Professor Vittorio Montemaggi (Italian, University of Notre
Dame, USA)
'What Game is This?': Play, Wonder and the Representation of Suffering
The aim of this paper is to raise a set of aesthetic, ethical and theological questions in connection with the juxtaposition of pain and laughter in Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful. Such questions will be arrived at through reflection on Life is Beautiful as seen in the light of Benigni’s own comments on his comic art, and in the light of select passages from Dante’s Comedy and from Primo Levi’s The Truce and The Periodic Table. In particular, such reflection will focus on the representation of children and on the complexity and potential value of juxtaposing, in interpretation and performance, play and wonder to pain and suffering.
Vittorio Montemaggi is Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also Concurrent Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. His publications include essays on Dante, Levi and Benigni, and on the theological implications of the relationship between their works. He is co-editor, with Matthew Treherne, of Dante’s ‘Commedia’: Theology as Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
