Maria Corti

Personal

Vocation

Traits

Italian university professor, linguist and novelist. Corti was not only an outstanding intellectual but she moved from the arcane to the popular venues. She did both fiction works and erudite research and was very involved with contemporary writers and promoting them. Her vivacious courses were well attended as she moved between writing narrative and intellectual tomes. Corti began her prestige with a novel published about the 1480 conquest of Otranto from the point of view of the Turks at the same time she was doing scientific research on another subject. She wrote "The Methods of the Critics" and then founded a magazine called "Critical Instruments" which introduced new methods of literary theory, including Russian formalism and structuralism. In 1968 she started a foundation in Pavia that gathered manuscripts and letters of contemporary authors and which broke the tie imposed by the philology measuring oneself only with tradition. She died on 2/22/2002.