Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was one of the most complex and challenging intellectual figures in post-war Italy. This book analyzes his intensely charged, experimental essays, poetry, cinema, and narrative, and their shifting perspectives of subjectivity.

In the twenty years since his death, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) has grown into a figure of defining importance in the history of post-war Italian literary and cinematographic culture. His extraordinary and continuing impact is explained by his capacity to appropriate and transform or distort traditional genres, media, languages, and forms of art, and to bring them into stark confrontation with the deeply fractured social, political, and sexual landscape of modern Italy. Pasolini:Forms of Subjectivity aims at a global reassessment of Pasolini, examining in turn his journalism and essays, his poetry, his film theory and practice, and his sprawling, posthumously published narrative fragment Petrolio, all from the perspective of the complex shifting workings of subjectivity which animate every aspect of his work. Gordon provides a conceptual and interpretative framework which illuminates Pasolini's mastery of both the written word and cinematographical world.