Heretical Empiricism

Softcover, Near to Fine, 320 pages. Also contains Pasolini’s “repudiation of the Trilogy of Life” translated and introduced by Lawton. This is an expanded edition of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s long out-of-print Heretical Empiricism. It includes a new Introduction by Ben Lawton that discusses the relevance of the book on the 30th anniversary of the author’s death. It also features the first approved translation of “Repu- diation of the ‘Trilogy of Life’,” one of Pasolini’s most con- troversial final essays.While Pasolini is best known in the U.S. as a revolutionary film director, in Italy he was even better known as poet, novelist, playwright, political gadfly, and scholar of the semiotics of film. “New Academic Publishing should be commended for making this expanded version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Hermetic Empiricism once again available to the English-speaking public, especially in the light of the fact that the important essay, “Repudiation of the Trilology of Life,” has been added to its contents. Thirty years after Pasolini’s violent death on 2 November 1975, the appearance of this excellent translation and edition of his major writings on Italian film, literature, and language is most welcome. No figure has emerged in Italy since the writer/director’s death that has aroused such passionate opinions from all sides of the political and cultural spectrum. The translations by Ben Lawton and Louise Barnett render Pasolini’s sometimes complex prose accurately with ample explanatory notes to guide the reader without a firm grasp of the original essays in Italian. This book represents an important work to have in every library devoted to cultural criticism, cinema, and literary theory.” — Peter Bondanella, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, Indiana University