Biography

María Matilde Morales is a literary scholar interested in the history of literary criticism, diachronic connections between late medieval culture and modernism. She is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, with a Secondary Field in Slavic Literary / Cultural Studies. She holds a BA from Columbia University and a joint MA from the Unviersity of St Andrews, Scotland and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. Her introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment is forthcoming with Alexandria Publishing.

Project Summary

The term narratology was coined by the French-Bulgarian literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov in his 1969 study of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Grammaire du Décaméron. This research project traces a history of narratology by looking at Todorov’s proximal sources, in Russian literary theory, and his more remote ones, in Boccaccio’s work. Todorov’s inauguration of narratology owed much to developments in literary theory in Russia and the Soviet Union; Todorov played a strong part in popularizing and canonizing the work of the Russian Formalists and later of Mikhail Bakhtin in the West. The project identifies three key Russian literary theorists—Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906), Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984), and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)—who present Boccaccio as an origin point for narrative and the novel. All three share a conception of Boccaccio as, in Shklovsky’s words, a big processer of plots, who takes older forms of narrative and, as it were, primes them for modern authors who followed. Combining these modernist theoretical concerns with work on archival medieval manuscript sources available in Florence, the project contextualizes Boccaccio’s narrative innovation by reading it alongside codicological medieval form of the miscellany, or zibaldone in the Tuscan context, and anonymous works like Il Novellino.