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William T. Vollmann frequently asserts that his ideal reader will appreciate the functionality and beauty of his sentences. This article begins by taking such claims seriously, and draws on both literary and rhetorical stylistics to explore some of the many ways that his texts answer to his intention to find “the right sentence for the right job.” In particular, this article argues that Vollmann’s stylistic decisions are most notable when they most directly satisfy his effort to produce texts that foster empathetic knowledge, serve truth, resist abusive power, and encourage charitable action. Extended close analyses of passages from an early and from a mid-career text (The Rainbow Storiesand Europe Central) illustrate Vollmann’s consistency across two decades of his career regarding choices in the areas of figuration (including schemes and tropes of comparison, repetition, balance, naming, and amplification), grammar, deixis, allusion, and other compositional strategies. Particular attention is paid to passages that display the stylistic mechanisms underlying Vollmann’s negotiation of his texts’ moral qualities, including both the moral content of the worlds represented in the texts, and the moral responsibility the texts bear with regard to their audience. The results of my analyses demonstrate that Vollmann typically prioritizes openness, critique, and dialogue not only in terms of incident and character, but also on the scale of the phrase, clause, and sentence. Ultimately, this article shows how Vollmann’s sentences serve his declared intentions and allow readers to recognize compatibilities between Vollmann’s works and the characteristic features of post-postmodernist writing in general., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

The article compares the representation of Asian sex workers in William T. Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories(1993) and Michel Houellebecq’s Platform(Plateforme, 2001). Both the novels are set in South-East Asia, and both involve an apologetic and romanticised description of the sex trade. By comparing the two novels, I argue that both authors’ treatments of the sex industry develop a critique of Western Orientalism, and at the same time sympathy for and complicity with the colonial power dynamics that regulate the relationships between Asian countries and the West., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

Recensione di Ezra Pound e l’arte italiana, di Andrea Mirabile (Olschki, 2018). Review of Ezra Pound e l’arte italiana, by Andrea Mirabile (Olschki, 2018)., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

A shorter version of this interview was published in The Claw, Fall 2009, Vol 2, No 1. © by Max McClure. Reprinted by permission., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

Per testimoniare la diffusione e la fortuna di Vollmann in Italia, Massimo Bocchiola, traduttore di Fathers and Crows(1992; Venga il tuo regno, 2011), Luca Briasco, editor di Minimum Fax, Claudia Durastanti, scrittrice, e Vanni Santoni, scrittore ed editor, intervengono con un loro personale contributo da lettori di Vollmann. In order to discuss Vollmann’s reception in Italy, Massimo Bocchiola, translator of Fathers and Crows (1992; Venga il tuo regno, 2011), Luca Briasco, editor at Minimum Fax, Claudia Durastanti, writer, and Vanni Santoni, writer and editor, participate with their personal point of view as Vollmann’s readers., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

The aim of the article is to ponder, from a narratological perspective, on the fictional pacts in William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreamsseries, i.e., on the virtual contract through which the author gives the reader, whether explicitly or not, instructions about the way in which his texts should be read, and that the reader, in turn, should follow to coherently process textual contents. By focusing on The Ice-Shirt, the first novel in the series, I will try to demonstrate how such a pact proves to be a problematic one, especially in that, throughout the whole text, fictional and non-fictional elements are constantly blended. Moreover, my aim is to address how on the reader’s part a ‘flexible’ approach, i.e., an approach that recognizes and builds on such a compresence of elements, allows him to navigate a text that reveals to be hybrid in nature., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

In The Book of Dolores, a series of self-portraits in photography and drawings with accompanying text, William T. Vollmann pictures himself as a cross-dresser. He uses various techniques that emphasize the pictorial approach of photography, to create an uncanny icon of femininity. As an attempt to reach the other side, not just of gender, but of life, his negative prints in particular seem to reveal a ghostly presence. In TheBook of Dolores, una serie di autoritratti fotografici e disegnati e accompagnati da un testo scritto, William T. Vollmann si ritrae come un travestito. Utilizza diverse tecniche che enfatizzano l’approccio pittorialista alla fotografia per creare un’icona perturbante della femminilità. Tentativi di raggiungere l’altro lato, non solo del genere, ma anche della vita, i suoi negativi, in particolare, sembrano rivelare una presenza spettrale., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)