Leonardo F. Lisi works on European literature and philosophy of the long nineteenth century (ca. 1789-1918), with a particular focus on the evolution of literary forms and their relation to German idealist aesthetics. His first book, Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce (Fordham University Press, 2013), argues that the standard approach to modernist aesthetics in terms of a contradiction between autonomy and fragmentation rests on an understanding of truth and experience that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist forms. Instead, Lisi traces an alternative “aesthetics of dependency” that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe’s Scandinavian periphery as his point of departure, Lisi examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined an aesthetic response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce.

Lisi’s second book, Modern Tragedy and the End of Worlds: Lillo, Leopardi, Ibsen (forthcoming with Northwestern University Press fall 2025), argues that the introduction of bourgeois characters and settings to high drama in the early eighteenth century does not simply constitute a sociological change to the genre but rather opens up a completely new strand of tragedy in European thought. Weaving together literary and philosophical analysis, Lisi shows how George Lillo, Giacomo Leopardi, and Henrik Ibsen present the conditions of capitalist modernity as destructive of human worlds. Tragedy here does not reside in the downfall of a particular individual or collective, but in the impossibility of sustaining human forms of meaning in the face of modern materialism, finance, and reason. Viewed in this light, modern tragedy requires us to think together the incommensurable scales of human existence and the inhuman processes on which it rests – a task that continues to have profound relevance for imagining the end of worlds in the Anthropocene. 

Currently, Lisi is completing two additional studies of modern tragedy that expand the argument in Modern Tragedy and the End of Worlds. The first, entitled Tragic Life: Forms of Being in Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Strindberg, takes as its point of departure the idea (popular as a defense against naturalism already in the eighteenth century) that reason and meaning must be grounded on a pre-reflexive form of intentionality. Looking closely at Schiller’s Don Carlos, Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, and the late plays of Strindberg, Lisi argues that this paradigm generated a neglected tragic variation, in which such intentionality is conceived in inhuman terms that we can only escape by means of resignation and releasement. The second study, Tragic Faith in Goethe, Kierkegaard, and the Theatre of the Absurd, concludes Lisi’s examination of modern tragic thought by tracing the relation of doubt and faith in Goethe’s Faust I, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and plays by Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee. In these works, Lisi argues, tragedy is mobilized to resolve the conflict between reason and immediacy by imposing a new criterion for meaning that forces us to redraw the boundaries of both.

Lisi has also published articles on a range of authors and topics, including Joseph Conrad, W. H. Auden, Rainer Maria Rilke, J. L. Heiberg, Scandinavian Modernism, the reception of Hamlet and Faust, Strindberg, Ibsen, Kierkegaard, and Wole Soyinka. He is the recipient of a number of honors and awards and is a past member of the executive councils of the Ibsen Society of America and of the MLA Scandinavian Discussion Group. Together with Niels Jørgen Cappelørn he co-edited Karsten Harries’ 2010 book, Between Nihilism and Faith and currently serves as executive editor of the comparative literature issue of MLN. At Hopkins Lisi has taught courses on literary criticism and comparative literature, Kierkegaard, Henry James, the tragic tradition, Capitalism and Tragedy from the 18th Century to Climate Change, modern drama, European romantic poetry, the philosophy of tragedy from Schiller to Cavell, and Shakespeare and Ibsen.