FEATURED MIND: VALERIO AMORETTI
Dr. Valerio Amoretti joins the English Department as an Assistant Professor this year. As an undergraduate, Valerio earned his BSc in Medicinal Chemistry from University College London (2006). He then obtained an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychology from the Anna Freud Centre in London (2010) and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of York (2011). Valerio holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2019), and he was the first scholar with a degree in literary studies to be appointed to the University’s Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience postdoctoral research program (2020-23). He has published in notable academic journals, including boundary 2 and Modern Language Quarterly. In addition to his academic work, Valerio worked in social services and child and adolescent mental health in school settings.
Photo Courtesy of Dr. Valerio Amoretti
Which classes are you planning to teach this upcoming academic year?
In Winter I’ll teach an undergraduate seminar called “Between Text and Reader.” If we think of reading as an encounter and an event, what proportion of that event is determined by the culture, identity, personality, mood and even mental state of the reader, versus the so-called form and content of the text? And what about the actual cognitive processing required for comprehension, which undoubtedly has a mechanical aspect but also interfaces with an infinite number of affective associations? These are all very multi-layered interdisciplinary problems. We will draw from biology, psychoanalysis, and, of course, literary theory, to make some inroads.
For the Spring, my plan is to teach a two-part series called Inventions of the Self. Part 1, From Confession to Autofiction, is an undergraduate lecture course that follows the vicissitudes of Western confessional autobiography from Rousseau to Sheila Heti. We learn from Freud and Dostoevsky that, in the deepest sense, our motives and desires might be illegible to us. Nowadays many contemporary writers seem to take that as their starting point, and they feel free to invent, play with, and create the stories of their selves. My question is: might theirs be a principled attempt to circumvent our blind spots to get at “a” truth of the self by ditching truth-to-fact?
Part 2: Affect, Creativity and the Writing Self will be a graduate seminar, although undergraduates who take Part I will be allowed to register. It follows the same general problem, but going much more in depth on the psychoanalytic and neuro-scientific perspectives on the same questions. Is there a fixed basis of self-hood in the brain? Can memory be said to work factually and objectively? And can this pliability, this creativity inherent to our acts of self-making and self-writing, be leveraged therapeutically? And also: how can we think of self-invention as bona fide creativity while living under a neoliberal imperative to always reinvent ourselves for the markets’ sake?
What are you most looking forward to this year, in both Literature and Mind and elsewhere across UCSB?
For many years, I wandered between the disciplines, trying to connect various dots and look beyond the arbitrary divisions which we have imposed on our universities. Now I feel very lucky: Literature and Mind has the explicit aim of studying literature by using multiple resources, including both psychoanalysis and neuroscience, which has been my life project. But until now I had been doing it mostly on my own, as an academic freelancer of sorts, without the stable validation (and the valuable collaborations) that come from an institution like this. So I am very excited to hear and learn from other Lit and Mind affiliates and students – and, indeed, beyond Lit and Mind and the English Department. If my time across disciplines has taught me anything, it is that you never know when you’re going to encounter a striking idea, a resonant concept, being discussed in a field other than your own.
And I’m especially excited to meet the students, both grads and undergrads; everyone here seems brilliant (and possibly a bit more relaxed than on the East Coast!)
How do you see your prior work experience and educational background intersecting with your current research?
I started off as a hard scientist, and that time left me with a deep respect for the biological underpinnings of the human mind. I migrated from chemistry to neuroscience and then to psychology because I wanted to understand the human mind. I wanted to understand mental suffering, attachment, and especially attachment to literary objects, to art objects. However, the fact that I came to these questions from science means that I cannot forget the miraculous biology that enables the mind’s very existence. It does not follow that I am naively in love with the methodology and the positivist attitude that is associated with science. In fact, I’m very skeptical of the value of using scientific methods to address questions that are fundamentally psychological, psychic, mental. To measure a psychological phenomenon objectively and reproducibly you usually have to distort it to the point that it loses whatever nuance and significance it had as a psychological phenomenon. At some point, as we go from the relative predictability and measurability of the life of of atoms, cells, neurons, brain networks and so on, at some point there is qualitative leap and we end up with something much more ephemeral and much harder to define, measure and quantify, such as the mind. But the latter still undeniably depends on the former. It is hard to do justice to both sides of this spectrum, but I think it is important, even as humanists, to recognize our humble groundedness in the matters of the body.
The other half of my pre-academic career was in social work and psychotherapeutical contexts, where I was talking and working with people who are essentially defined by their suffering. Those stories drive my love of the literary domain much more than science and in a much more visceral sense that I do not fully understand.
How do you see your current research aligning with the 2025-26 theme for Literature and Mind?
It’s a great theme, and reading about it actually helped me rethink something about my own research questions. I understand the theme to say: the human subject, the self, has been in dialogue with these cultural artifacts (i.e. the novel, the printed word) and it has been shaped by them. And now, that’s changing. As we move into the digital, fragmentary world we have today, the self will change too -- there will be shorter attention spans, but perhaps people can also become more creatively rhizomatic and connect unexpected dots. That is a fascinating premise to me because the kind of psychology I’m interested in sees the self as arising primarily out of relationships, out of internalized relationships with others. What I have suggested in my own work is that it’s helpful to think about our relationship with literary objects as if they were relationships with another subject, even though a text is not, of course, alive in quite the same sense as a person. The way we engage in the arts and the way we love the literary arts and let them shape us over time has some similarities with the ways in which we relate to other people, and in which the people we love become part of our selves over time.
The common denominator in all these hypotheses is that the self is not preordained. It’s not something that has to have a particular form due to, say, its biological underpinnings. The self is, indeed, largely invented by us, in and through our cultures. But if they effectively help ‘make’ the self, the objects in our culture have a big responsibility on their shoulders. Now, one thing is to say that the self is made up of others or of ‘traditional’ cultural objects (which are at some level the residues of lives and thoughts and passions of others). It is quite another to imagine a self that is shaped, instead, primarily by its interactions with a machine – a machine that no longer just contains and repurposes human artifacts, human content, but is now generating new objects of its own. That would be a new self indeed – if we will still recognize it as such.
And yet as always, with these kinds of disruptions, there are also new, creative things coming up that we don’t even imagine yet. I haven’t talked too much about technology in the past, precisely because I’m so anchored to the idea that human relations are what art builds upon and what art embodies. But even I have to reckon that as technology gets further and further, there might be a point where it can imitate and generate everything accurately, including the hidden affective dimensions of a human-to-human, or indeed human-to-book, interaction. I certainly wouldn’t want to go on record claiming that it could never get there.
