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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Daniele Pio Buenza

Pio Buenza

College:

Fitzwilliam

Email:

dpb36@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor:

Dr Pierpaolo Antonello

About me:

I completed my BA in Lingue and Letterature Straniere (English and Spanish) at the University ‘Gabriele D’Annunzio’ of Pescara-Chieti with a dissertation on British anti-utopian and dystopian novels of the 1960s (2008). At the same University, I completed a Master’s degree (magna cum laude) in Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne (specialism in English) with a thesis on Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (2011).

My research:

My PhD research originates from a personal interest in postmodern – and postmodernist – Italy. Through the study of an Italian popular music icon such as Fabrizio De André, in the period between the Sixties and early Seventies, my research intends to put another brick in the wall of the revaluation of the idea of impegno. Thus, this project follows the methodological footsteps and tries to extend the reach of the volume edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture (Peter Lang, 2009). In particular, my research wants to enlarge the discourses contained in that volume by discussing the relationship between agency – that of De André and that of the audience – and impegno. The need for such reexamination emerges from the gathered evidence that the choice of dealing with socially committed topics was not always ascribable to De André himself. Instead, in that particular ‘structure of the conjuncture’, such decision was often due to the profit-driven aspirations of the music industry that fabricated De André as a cantautore impegnato in order to follow and adapt to the taste – and identities – of the audience.

Conference papers:

‘Fabrizio De André’s Canzone d’Autore Impegnata: A Postmodern Product’, paper presented at the Research Networking Colloquium on Current Trends in Italian Popular Music Studies, University of Hull, UK, March 2015

‘Fabrizio De André’s Postmodernism in Tutti morimmo a stento’, paper presented at the XLVI Annual Convention of the NeMLA on The Italian Canzone d’Autore, Toronto, Canada, April 2015

‘Fabrizio De André and Postmodern Impegno’, paper presented at the conference What Commitment? Reshaping Impegno in Contemporary Italy, University of Kent, UK, June 2015

Other activities:

I am one of the three coordinators of the Research Seminars Series in the Department of Italian, Cambridge University.

In 2015 I collaborated with the Cambridge University He+ Project, preparing a module on the cantautori.