Leonardo Lisi is a Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow and currently teaches a Humanities Center class, "The Sense of Loss, 1900-1927."
News-Letter (N-L): Starting at the beginning, where were you born, and where did you grow up?Leonardo Lisi (LL): Well, my parents are from Argentina, but they left during the dictatorship. I was born in '79 in Tübingen, a small university town in Germany, then we moved to West Berlin in '80. I moved to Denmark in '86, and I lived there until I finished high school. I went for a gap year to Spain, and after the gap year I went to England, where I did my B.A. in English Literature. Then I came to Yale to do my grad school.
N-L: So how many languages do you speak?LL: That's a good question. Obviously all the languages of the countries I've lived in. Technically I'm an Italian citizen, as my grandparents are Italian, so I was always growing up with Italian in my home. I speak Spanish with my mother, I speak German with my father, I speak Danish with my sister. I know Swedish and Norwegian because they are very close. Italian, Spanish, French, they are all very close as well, and Portuguese - I can read it, but I don't speak it. But in terms of just passive knowledge, those are there as well. I've been very lucky in that sense because I've lived in all these places, so it had just come with the territory.
N-L: Which place did you like living in the best? LL: That's tough, I'm not sure. Because I've spent most of my life in Europe, I have a certain attraction to Europe still, but my experience in America has been fantastic too. I lived in Denmark for so long, I felt Danish for a long time, because I was growing up there in my formative years of teenagehood, but since then I've overcome any favored attachment to one place, so I'm not sure I have one.
N-L: After all that, what brought you to Hopkins?LL: Well, I got this Mellon Post-Doctorate, which started last summer. I was planning to finish my dissertation at Yale, then this post-doc showed up, which is a two-year thing. It's the perfect situation, because I get to teach just one class per semester, and I have the opportunity to do a lot of my research and sort of wrap up the things I was doing with my dissertation. And Hopkins, of course, has a great reputation, and the Humanities Center has a great environment for the things I'm interested in as well - so a perfect fit in a lot of ways.
N-L: What are you currently working on?LL: I'm doing two different things right now. I'm wrapping up my dissertation, which is essentially an attempt to trace an alternative genealogy for Modernist aesthetics. I don't know how detailed I should get, but essentially, we usually have very limited amounts of ways to think about the ways in which literary texts are organized. I examine those derived from a very specific philosophical tradition in Germany, and I try then to show how that differs from the philosophical tradition which emerged in Scandinavia in the 19th century, which by having a different kind of conception of being, and different philosophical foundations, actually provides a different aesthetic model from the one that we usually take for granted when reading Modernist literature. And so I traced the development of this aesthetic paradigm and its philosophical and historical context in Scandinavia, particular to Kierkegaard, Ibsen and then into Henry James and others. That's the dissertation I'm trying now to finish up. The next project is modern tragedy, where it's sort of tracing the evolution of modern tragedy again through Germany, to Scandinavia, to European Modernism. That's the next thing I'm working on.N-L: What initially attracted you to this field of interest?LL: Good question. Well ... I'm not sure. I was always going to do comparative literature, because I have this language background, so that seemed to be an obvious thing, although I did my B.A. in English literature. In grad school, I didn't really necessarily think I was going to work a lot with Scandinavian literatures, which I ended up doing, nor with the philosophical background I ended up doing, but I sort of stumbled across Kierkegaard, and I was very lucky to work with the college people at Yale, who had a very philosophical take on literature.So I sort of returned to an interest in philosophy, which I had prior to beginning my undergraduate studies, because my father also does philosophy, and so I started developing that further. And that combination of philosophy and literature was what all of a sudden made a lot of sense to me and allowed me to develop a topic that worked, and I think that's how interests emerge, when things suddenly work for you.
N-L: So how has being at Hopkins influenced your work and interests?LL: Primarily I think it's influenced my interests and work in that it allow me to continue doing what I was wanting to do, in a sense, because I've worked with a lot of different literatures and philosophical interests and theoretical interests, being here. The Humanities Center actually allows me to continue that in a way that, possibly, if I were, for example, in a language department, I wouldn't be able to, because I'd have to teach language courses, or I'd have to focus on just one national literature or not necessarily engage with a philosophical background to the extent that I'd like to. So in that way, this has been fantastic, because it actually allows for this kind of interdisciplinary and inter-cultural context work that I like to do, so that's been very helpful.
N-L: The one class you teach this semester is "Sense of Loss." What did you want to do with this course?LL: What I wanted to do was to teach a lot of the canonical Modernist texts and combine it with some of the lesser-known texts that we did in the beginning of the semester. And it also was already beginning to open up the perspective towards my second project, the tragedy project, because a lot of the texts, the Ibsen and the Strindberg, for example, are things that I'll be dealing with for the tragedy project. So it allowed me to combine both the actual material that I need to work with in the future, but also to develop this concept of loss, which is something I had thought about a lot in the past as essential to Modernism but hadn't really had the possibility to systematically develop.The class was formed around that desire, which was still nice at this point, I think, when you still don't have many classes developed, to do things that you yourself want to learn, rather than teach things that you already pretty much have an answer to, which is very nice. So, in a way it's as much learning for me as I hope it is for my students.
N-L: So why do you think it's important to study the humanities?LL: Ah, the crucial question. Well, that's a difficult question, but I think it's important to study the humanities for the reason that it allows, or it seeks, I think, to teach the way in which we relate to the world. It's difficult often to sell the humanities, because it's not easy to pinpoint what is the cash value of education. And certainly the job market isn't very strong. But the common perception that the humanities are somehow a luxury that we can ultimately do without is a mistake. In my view, it is in fact the humanities that are the most necessary, since they provide us with the way in which these other sciences and discourses that are very practical should be used, and should be related to, and I think that's something that today, possibly, is even more important than previously, insofar as a lot of the difficulties we're having in the world. In our daily lives we don't necessarily see the relationship between what we do now and what's happening in Iraq, or what we do now and moral questions and so on, so I think that there's a definite sense of the inability to see the relationship between our own lives and other lives and other consequences and so on, and I think that humanities is a way, a space in which those kinds of relations can be established.
N-L: Do you have any advice for undergraduates who are studying the humanities?LL: No, I mean ... I think it's very difficult to give practical advice now, because the current situation is sort of discouraging, but I think it's discouraging on all fronts; I'm not sure exactly what awaits after college life at this point for anybody. For my whole life, at least, looking back on my own experience, I always ended up doing the thing that was the least logical, in terms of getting me a job and getting me anywhere, but just because I loved doing it, it just sort of worked out. I hope that the value of the humanities is not sidestepped on the basis of the fact that we are afraid of what actual possibilities we have after college. I think they are more important now than ever, for a lot of problems we're having now come out of the inability to properly value those kind of perspectives and insights that the humanities give us. I'm not one to give advice, I'm not that wise yet, but at least I don't think anyone should be discouraged from studying the humanities, on the basis of what happens outside of the university life. On the contrary, it's more important now.
