Comparative Literature

Alessandro Moghrabi is a PhD candidate whose work focuses on the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia as well as 20th century continental philosophy and critical theory. Through readings of Sciascia's novels, I argue that irony and stupidity—as pre-eminent figures of understanding and nonunderstanding respectively—help us critique and redefine a long-standing philosophical discourse on the concept of understanding. Kierkegaard, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Avital Ronell, and Peter Szendy are some of the thinkers that most directly guide this project, both in a first philosophically focused chapter and as recurrent interlocutors throughout the manuscript; subsequently, close readings of the novels of Leonardo Sciascia form the backbone of a central three-chapter arc, which is followed by a concluding chapter on Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet.

My engagement with these ideas persists throughout other research projects that I am currently engaged with: I have recently published article on gift and reading in Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler and Derrida’s Given Time; I have also published a working paper—which I am reworking into a journal article—on borders as phantasmically expansive forces, capable of eroding the sovereignty of communities living in their wake;  in addition, I am currently preparing an article on simplicity and literary style in Sciascia’s work in order to explore how discourse can occult the conditions and mechanisms that produce its own self-evidence.

Education:

B.A. in Comparative Literature, New York University, 2017
M.S. in Economics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, 2018

Languages:

Italian, French, English, Spanish, German (beginning)