing, namely, that both are an expression of Enlightenment rationalism, cerebral, serene and detached. I look at the central roles played by repetition, sexual deadlock, desire, perversion, and theatricality in Calvino’s writing, and how their invisibility has conditioned Calvino criticism.

Publications

 

   Books

Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture (New York: Other Press, 2007)

Articles


  1. “Gentlemen Prefer Hercules: Desire | Identification | Beefcake” in Camera Obscura (forthcoming).
  2. “Memory & Masculinity in the Italian Peplum Film and Zach Snyder’s 300” from the Culture et Mémoire (Culture & Memory) conference at the École Polytechnique in Paris, France (forthcoming)
  3. “‘Tutto è zuppa!’ Making the Superego Enjoy in Calvino’s Il cavaliere inesistente” in Romanic Review (forthcoming, May 2009).
  4. “Italo Svevo and Charlie Chaplin: Dramatic Irony and the Psychoanalytic Stance” in American Imago 63.2 (2006): 183-200.
  5. “What We Desire, We Shall Never Have: Calvino, Zizek, Ovid” in Comparative Literature 58.1 (2006): 44-58.
  6. “From Monk to Monks: The End of Enjoyment in Eco’s The Name of the Rose,” in Symposium 59.2 (2005): 116-28.
  7. “Traveling Detectives: The ‘Logic of Arrest’ in Verne and Christie,” in Yale French Studies 108 (2005): 89-101.
  8. “The Real of Desire: Travel/Detection/Hitchcock/Antonioni,” in The Communication Review 6.4 (2003): 313-26.
  9. “Alessandro Baricco’s Seta: Travel, Ventriloquism & the Other,” in MLN 118.1 (2003): 209-36.
  10. “Traveling By Metonymy: Ugo Foscolo’s ‘A Zacinto,’” Annali d'Italianistica 20 (2002): 201-16.
  11. “‘La sua tragica incompiutezza’: Anxiety, Mis-Recognition and Ending in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio," MLN 116.1(2001): 130-49.
  12. “The Horizon of Literature: Epistemic Closure in Calvino’s I nostri antenati" in Forum Italicum 33.1 (1999): 213-23.
  13. “Il cristallo e il mare: L’enumeración caótica e l’epistemologia in Calvino e Gadda" in Forum Italicum 31.2 (1997): 407-22.

Responses and Reviews

  1. “Am I Paranoid Enough?” (response to Emily Apter) in American Literary History 18.2 (Summer 2006): 390-93.
  2. Review of Albert Sbragia, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic, in the South Atlantic Review 62.4 (1997): 101-04.
  3. Review of Fernando Amigoni, La più semplice macchina: lettura freudiana del «Pasticciaccio» in Forum Italicum 30.1 (1996): 224-28

Encyclopedia Entries

 

  1. “Our Ancestors: Italo Calvino” in Cyclopedia of Literary Places (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2003): 867.
  2. “Pale Fire: Vladimir Nabokov” in Cyclopedia of Literary Places (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2003): 875-76.