Alessandro Carrera

Alessandro Carrera is currently Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Houston and Graduate Director of the M.A. in World Cultures & Literatures. He has graduated in Philosophy from the Universita' degli Studi in Milan, Italy, and has taught in several North-American universities. Carrera has published books on Italian and Comparative Literature, Continental Philosophy, and Literary Theory. His major publications are: "L'esperienza dell'istante. Metafisica, tempo, scrittura" (1995), "Lo spazio materno dell'ispirazione. Agostino Blanchot, Celan Zanzotto" (2004), "La consistenza della luce. Il pensiero della natura da Goethe a Calvino", and "La distanza del cielo. Leopardi e lo spazio dell'ipirazione" (2011). He has edited and introduced Massimo Cacciari, "The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason" (Fordham UP, 2009, and the 2011 issue of "Annali d'Italianistica", dedicated to "Italian Critical Theory". He has also translated into Italian all the songs and prose of Bob Dylan. His novel "La vita meravigliosa dei laureati in lettere" (2002) has been a bestseller in Italy. Carrera has won the Montale Prize for Poetry (1993), the Loria Prize for Fiction (1998) and the Bertolucci Prize for Literary Criticism (2006).