Michael Wyatt

Stanford University

Michael Wyatt

Stanford University

Biography

Professor Michael Wyatt is an independent scholar. He has taught at Stanford University, the Università degli Studi di Trento, Wesleyan University, and Northwestern University, and he served as the first Associate-Director of the Stanford Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

His work is engaged with the pre-modern intellectual and cultural history of Italy, England, and France, particularly questions of translation as both a textual practice and a socio-political phenomenon. He is the editor of the The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance (CUP, 2014), author of The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: a Cultural Politics of Translation (CUP, 2005), and co-editor (with Deanna Shemek) of Writing Relations, American Scholars in Italian Archives: Essays for Franca Nardelli Petrucci and Armando Petrucci (Olschki, 2008).

He is currently working on a second monograph, John Florio and the Circulation of Stranger Cultures in Early Stuart Britain, a critical edition of Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne, The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses, and he is one the co-editors of The Springer Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy.

KEYNOTE TALK

” … such stuff as dreams are made on …” Asinara, from the domus de janas to the ‘Isola dei cassintegrati’

Among the most suggestive and unspoiled of all Mediterranean islands, Asinara has long served as a palimpsest upon which successive peoples have sought to re-imagine themselves and their cultures. But as the island has at times also played a tangible role in such narratives, this talk will aim to situate its liminal topography between ‘history’ and ‘representation’ in order to consider the complex web of relations evoked by Shakespeare’s Prospero both in my title and in that of Gianfranco Cabiddu’s extraordinary 2016 film, La stoffa dei sogni. A multilayered re-enactment of The Tempest vis-à-vis Eduardo De Filippo’s 1964 play L’arte della Commedia and set on Asinara in a purposefully undefined moment of the last century, Cabiddu’s film embraces the wide temporal arc of signification elicited by the island, from the primordial language of an indigenous shepherd to the penal colony established there at the outset of the First World War that from the early 1960s through 1998 served as one of Italy’s highest security prisons and subsequently, in 2010, hosted the protesting victims of a multinational takeover and shuttering of the Vinyls factory in Porto Torres. Cinematically melding the theater pieces of Shakespeare and De Filippo within this highly charged environment allows Cabiddu to re-propose their crucial questions in distinctly original terms – not least of which a rich visual grammar – thus making of Asinara a key protagonist in the persistent tension between artistic praxis and the exercise of power.