POTLATCH Issue #5 

On March 6, 2022, Potlatch editor Yehuda Safran and frequent contributor Daniel Sherer interviewed Carlo Ginzburg. A broad spectrum of themes was discussed. These include the complex relationship between microhistory, ethnohistory and anthropology, the impact of Marc Bloch on Ginzburg's formation as a historian, the formalist and structuralist approaches of Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the work and figure of Michel Foucault, disparate receptions of psychoanalysis (Yosef Yerushalmi, Francesco Orlando, Ignacio Matte Blanco), Machiavelli's impact on the visual arts (and on Michelangelo in particular), the uses of estrangement in literary texts (Flaubert, Proust and Tolstoy), Ginzburg's interactions with Manfredo Tafuri, the importance of film for the comprehension of historical narrative (with specific reference to Sergei Eisenstein), Italian postwar cinema (above all Pier Paolo Pasolini), the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss, "slow reading" as a partial antidote to our present political and cultural predicament, the various factors contributing to the alarming  and dangerous resurgence of authoritarianism in our own time.

Offering a sort of "living portrait" of a mind endowed with insatiable curiosity, the interview must be counted among the more revealing and significant to have been carried out with this pivotal historian and thinker.       

Limited Edition                  52 pp, Softcover  $10