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The first classifications of the novel date back to the early 18th century. Then, the novel was still a new genre and was defined in relation to ancient Latin or Hellenistic models and to their narrative variations from the 17th century. By analyzing the first works that try to trace a history of the new genre and a taxonomy of the various types of novels, penned by authors such as Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy, James Beattie and Clara Reeve, this paper argues that the works seen as peripheral in relation to a canonical, archetypal narration, which is typical of the novel, are in themselves illustrative of a wider phenomenon - the marginalization of those narratives which do not fit a current and implicit definition of a genre. Using Corin Braga's concept of "anarchetypal narrative", this paper discusses the works to be found at the peripheries of the novel in the 18th century and the explicit and implicit reasons for their theoretical dismissal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the 20th century French School of imagination studies, my paper wants to highlight the significant differences between two visions about humanity: a traditional transcendentalist vision of immortality, created by a long historical and cultural process of self-poiesis, and an immanentist scientific ideological vision, represented by the humanism of the modern era. In postmodern times, this positivist view prolongs itself in the "transhumanist revolution", a by-product of the ideological myth of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While poststructuralist attacks against structured forms freed literature from the dominance of Aristotle's canon, twentieth-century evolutions in physics and cosmology brought about a new world vision which also deeply influenced modern authors. If the universe was no longer Newtonian, linear and predictable, and if literature was to "imitate" this new reality, world-texts were also supposed to explore anarchical and complex landscapes. To be able to investigate these antistructure texts, literary and art critics adapted analytical tools from mathematical and physical theories - modern literature was associated mainly with the theory of quanta, and postmodern literature with chaos theory. In this paper, I engage with some of the main mathematical and physical concepts used as instruments in literary analysis, such as non-Euclidian geometries, the field concept, relativity, entropy, uncertainty principles, fractals, chaos, strange attractors, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After being considered a kind of weakness for a long time, femininity seems to have reversed. its stigma and has become a positive value in the political discourse due to the stereotypes usually related to it, which allow to define the female political ethos in terms of empathy, affectivity and non-aggressive behaviour. However, the women of the emerging right-wing party in Spain, VOX, contradict this trend by assuming an extremely polarized anti-feminist discourse. Based on a fourhour corpus of public speeches, this paper aims to analyse the topics and the rhetorical strategies used in those speeches, which will show how porous the dichotomy “male-female” can be when it comes to political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The feminine imaginary has persisted throughout history as the result of a psychophysics relationship between women and landscape, specifically in different salt marshes: La Malahá (Granada), Janubio (Lanzarote) and Batz-sur-Mer (Loire-Atlantique). In this way, an “anthropological trajectory” (Gilbert Durand) has been consolidated, as the conjuncture between natural and sociocultural environments, geopoetics and symbolic representations. This paper proposes to explore the permanence of myths and a matriarchal and naturalist axiology related to the female body and a symbolic heritage nowadays forgotten, in order to determine four groups of archetypal images that claim the feminine identity in the alchemic salt landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the relation between genders in the movies Scent of Women (the original and its remake). Our approach can be considered as an exercise in Jungian-Bachelardian interpretation through the grid of a poetics of androgyny, which attests that a man and a woman speak in the solitude of our being, according to the expression of Gaston Bachelard. Beyond the different constructions of the two cinematographic productions, critics generally consider that the two films have as common themes: the crisis of modernity revealed by the tragic and blind loneliness of modern man, the initiation of a young man to the misfortunes of life and to the love of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of identity and its reconfiguration after experiencing a traumatic event. Anny Duperey’s account of her shock caused by the sudden loss of her parents at the age of eight is the selfnarrative analyzed this study. After thirty years of silence, Duprey finally decides to rediscover this “lost” past and “upset” childhood, which allows her, in particular, to reconstruct her injured identity. Therefore, the question that arises is how the author / narrator manages to approach the representation of self during her narrative project, while she is suffering from identity rupture in the aftermath of such a heavy loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the narrator of Catherine Mavrikakis’ novel A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning (2000) learns of the consecutive passings of several of her close friends, she transforms this experience into text. In this paper, we analyze Catherine Mavrikakis’s textualization of the ineffable death and loss of the other as a condition of awareness of one’s own finitude. By applying several narratological and theoretical tools to the text, we show how, using the writings but also the life of Hervé Guibert as a hypotext, the narrator articulates her own understanding of death by gathering the multitude of the dead under the banner of a single Hervé. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims, with regard to the imaginary of identity, to outline the essential lines corner poles of our hermeneutics. Against the tendency to approach contemporary identity tensions, I will focus here on identity fluctuations, above all in contexts of disengagement of identity, following the possible dissolution or deconstruction of any identity, collective and personal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The various cultures that coexist in Brazil have established a specific dialogue between them. The mythical elements present in the imaginary originate from various continents. It is possible to understand these images, their dynamics and their dialogues through a myth-criticism of the media. In this paper, we shall analyze images linked to a specific theme such as hunger, and its various artistic expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the ingroup identity which emerges through three events, the Cologne attacks in January 2016, the attacks against the Charlie Hebdo journalists in January 2015 and the Yellow Vests' demonstrations in France from November 2018 to 2019. It focuses on the images and fictions which are performed by the citizens as well as those which appear through the reactions of academics, journalists and politicians in media. It aims at revealing the accommodation of political myths and the way the representations of collective identity are built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores various meanings of the notion of identity, the individual and collective contexts in which it applies, the questions and the problems it raises. Its scope is to build a cartography of the different approaches adopted by the participants in the 4th Congress of the Centre International de Recherches sur l'Imaginaire, dedicated to self-images and self-representations. The main idea is that identity is situated between rationality and imagination, between an objective reality and an unlimited fantasy, which is the cause of its paradoxical usages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper starts from the deconstructionists' attack on the notion of structural center and of architecturally structured literary texts. However, it does not indulge in the opposition between structuralism and post-structuralism, archetypal essentialism and relativistic nihilism, but it goes forward to a more serene position, in which the center and the margin, the archetypes and what Corin Braga calls anarchetypes, are no longer exclusive, but complementary. Its main focus is on the identification of centered literary structures with aesthetical value and literary canon. In George Poulet's, Roman Ingarden's or Rudolf Arnheim's theories, a literary work reaches aesthetical significance only when it can make emerge a cogito, a ratio, a synopsis. The paper questions the solidity of this judgment and argues for the parting of aesthetical value from structural cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, cultural studies have embraced concepts and methodologies set forth by the new fields of inquiry brought about by the "spatial turn". These new disciplines combine knowledge from the domains of geography and literature in an interdisciplinary way. In my paper I propose to go beyond this dialogue between disciplines to the roots of both geographical and literary representations, that is, I aim to discuss the geographical imaginary. Resorting to concepts from the theory of fictional worlds, I will make a distinction between "realistic" or "mimetic" geographies, "symbolic" geographies, "fictional geographies", and "allegorical" geographies. I am primarily interested in symbolic geographies and the non-empirical criteria which produced, especially during ancient, medieval and early modern times, cartographical and literary representations of the world that might appear to be fantastical nowadays, but that were nonetheless considered adequate in their respective epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims to reflect on the symbolic conditions (Durand, Bachelard) that, in cinema, can take part of the image of success. This, considered in its requirements of consensus and collective adhesion, is defined from the premise of the Imaginary Studies on the representations of the logical principles of antithesis, analogy and complexity, pondering that the relation with difference is fundamental to understanding the symbolic condition of success. With this premise, three of the ten films considered the greatest box-office hits of all time are examined: Gone with the Wind, Avatar and Titanic. The paper concludes that in both Avatar and Titanic there is a dualistic approach to otherness, while in Gone with the Wind the approach is monistic. In either case, plurality is retracted, with the refusal of the Other's effectiveness as a third party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Candomblé rituals, in Recife, Brasil, the frontiers between interior and exterior, female and male, adult and child, mineral, vegetal and animal, the sacred and the profane, are not means of separation but places for cultural exchanges. How to speak about otherness in this context? The supernatural being Exu, a messenger between humans and gods, attend to individual prayers and, as such, make possible the expression of desires that are both universal and specific and embody different forms of alterity. Making use of interviews, mythology, ritual analysis, mythanalysis and mythcriticism (Gilbert Durand) this paper tries to classify the diverse forms of ritual living otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the publication of the well-known work by Huntington The Clash of Civilizations, the idea of a clash between civilizations has established itself at a global level, also supported by the recent bloody events that have afflicted the political scene. This brief paper intends to offer an interpretation of the concepts of civilization and conflict as forms of representation of reality and alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to give several answers to the fundamental question Who is the other? In other words, it seeks to explain what I mean when I say "the other". The method consists in shifting the question outwards and inwards in relation to the philosophical tradition, science and poetry. It entails adopting a bird's eye view on a broad thematic which demands various inter- and pluri-disciplinary perspectives. The logical structure is the historical breakthrough in which, at every step, new answers are given to the primary question, like in Ravel's Bolero, or in a mantra, making possible both a historical and a circular advancement. In the third part I express a proposal from my own philosophical perspective, in relation with geometry, quantum physics and art. I conclude with the design of a possible emergency exit for the present situation of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches some fundamental philosophical problems, which are more or less present in the contributions. Otherness is not only a specific category of the collective imaginary, but also its "fuel". How could imagination make the difference between what is real and what is imagined? How could this difference produce such a large range of varieties that can reach the extreme of alienation from oneself or from the others? How can the varieties of the imagination give birth to the topics of alteration, altercation, alternation? And how do these relationships create a specific domain in which ethics and aesthetics intermingle? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lately, the French concept of "imaginaire", coined by philosophers such as Gaston Bachelard, Henry Corbin and Gilbert Durand, has been successfully adapted to Anglo-American Studies. Imagination studies ("recherches sur l'imaginaire") have spread from literature and arts to philosophy and social sciences, so we speak today of "collective myths and social imaginaries". In this paper, I want to present some concepts from this domain that could shed fresh light on the study of otherness, on the construction of identities and alterities, and on the comprehension of the similarities and differences between various ethnic, social, confessional, and gender groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Gothic-Postmodernism in Dora Pavel's fiction. In the first theoretical part, it will be presented the symbiotic convergence and the genetical affinity between Gothic and Postmodernism. In the second part, it will be shown that the works of the Romanian writer, through hybridizations and grafts, incorporates Gothic features sometimes explicitly, sometimes unconsciously and in a more encrypted way. A summary analysis of the first two novels - Dying Agata (Agata murind, 2003) and The Captive (Captivul, 2006) - will be proposed, through which some Gothic traces will be reviewed. A more extended case study will be dedicated to the novel Powder (Pudră, 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with hybridization technologies. Seen as a process of shifting from natural to artificial and vice versa, these technologies belong to the broader framework of biopower. They influence the ethical paradigms of contemporary civilization, especially in what regards the question of the criteria ruling the relationship between human race and nature. In this paper, we redefine the concept of the sacred in order to obtain new and coherent principles consistent with this technological worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the changes brought by the digital era and virtual reality upon theatre acting and the redefinition of the role and function of the actor as a participant within virtual theatre projects. This paper insists on the fact that the actor has not turned into a "diminished" performer, but into one whose mediatised effect on the public is amplified by the interaction of all the scenic elements. The duality of being immersed in a virtual medium and of being in interaction with it is approached by this particular performer with a very disciplined, precise acting, with heightened imagination and body training, with great willingness to accept working in unfinished performance structures. This paper also includes unpublished fragments of interviews taken in 2006 and 2007 with several creators of virtual theatre performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper grows out of a personal experience of Romanian's communist political regime during the last years of Ceausescu, including the last hours of his reign and the passage to a new political regime. This experience is above all affective and my paper aims to focus on it through some concepts: the "distribution of the sensible" (Jacques Rancière) as dimension of each political and cultural regime, and the "historical feeling" as the way to measure the transformation from a certain radical modern history, of progress and human rationalization, to a low profile history, the democratic and capitalist one, wherein the aesthetic category of sublime is no longer possible and no sacred power sticks anymore to our consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper intends to examine the controversial nature of logos. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, because this is one of the most "bewildering" questions for linguists, philosophers, anthropologists or psychologists, generating widely divergent views. The apophantik view starts from the assumption that language "blocks" the way to the essence of things. Or, as we try to argue in this present paper, this view is only a "myth", created to "hide" our ontological impossibility of a direct contact with things themselves. The pragmatik interpretation considers language only as a tool of communication. Language is, of course, a tool of communication, but, as we have tried to show, this is not its primordial nature. There is also a "magic" view, according to which language is a sort of supernatural force that can help the human being "to compel the will of gods and demons". The aim of this paper is to show that language itself, far from being a human "disease", a pragmatic tool or a magic weapon, is merely "the principle of the universe and the first principle of knowledge" (Cassirer). By its very nature and essence, language is logos semantikos: its purpose is not to create the beings, but to create the being of beings, according to Eugenio Coseriu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with some non- Czech literary reflections of Bohemia and its culture/cultures: in Central-European history the notion of Czech culture is not univocal and the perception of Czech Bohemia is not continual. The region, situated in the same centre of Europe, since medieval times has been the theatre of crossings and encounters, as well as the scene of conflicts and removals. Literature preserves and restores, recalls traces and restitutes values from oblivion, creating at the same time fictional characters and places, which can conceal the real ones or at least change their nature and shape. An elusive Bohemia, located somewhere else, thus mythical, is frequent in its German literary reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper not only analyzes the affinity between the process of organic/natural creation and the artistic creation in the work of Paul Klee (both painted and theoretical), but also offers some phenomenological insights concerning the creator's attempt to make himself "approachable" to Art by means of: uninterrupted genesis, symbolic configuration (not imitation), disillusionment, the correspondence between the micro- and the macrocosmos, continual movement, the tension of rhythms, the grey point as the proper movement of chaos. Since art represents for Klee a parable of Creation and, moreover, it does not reproduce the visible but makes visible, his organic paintings show how things come into being, how being becomes phenomen, also how sign unveils language, not meaning. In addition, as the symbol rises to its visibility, the representation reveals the force of the souvenir; properly speaking, the abstractism in the works of Klee belongs to the real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though theoretical reflections about the relationship that exists between film and literature seem to concentrate on film adaptations, the present paper aims at showing how contemporary French novelization, a literary practice that finds its source in cinema, meets the challenges that represent the transition from the visual medium of cinema into the textual one of literature. It proposes, via Nathalie Léger's Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden, published in 2012 by P.O.L., to highlight some of the operations that accompany the encounter of the two systems of representation: images and words, images through words. An encounter that, beyond establishing an intermedial dialogue between film and literature, gives shape to a discontinuous life narrative, opening up to cinema, but also and necessarily, to fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the standard arguments against utopian writings is that, in their depictions of ideal communities, they don't fully take into account the constraints of human nature. This paper argues that a version of this seemingly perennial argument goes back to those mid-eighteenth-century France authors that took a stance against political writings which called into question established principles such as monarchical sovereignty or private property. By defining a civilized human nature, a second nature that was radically detached from its ancestral, egalitarian roots, these authors tried to argue that utopian fictions and radical political theories were equally flawed, since they misrepresented the functioning of modern societies and advocated for an impossible return to an antiquated, primitivist way of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celebrated by Louis Aragon as a pure "narcotic" to be used constantly, wildly and passionately, the poetic image is meant to function as an almost illegally adjuvant in order to bring to life the most extravagant artificial paradises. This is, at least, what Surrealists poets claim. Or that claim will be later denounced as a mere delusion, many French poets writing after 1945 insisting on the deceptiveness of the (visual and rhetorical) images. May poetic representation do without the mediation of imagery and poetic devices? In this paper we endeavour to answer this question, basing our analysis on a collection of short prose written by a contemporary French poet, Philippe Jaccottet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary translation is often described using metaphors of loss, infidelity, and betrayal. In-depth experience as a literary translator reveals the opposite: despite the gaps between languages, literary translation can best be described using metaphors of victory, triumph and fulfillment. This paper describes the overwhelming challenges of passages from one language to another, the concrete experience of translation, and, beyond images of loss, a vision of the translated text as an intimate echo of the original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of modern feminism inspired the revisiting, among other ancient themes, of the Amazons figure. Living alone, without cooperation with men, the Amazons could be a symbol for new ideals of social, moral and spiritual emancipation of modern women. The most radical element that can advocate the idea of feminine independence was the fantasy of parthenogenesis. The works discussed in this paper, Mizora. A Prophecy (1890) by Mary E. Bradley Lane, Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins, With Her in Ourland (1916) by Charlotte Perkins, The Female Man (1975) by Joanna Russ, and Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy explore the social and anthropological consequences in women's utopian societies triggered by the lack of heterosexual relationships and unisexual engendering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utopian literature came to be understood as a genre in its own right only during the 18th century, and it was during the same period that a significant shift in the meaning of the word "utopia" occurred - some radical political theorists and philosophers were now portrayed as incorrigible dreamers and designers of ideal, unfeasible communities. Utopia became thus politicized, but this didn't mean that literary utopias were always marginalized by those authors which made passing references to the genre. On the contrary, as this paper shows, in the last two decades of the 18th century, some authors began to claim that at least some utopias deserved to be read for their political or legal arguments. Classical or obscure utopian texts were being re-edited and efforts were being made to legitimate a literary sub-genre (at times labeled "political novel"), in an attempt to advance subversive ideas about political power, hereditary monarchy, tolerance and equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeing shame as the consciousness of a person who has been rejected by the group to which she belongs, this paper aims at clarifying the experience of shame and its reversal. The two stories being discussed here are setting the marks for a passage from destitution to restitution, from impossible narration to the narrative possibility. Their main idea is that the description of the experience of shame cannot be detached from either the power of self-expression of the persons concerned, or from that of the standing in for (the other) of their peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major intent of this article is to raise -- if one is not able of giving an appropriate answer -- one particular question: is a world where dreams are controllable a utopia or a dystopia? Since the 1970s, from less successful American sci-fi thrillers and horror movies to some iconic outputs (like Brazil, The City of Lost Children, Paprika, Inception), hypercinema has engendered many productions focusing on various hyper realistic whimsical machines of recording, erasing and even implanting dreams from human brains or minds. Thus, in the first part of my paper I review a series of movies that are simply featuring these devices made possible by mad scientists, while the remaining two sections are going to examine more in detail other films where dreams act either like utopian portals, or as an exit from a dystopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to investigate how the utopian thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was shaped in cinema, by the specific means of the seventh art. Different categories of films are defined and analyzed here. First of all, the focus is laid on a biopic made by Swiss director Claude Goretta, Ways of Exile, or the Last Years of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1978). Then, the influence of Rousseau on Alain Tanner and some young Swiss directors is interrogated through several films in which the works of the philosopher are explicitly cited or interpreted. Lastly, the emphasis is put on the influence of Rousseau on cinema schools, such as Italian new realism or the French New Wave, the last one with its key figure, Jean-Luc Godard. In this article, the cinema appears as a way of re-reading classical Utopian systems, but also as a medium capable of fabricating utopias for our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While during the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century many utopists imagined better societies based on emergent technology and socialist principles, with the putting in place of the totalitarian regimes (communist and fascist) of the 20th century utopian optimism faded away and gave place to dystopian and apocalyptical visions. The utopian interest shifted towards topics which have been lately brought together under the name of cultural studies: feminism, post-colonialism, ecology, etc. This paper tackles some seminal "ecotopias" of the period, such as Walden Two by B. F. Skinner and Ecotopia by Ernst Callenbach, showing how these texts upgrade the classical physiocratic and Arcadian utopias and romantic utopias such as Thoreau's Walden. Then it moves on to science-fiction utopias, such as Pennterra by Judith Moffett, seen as an enactment of the deep-ecology Gaia hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since modernity, childhood has been a privileged anchor theme for humanities. Already rationalized by theological pedagogy, essentialized by psychology, currently included by neuroscience, it embraces the power and flow of representations that remain at the heart of these disciplines, triggering them in a vibrating and renewed social construction. This movement around childhood is not confined to the limits of what produces it or what ends it, because it transcends the formerly established frameworks and paradigms. Following the track of imaginary identities assigned to childhood, this paper aims to understand how this identity, anchored in the body and its fluids, organizes and disrupts in our contemporary world, a field concerning childhood. Further-more, it focuses on the mapping of imaginary significations maintained/ historically altered in discourse and practices concerning children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing with the history of literary forms in European literature, the paper investigates the way cultural traditions forged them (by discussing what forms are interpreted as "poems", starting with a peculiar testimony from the Enneide) and how misreadings often perpetuated them; the paper focuses on the case of visual poetry, which is traditionally established in Horatio's poetics, and aims at proving that there is no objective way of establishing literary species, that they are the result of historically limited cultural conventions and interpretations. Furthermore, written forms of poetry are to be understood as imagining, in a visual system, the sonority of spoken language - again, with no objective guide for a so called transcription of voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief essay intends to examine the superimposition of virtual and empirical landscapes with regard to the concepts of biopower, identity and utopia. The landscape, broadly speaking, is analyzed both as a natural space colonized and shaped by technology and as a virtual and utopian project exhibited by political power. In this sense the paper reflects on how hybrid landscapes combine to organize and reflect at once the new technological identity of the contemporary civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses utopian propensities in German travel relations and colonial novels from ca. 1850 to 1914 and focuses on the metaphorical projection of idealized societies and regimes into the exotic landscape. The word "colony" is understood in two different acceptations. Around 1850, the "German colony" designates a group of settlers who emigrate and keep true to their original way of life. From the 1880s onward, the "German colonies" stand for countries in a state of political and economic subordination to Germany as a new colonial power. Despite the evolution of the German colonial policies through the 19th century, the perception of the German communities overseas evince continuities: the "German colonies" allow the colonialist activists to show the defaults of the European Germans and to sketch a better society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that what may appear as an apparently minor detail in the French utopian narratives written during the reign of Louis XIV, the shape and ornaments of the utopian garden, is in fact highly consistent with the developments of the genre in that particular historical moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we address the problem of the inhabited worlds and the concept of otherness in exoplanets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Louis-Sébastien Mercier's uchronia, The Year 2440 (L'an deux mille quatre cent quadrant), first published in 1771, is widely regarded today as one of the first examples of a utopian narrative which embodies the Enlightenment notion of progress. As such, Mercier's text has had a tremendous influence on the development of science-fiction literature, establishing some of the conventions of the genre. However, in this paper, we argue that the text in itself is highly ambivalent in terms of the shape of the future society Mercier depicts. Accordingly, one can read it today as an idealized utopia or as a predecessor of some of the dystopias of the 20th century. Furthermore, the revised edition of the text, published in 1786, brought to light even clearer the ambiguities of Mercier's political vision. The Year 2440 was, in this regard, not only embodying certain ideals of the French Enlightenment, but also manifesting a crisis of the utopian genre in the late 18th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The universe has since time immemorial been considered unique and unitary. The visible meets the invisible, the sensorial meets the intelligible, the sacred meets the profane, the human meets the divine. There are spaces of communication, of passage, of correspondence where humans comes into contact with the cosmos by an imagined hereafter which makes them aware of a genuine fundamental unity. This paper analyses some passage symbols as the gate and the stairs, whose semantic is rendered even more intense by their encounter with the myth on the diachronic-vertical axis and with arts on the synchronic-horizontal axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The descent to the underworld, or katabasis, is a well-documented mytheme and a wide-spread literary topos; due to the influence of such canonical authors as Homer, Virgil or Dante Alighieri, it has become one of the prominent symbols for human mortality. Nonetheless, the typical descent to the underworld is not limited to describing the hopeless land of the dead. The hero, during katabasis, might encounter lands of serene happiness, which can be etymologically classified as utopias (eutopia, "happy place"). Modern Argentine literature, on the other hand, as this paper implies, developed a different conception of the katabasis, one in which the hero is more likely to encounter dystopian literary landscapes. Writers such as Ernesto Sábato, Jorge Luis Borges, Abelardo Castillo and Leopoldo Marechal have all remodeled in their prose fiction the descent to the underworld in response to an increasing postwar skepticism toward human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Hall's parody of the utopian conventions, Mundus alter et idem (1605), has acquired a reputation for being an early example of anti-utopian writing. However, Hall was not the only author of his time to use the utopian form or certain utopian themes as means of depicting imaginary societies in which vice and chaos had became the norm of social behaviour. This paper discusses two other such texts, Artus Thomas' L'Isle des Hermaphrodites (1605) and Jean de la Pierre's Le grand empire de l'un et l'autre monde (1625), besides Mundus alter et idem, in order to determine their possible relation to an early modern tradition of the Menippean satire and to reassess their place within the anti-utopian subgenre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally, the representations of Christian hell belong to violent imaginaries. Even if this tradition is well represented in Christian texts and paintings, in other traditions (folk mythology, alchemy, literature, etc.) there appears a poetical dimension of death. Exploring this "mild death", the paper engages Bachelard's approach of deadly waters. It also deals with the poetics deriving from "feminine" thanatology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to show Lautréamont's The Songs of Maldoror as an infernal dystopia. In Bachelard's lecture, we will stress the metamorphic schemes of aggression and violence pictured by the rapid and perpetual transformations of animal forms. In fact, Lautréamont's poetry is aggressive and nervous. Bachelard speaks of a "projective poetry" as a psychic explosion of an over- excited mind. This poetry is therefore dynamic and primitive, because it is the expression of an original "will to live" that is a "will to attack". It follows that the lecture of The Songs of Maldoror teaches us how to descend to our psychic hell and to live its tensions thanks to the animal metaphors it displays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposal for this paper, "It seems that the fear of suffering and death has the pictorial representation of his fears, to appease them and to take them under control" refers to Gilbert Durand, who writes: "configuring an image of evil, a danger of sorts, symbollising anguish is a form of taking control, of mastering these by virtues of the cogito". In Brazilian society exist different highly potent symbolic systems, among them that of Candomblé. An Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé is a Orixás worship, where deities are associated with the elements of nature (water, land, forest, fire, lightning, air, etc.). Here we seek to observe how the representations developed in a Candomblé ritual of synthetic structure (disséminatoire), master anxiety by re-signifying core elements within the culture, space and time, balancing the various energies of good and ill in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]