Nora Siena's dissertation, “Inoperative Brevitas: The Contamination of Short Literary and Philosophical Forms and the Twentieth-century Italian Racconto,” identifies a paradigmatic mode of twentieth-century European poetics and philosophical programs in the disruption of the historical tie between textual brevity and exemplarity. Within the genre of exemplary narratio brevis (exempla, parables, apologues, fables), the formal/rhetorical principle of brevitas has been codified to elicit an allegorical reading connecting the text to a universal truth, norm, or doctrine. Relying on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of inoperativity (a potentiality that is not exhausted in its actualization), she defines as “inoperative brevitas” a category of twentieth-century literary and philosophical forms that exhibit the genre constants of brevitas while withdrawing from its exemplifying function. Focusing on the work of Italian and German philosophers, in her dissertation she argues that the employment of inoperative brevitas in philosophical writing opens new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between universality and particularity and thus the entanglement of language, ethics, and politics. Furthermore, she maintains that the notion of inoperative brevitas illuminates a tendency of the twentieth-century Italian racconto that would otherwise elude any critical definition.