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This article analyses Italian illustrated editions of Little Women published between 1908 and 1945. After an overview of the publishing history of the novel in Italy, the paper will examine Italian illustrations as hermeneutic tools in order to examine their ideological function in the representation of gender. The belated reception of Alcott’s novel in Italy, caused by its representation of a nonconformist educational model for girls, is mirrored in the tension between the nationalistic drive and the influence of foreign models that can be pinpointed in the illustrated editions. By analyzing adaptations of American illustrations, original Italian creations, and omissions of iconic illustrations, this paper will unveil how much the visual element is embedded in the Italian historical and cultural context, as the choice (or omission) of particular images impacted the interpretation of the book. By examining the Italian editions of Little Women published in this time frame, we will also be able to retrace the links with the American illustrated history of the book and bear testimony to the powerful impact of the 1934 film version on printed editions.

The paper intends to propose a reading of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Machines Like Me (2019), qua insightful reflection on the topic of Artificial Intelligence and its bearings on different aspects of human life, from interpersonal relationships to moral behaviour. At the same time, the novel also engages in a reflection on the value and the prospects of literature, whose very premises might be called in question in a posthuman context. Set in a 1980s world whose contours radically deviate from historical facts – the atomic bomb was never dropped; Kennedy was not killed in Dallas; the Beatles are still a band; and Alan Turing has survived the conviction for homosexuality and successfully carried on his studies on AI – the novel introduces the simulacrum in the form of an android, Adam, a hyper-sophisticated machine that enters the characters’ life and upsets it thoroughly. The troublesome relationship with Adam forces Charlie, the protagonist-narrator, to ponder on his own system of values, posing questions about the Other which inevitably end up throwing new light – but, above all, casting new doubts – on the Self and on what it ultimately means to be human. By way of his “What if novel” set in an alternative past, McEwan tackles pressing issues of our present, while trying to envisage a future that is not far to come. The paper intends to explore both the ethical and the metaliterary level of the story on the background of the contemporary theoretical debate on transhumanism and posthumanism, pointing to the simulacrum as the uncanny catalyser of the major topics the author intends to tackle.

The aim of the present paper is to consider Remades (posthuman figures who populate China Miéville’s “Bas-Lag trilogy”) as simulacra of their social milieu, highlighting the interconnection of power and economic systems which shapes the “remaking” process and ultimately the position of Remades in society. Two methodological approaches are applied to the analysis. The first draws from Halberstam, Livingston and Micali to account for the “posthumanity” of Remades, interpreting them as liminal figures who physically summarise various categories of inhabitants of the Bas-Lag. The second moves from Foucault’s reflections on the relation between power and punishment and on the centrality of the body in this relation to determine how these categories – power and punishment – work in the context of the specifically posthuman bodies of Remades. Combining these perspectives produces interesting results. First, it can account for the “otherness” of Remades on the level of their physical transformation (from “whole” bodies to Remades) as well as on the level of their social position (from citizens, to prisoners, to outcasts). In addition to this, by providing some key examples, the paper foregrounds that, if the dialectical relationship between Remades and society is overtly inscribed on their bodies, different societies are likely to alter them in different ways. As a result, a totalitarian structure will inflict marks that are not superimposable with those produced by an egalitarian one.

In the last decades formalistic and structuralist narratology has been intensively recovered and reinterpreted in a cognitive perspective, and with a new focus on transmedial dissemination. The goal is, as Marie-Laure Ryan and Jean-Nöel Thon state, a media-conscious narratology. In particular focalization appears to be a crucial category to define the various narrative techniques through different media. The paper will deal first with the theoretical debate on focalization, analyzing the shift from Genette’s canonical triadic pattern to the more fluid scale proposed by cognitive narratology (for example by Manfred Jahn), and the coexistence between different meanings and applications (basically: perceptual, emotional, informational). The second part will be devoted to some significant examples: the iconographic motif of the character (usually a woman) at the window; Alfonso Cuaron’s recent movie Roma, as a vivid example of central focus in cinema; focalization in videogames; and the 360° multifocalization practiced by new media, which radically change the notion of point of view itself. In the last decades formalistic and structuralist narratology has been intensively recovered and reinterpreted in a cognitive perspective, and with a new focus on transmedial dissemination. The goal is, as Marie-Laure Ryan and Jean-Nöel Thon state, a media-conscious narratology. In particular focalization appears to be a crucial category to define the various narrative techniques through different media. The paper will deal first with the theoretical debate on focalization, analyzing the shift from Genette’s canonical triadic pattern to the more fluid scale proposed by cognitive narratology (for example by Manfred Jahn), and the coexistence between different meanings and applications (basically: perceptual, emotional, informational). The second part will be devoted to some significant examples: the iconographic motif of the character (usually a woman) at the window; Alfonso Cuaron’s recent movie Roma, as a vivid example of central focus in cinema; focalization in videogames; and the 360° multifocalization practiced by new media, which radically change the notion of point of view itself.

The writer's travel reportage and photography present, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view, many points in common. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the similarities and differences between the two arts, to demonstrate how the relationship between writing and photography is effective in the proposed reportages. The analyses reveal that the interaction between writing and photography leads to a more complex level of observation. Specifically, this analogy has been applied to three Chinese reportages by three authors from the second half of the twentieth century: Roland Barthes, Franco Fortini and Goffredo Parise (the latter in opposition to the first two). Their journeys took place at different times: Fortini's journey dates back to 1955, followed by the publication of Asia Maggiore – a text accompanied by photographs by Fortini herself, which is an interesting reason to investigate the relationship between writing and photography – and then returned to China in 1972; Parise was in China in the spring of 1966, and in the same year he wrote the reportage Cara Cina; Barthes' journey dates back to 1974, reported in Carnets du voyage en Chine and in the article Alors, la Chine? In particular, Fortini and Parise can be considered, as proposed by Luigi Marfè, two typical “political anti-tourists”. The starting point of the paper is the indication of the theoretical premises and the analysis of theories presented by Barthes in his text on photography, La chamber claire, and other theorists such as Peirce, Arnheim, Sontag, Benjamin. In particular, the following approaches – which have been included by Claudio Marra in the evolution of the photographic practice and then recovered by Silvia Albertazzi – have been applied: compositional neo-painting, the poetics of the decisive instant and the practice of filing, of particular interest because of its testimonial aspect. In the three reports these aspects have been traced and highlighted. In addition to the application of the three approaches proposed by Marra, emphasis was placed on the testimonial value of photography and writing, with particular attention to the combination of the two arts and the value that this had in the reports analysed, focusing on the texts of Bertolt Brecht and Susan Sontag. From the analysis of the Chinese reportages of these authors, many common points emerged, especially regarding the structural aspect of the texts and the use of photographic techniques in writing. In particular, the analysis highlights the close and also practical relationship between photography and writing.

By delving into the relation between image and memory, this paper puts into question the bodily reality of screens. Or rather, it questions how our own bodies are themselves but screens, a fabric on which the images of our dreams slide by, thus bestowing upon us the gift of the time for an experience of pure virtuality. The paper focuses on the work of video-artist Bill Viola assuming the philosophical perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan.

The paper aims at exploring how the literary representation of the worker has changed between the end of 20th-century and the beginning of the 21st-century. With the fall of the 20th-century ideologies and raising the fragmentation of labour, texts have emerged in Italian literature which illustrated the tragic social and existential condition of the working class. Among these texts we can find some récits de filiation written by sons and daughters of workers whose health and ideals have been undermined even down to death. These typology of texts let emerged two equally tragic characters: fathers, ill and defeated but still working class heroes and sons, tragically conscious of their roles witnesses-superstites of those ‘denied heroes’. Among the texts being tackled in the paper Il nemico (2009) by Emanuele Tonon, Amianto (2012) by Alberto Prunetti, Il fuoco a mare (2015) by Andrea Bottalico, Ilva Football Club (2016) by Fulvio Colucci and Lorenzo d’Alò

The paper proposes to approach the issue of literary realism through the prism of archive art, i.e. the artworks that are archives of objects, documents, statements, even other artworks by other artists etc. The preservation of the otherness of an entity, which is subsequently taken up and kept in an archive, is one of the key challenges involved in such projects. The second task of an archival artwork is to construct—in fact add—an encompassing totality that correlates with the authorship and gives significance to the archive-artwork as a whole. The paper scrutinizes possible links between the archival approaches to art production in the 20th and 21st centuries and the practices of realist writing beginning in the 19th century.

Luca Ferraro L’articolo è incentrato sul rapporto tra eroicomico e satira. Gli autori passati in rassegna sono i principali del canone europeo: Tassoni, Boileau, Pope e Parini. L’obiettivo è stato quello di verificare quanto l’elemento satirico sia parte integrante del genere inventato da Tassoni. Nella seconda parte del testo si è cercato di dimostrare che la satira diventa la forma del comico predominante nei poemi eroicomici successivi alla Secchia rapita. Analizzandone in ordine cronologico le opere più rappresentative, si è voluto fare una riflessione sul genere e su come mutano gli elementi che lo caratterizzano nel corso dei suoi quasi due secoli di vita. The focus of this paper is the relationship between mock-heroic and satire. The analysis will deal with the most important satirical and mock-heroic authors in Europe : Tassoni, Boileau, Pope and Parini. The purpose is to prove how the satirical element is an essential part of the genre invented by Tassoni. In the second part of the paper we will try to demonstrate that the satire becomes the main mode of the comic in mock-heroic poems after the Secchia rapita. By analyzing chronologically the most representative works, our article proposes a reflection about the genre and the evolution of its characteristics during almost two centuries.

The paper investigates the ways Shakespeare’s oeuvre, with its reputation for a universal adaptability that embraces all media and contexts, finds its way into a serial structure that is the dominant form of visual performance today. In order to see whether this seems at all possible, the paper examines the most recent television series, Star-Crossed, in which the original Shakespearean narrative unit (Romeo and Juliet) is broken up into several episodes, thus adopting the most popular televisual genre of our time. The paper argues that this fragmentation of the original narrative whole fits into the contemporary cultural tendencies of textual poaching, snatching quotations and (re)placing them in seemingly random contexts, often with a complete ignorance of original meanings and contextual frameworks, but applying them to whichever means seems favourable for the adaptors. At the same time, it also appears that the dramatic original does not lend itself easily to serialisation, and notwithstanding the conscious decisions on the part of the creators to embed the series into the topical, stylistic, generic and aesthetic contexts of contemporary television, the failure of the enterprise comes as no surprise.

The issue The Illustrated Fiction between the 19th and 20th Century fits into the fields of the icono-textual and visual studies. It focuses on the publishing choices in the 19th and 20th centuries and their aesthetic implications. The contributions collected in this volume discuss both theoretical and methodological aspects, especially significant when the authors take part actively in the drawing process. The papers analyse national and international macro-trends, matters related to reception, contamination, influences in European production, and aesthetic issues regarding the relationship between word and image. This volume aims at examining case studies from a theoretical-comparative perspective, focusing on some successful illustrated novels published in Europe between the 19th and 20th century, in order to highlight their relevance to the above-mentioned field of studies.

The present issue of Between contains the proceedings of the 2014 Compalit annual conference, The Political Imaginary: Commitment, Resistance, Ideology (Bologna, 17-19 December 2014). It was a brimming, vibrant conference with eleven plenary speeches, over a hundred papers delivered in parallel sessions, the presentation of the previous issue of Between, the launch of the textbook on Comparative Literature edited by Francesco de Cristofaro, and a passionate and crowded evening round table with two members from the Wu Ming collective. Most of the papers presented in Bologna appear in this very rich issue. Clearly, much has changed since the original conception and elaboration of the conference programme: during the presentations and in the ensuing discussions, novel perspectives, reflections and questions have been raised, and many of them have been taken up in the essays collected here. The broad scope of the present issue and the multiplicity of points of view, competences and critical approaches epitomize the dissonance and complexity of the topic under discussion.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the different ways in which the contemporary italian poets approach the inevitable interference between poetry and Web in the age of global communication. The computer technology provides not only a specific vocabulary for new materials for metaphors, but also new methods of composition (such as hypertext), and also it accelerates the circulation of text on the Web. In this paper the author analyzes poems about computer technology and Internet written by poets who belong to generations “pre-computing” and by “computer-native” poets. The results of this analysis show that most of the italian poets has resisted to the contamination between new media and poetry: only in the last ten years the creative experimentation through Internet become real (as the technique of the “sought poems”).

By isolating some case studies of successful fiction, this paper reconstructs the ways in which, within contemporary cultural industry, the writing of a tv-series takes shape. From the “writers’ room” to the dynamics of negotiation involved in the production, releasing and broadcasting of audiovisual products, through users’ feedback and professional associations, the paper will outline the features of a diffused auteurism, where the writers, as well as the viewers, are first of all performers.

This paper examines the contribution that Warburg's theories can bring to thematology. It does so concretely, above all, through a discussion of historical-literary material. The author hypothesises that the literary representation of non-inert objects took place, in the 18th- and 19th-century fantastic genre, also by using spatio-temporal constants and recurring figurative formulae. By analysing not so much the linguistic, but rather the iconic or imaginative aspect of such constants and formulae (which can be considered as loci communes), these end up resembling Pathosformeln, or moving themes. Through the example of a canonical text such as Berenice, the author illustrates the basic characteristics of this sort of imaginative rhetoric. Subsequently, he shows how the image of things' gaze, which is arguably part of such rhetoric, in the 19th century is transposed also to non-literary texts, and above all to Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. Lastly, on the basis of the arguments and the data collected, the paper proposes an archaeological approach to the study of themes. Keywords: Literary theory, Theme, Thing theory, Fantastic

The paper deals with the relation of power established by narrative texts, exploring the many-sided field of articulation among the related subjects: the narrator as a subject of power, the text as a rhetorical device, and the reader as an ultimate guarantor of meaning. After a brief introduction on the “rebirth of rhetoric” in the second half of the Twentieth century, drawing attention to its links with Reader-response criticism, the paper focuses on the “power of words” and analyzes three case-studies: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955), Money by Martin Amis (1984) and The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (2006). These novels depend for their rhetorical effect on the invention of a special narrating voice and on the relationship that it establishes with the reader – an odd mixture of antagonism and complicity, seduction and persuasion. The reader is thus invoked as a brother, but an ambiguous and untrustworthy one, as archetypally described in last verse of the opening poem from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: «hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable, mon frère».

The Judeo-Christian ‘exclusive monotheism’ is based on the strict ontological differentiation of God, the unique Creator, from the World, as his Creation. Such a conception of monotheism is, as Jan Assmann pointed out, strictly connected to a repressive exercise of violence and to God's opposition against every possible form of ontological rivalry. In the Genesis, Yahweh turns this law machinery even against his simulacra, the creatures made «in his own image»: Adam and Eve are removed from Eden and condemned to mortality only as a result of their attempt to become «like God, knowing good and evil». The aim of the present paper is to trace the Nachleben of this tradition within the fictional reflection on human simulacra. By means of a brief analysis of some exemplary literary cases, an attempt will be made to show how the fear and violence exercised by man towards his simulacra are deeply linked to a secular revival of the theological-juridical complex intertwined with the Adamic model.

Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson's 2019 novel, is a mirror transposition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The novel adumbrates a posthuman or transhuman life to be lived “forever as brain emulation” (Winterson 2020, 104). What was traditionally known as the human being is now required to transcend biology through “better biology” (ibid. 113), i.e., Artificial Intelligence. Assuming that homo sapiens is not a special case, an ontology that transcends the human/nonhuman divide is proposed in Winterson’s story by scientist Victor Stein. He assumes that we can develop our brain software through learning, including outsourcing to machines, until we learn to share the planet with “non biological forms created by us” (ibid. 73). This delineates a utopian dimension in which the relationship between self, other and power is reworked so that as, in Donna Haraway’s words, there is “agency ...without defended subjects” (Haraway 1991, 3). Or, in other words, a world in which the cyborgification (the fusion of nature and culture/technology) is seen as inevitable and there is no need to ‘defend’ nature. With further lines of thought, my paper explores the metaphorical fields (parallel worlds, simulacra) and narrative devices (metalepsis, alternating montage, internal parallelism) that underpin this story. My point is that the attempted fusion of nature and technology, as theorised by techno-scientists in Winterson’s story, only produces a modification in the attitude of some unaugmented humans towards other unaugmented humans, both living and dead. Eventually humans are not cyborgs, nor inforgs, nor full-blown transhumans but boundary creatures straddling alternative ontologies and often acting as less than humans, infrahumans or, like transexual Ry Shelley, “inappropriate others” (Haraway 1992).

In a story entitled Le chevalier double and published in 1840, Théophile Gautier stages the duel between a medieval knight and his double, who represents a part of himself, a diabolical part whose origin lies in a mysterious adultery. At the turn of the fairy tale and the fantastic, this story is contemporary of Poe’s William Wilson, and echoes some earlier works, by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Washington Irving in particular, but also draws on a more distant tradition, which dates back to seventeenth-century Spain. Poe and Gautier gave different results and meanings to the duels of their characters: this paper proposes a reflection on this difference, and more generally on the theme of the duel with the double.

This paper analyses two stories by Henry James and two others by Max Beerbohm whose protagonists are, at the same time, writers and ghosts. Such a diegetic scenario is interesting because it seems to point at a disguised metaliterary treatment of current ideas about fin de siècle authoriality and a peculiar metalepsis of the concept of the death of the author, later popularized in post-structuralist France. After a contextualization of Henry James’s and Max Beerbohm’s dissimilar but equally significant contribution to the genre of the ‘Decadent short story’, the discourse turns to the features of their writer-ghosts, in order to retrace not only their conjunctural literary value, but also their fascinating impact on aesthetical matters.

This paper aims to investigate the meanings and phenomenologies of the simulacrum as a materialisation of a hybrid, liminal and nomadic ontology and as the result of biotechnological experiments that have redesigned the animal/human along post-anthropocentric lines. The analysis takes its cue from the post-apocalyptic setting of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, with a final focus on the last book in the series. After the world population has been decimated by a pandemic unleashed by Crake, the creatures he has generated via transgenic technology emerge as the ‘fittest’ inheritors of the Earth. Toby, one of the few human survivors, is involved in training them in the Post-Anthropocene era. Attention will be paid to the Crakers’ identity as humanoids hovering between an anthropological and a zoomorphic dimension. If capable of establishing bioegalitarian relationships with the ecosystem, such pseudo-primates also show uncanny features that progressively come to the fore through their leader Blackbeard.

Adapting translation for dubbing is not a mere linguistic fact: it is mainly the adaptation of cultures. In fact, audiovisual translation and adaptation implicitly takes into account the importance of the historical background behind the multiplicity of languages and cultures, and by doing so, it becomes a means of cultural diffusion. That peculiarity enables what we can describe as the “socio-anthropological function” of the adaptation of translation for dubbing, which is the object of the following paper. Through an analysis of some important landmarks that intersected the history of some Western countries in the last two centuries, it was possible to trace a lack of reciprocity in the usage of dubbing in the two biggest film markets: North America and Europe. Clearly, that helps cultural supremacy to penetrate into our lives in a very subtle way. As a result, the paper attempts to demonstrate how dubbing spreads all cultures in order to have an effectively global communication.

In this paper I will focus on the censure applied by religious authorities, who intervene in tracing the limits between the licit and illegal when an author employ the religious stories as literary materials. I will trace the complex editorial story of Awlād Ḥāratinā a novel of Nağīb Maḥfūẓ (1911-2006). When it was published in 1959 on the cairene newspaper Al-Ahrām, numerous protesters asked for an interruption of publishing and to ban the novel for its blasphemous contents. Even if the printing of the work could be completed, Awlād Ḥāratinā was never published as a book in Egypt, only in 1967 the libanaise Dār al-Ᾱdāb issued the novel but it was forbidden in Egypt.The Islamic censure judged Awlād Ḥāratinā a work that deride religion for its non orthodox use of the sacred story. Not only the structure of the book, but the stories of its characters seemed to be more closer to prophetic lives. In fact, the narration represents the sacred story of the humanity in a usual modern cairen neighborhood, that is to say employing imagination where devotion, authenticity and respect were required. Maḥfūẓ’s explanations of a political rather than a religious interpretation was useless. Through the analysis of original documents, I intend to deal with the nature of this ban, because the censure wasn’t a formal political or religious interdict, nor it was an official juridical decision, but it seemed more a informal forbid or a kind of auto-censure influenced by the pressures put on by the context. In 1988 two events renewed the attention on Awlād Ḥāratinā: Nağīb Maḥfūẓ was aworded the Nobel prize for literature and Salma Rushdie published The satanic Verses, that was followed by the death sentence (fatwā’) cursed by Khomeiny. Thus, the similarities between the two works soon arose and some Islamists started to attack Maḥfūẓ. As a result of that tension, in 1994 some fanatics attempted on Maḥfūẓ’s life. In this paper I will trace a comparison between Awlād Ḥāratinā and The Satanic Verses affairs and I will deal with Maḥfūẓ’s ambiguous positions toward Rushdie’s death sentence, discussing his numerous statements on the boycott of The Satanic Verses to prevent a social and religious conflict.

This paper analyzes the impact of migration on the family roles in Moldova and the changing dynamics within transnational families. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the economic collapse of the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Moldovans have left their country over the past decade [past two decades?] to seek opportunities abroad. The mass migration has become the dominant socio-economic phenomenon of the country and has prompted the redefinition of the family structure and ideology. The migration of a large number of women leads to a reorganization of the division of labour and the gender roles within the transnational family. These changes influence communities as well as families. Taking a closer look at the transnational experience of a family in the rural context, this paper explores the migrants' consumption of desires and practices as reflective not only of commodified exchange, but also of affection and sentiment.

This paper aims to study a phenomenon that, to date, has received scant attention: the rebirth of the literary genre lagernaya literatura (literature related to the theme of Soviet repression). This study analyzes it in the Anglo-Saxon context through two novels, Martin Amis' The House of Meetings and Travis Holland's The Archivist's Story. After a brief introduction devoted to Russia's current controversial relationship with the memory of its tragic past within the literary field, the paper delves into the characteristics of the two texts, seen as an extension of a literary genre exhausted in its country of origin and reborn in the West. The paper shows the correspondences between the two novels and the tradition of Russian lagernaya literatura, both at a thematic and at a stylistic level, and highlights the common characteristics and the differences, as well as the different narrative approaches of the two authors.

This paper proposes an analysis of some texts by Paolo Volponi and Tiziano Scarpa in which the body reveals the alienation of the protagonist. By the analysis of the texts we reflect on the concept of the Persona as the complex concept of human being in which the physical body, the juridical essence and the sensible entity are unified. The body is a porous barrier, a threshold that the authors use to discover the points of contact and separation with the external world, it’s man’s first space and his first language. In the age of the Body fabrication” some concepts as “the senses feast” by Kristeva, and as the one of Somatisation derive from a recent analysis of the human body and of its relations with the representation of human sensibility. These works describe cases of alienation by mean of a sort of body language, activated by the illness or other specific circumstances, the paper then tries to reconstruct the last changes related to the body concept and to analyse the literary examples in relation to recent theories on fragmentation and dissociative disorders (corps sans organes- Deleuze Guattari) The description of this fragmented condition reveals the necessity to rebuild a human integrity, to construct a new concept of human physiology based on an organic vision of the human being. The current dilatation and deflagration of the intimacy then seems to be a strategy to overpass the limits of conscious communication, to impose a new holistic concept of human sensibility

The main aim of this work is to identify, analyse and propose to modern readers and scholars, in an imagological perspective, how war propaganda, through trench papers, was able to create a group identity and a war mentality during the Great War. In particular, this article concentrates on the vis-à-vis between Italy and Austria examining both an italian and an austrian trench paper (“La Tradotta” and the “Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung”). Through the comparison between some of the most interesting pieces of the two, the author tried to make the reader understand how war propaganda worked with language and how important it was in the creation of consent. It emerges a skilful use of persuasion strategies which can be also seen in a more current perspective and can be useful for the study of modern mass media and their capacity to drive people’s way of thinking and behaviour.

Renaissance travel literature does not include the experience of the geometrical border yet: it tells about positioning in zones, transitional areas where everything happens. Thus these textual traces increasingly tend to fashion themselves according provisional negotiations between map indicators and route indicators, between description and narration, leading to a balance or a tension between strategies and tactics. The features of the modern map, its formalization and its newly acquired autonomy, depend on this very polarization, on a binarism emerging between spatial setup and material experience of places. Referring to this crucial historical context, this paper would like to consider some apparently divergent definitions of space and place. In the last decades two main trends, respectively oriented to the theoretical redemption of the notion of space (the spatial turn of cultural studies) and place (the humanistic turn of geographical disciplines), seem nonetheless to convey towards a shared critique of the rigidity and stability of the concept of place when confronted to the polysemic category of space. If the Aristotelian place as a qualitative limit worked as an authoritative foundation unit for the medieval space of localization, during the Renaissance a quantitative space willing to be an “unlimited place” challenges this well established organization. Considering this process, this paper suggests the possibility, in order to suit a distinction rendered influential by Yi-Fu Tuan in geographical studies, to invert the promising philosophical terms employed by Michel de Certeau to describe the radical changes undergone by geographical imagination in these critical centuries.

The paper focuses on the relation between the concepts of geographical and cultural frontiers, using Sea of Poppies (2008), Amitav Ghosh’s last novel, as a case study. Indeed, the journey of the ship Ibis from the Gulf of Bengal to the Mauritius islands provides the backdrop against which the theme of the crossing of religious, social and caste boundaries is developed: as the Ibis crosses the frontier which divides India from the Mauritius, the men and women on board, embodiments of both colonizing and colonized values, are subjected to a series of (religious, linguistic, social) negotiation processes. The aim of the paper will be to analyze some of these processes in order to show that in the novel negotiation and contamination become synonymic with cultural resource and new beginnings.

The scope of the paper is to present the work and the poetics of Francesco Biamonti (1928 - 2001), a real man of the frontier, born and raised in San Biagio della Cima, on the far West of Ligury. Instead of dealing with the territory where the writer has lived all his life and set all his novels, the paper focuses on another threshold he has crossed with his work, that is the one between painting and writing, both of which he considered visual practices connected from a theoretical and technical point of view. The paper briefly deals with the education of Biamonti and, by examining some of his quotes, it would like to demonstrate that his writings aim at showing the landscape by an act of “donner à voir” whereby the space of action of the characters is visualised: such work is theoretically based on the reflections of philosophers and artists about perception (Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne above all) but also structurally inspired by the paintings the writer lived the most. This study is only a first step in the investigation of the traces (the memory) Biamonti’s work bares of the author’s readings on philosophy and art, especially painting.

This paper aims at a critical analysis of comedian Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside (2021) – a show filmed during the Covid-19 lockdown period – in terms of defamiliarization techniques, and especially through the lens of the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung. By resuming the main theories of estrangement, comparing Shklovsky’s ostranenie to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and transposing them into the context of contemporary cinematic texts, the analysis foregrounds instances of the V-effect in Inside, namely the ironic exposure of the automatisms of contemporary society, the attention drawn towards performativity, and the goal of encouraging viewers to adopt a critical frame of mind. Despite the emotional detachment that Verfremdung conventionally pursues, this essay explores the complex interplay between estrangement and affective responses in the audience’s engagement with the comedy special.

The article examines Ingo Schulze’s novel Die rechtschaffenen Mörder (2020) in the light of the considerations on estrangement expressed by the author in his speech for the Brecht Prize in 2013. This paper highlights how the novel is about two types of ‘estrangements’: the first, along Brecht’s lines, is at the service of committed literature, capable of representing an “alternative project” for society; the second, on the other hand, is functional to the author’s self-reflective moment and characteristic of the postmodern novel. The analysis of the novel argues that ‘estrangement’, from being a tool of political and social commitment aimed at demystifying power relations, ultimately becomes a merely formal device that preserves the status quo in the market of artistic forms produced by the “mass-democratic postmodernity” (Kondylis) in which Schulze operates, thus counteracting Brecht’s and perhaps even Schulze’s own initial aim.

L’opera di Goliarda Sapienza trova posto dentro i discorsi e le categorie di reclusione e confinamento, a partire dalla sua voce narrante che si colloca di continuo entro spazi chiusi e che, per una paradossale dinamica di affrancamento messa in racconto nei suoi testi, si rivelano anche gli spazi della scoperta della libertà. Come è noto, dal confronto diretto con l’esperienza del carcere fatta in prima persona nascono due romanzi: L’università di Rebibbia (1983) e Le certezze del dubbio (1987). Obiettivo del paper è quello di provare a tracciare la cartografia delle emozioni che emergono nei romanzi carcerari di Sapienza seguendo l’idea proposta da Giuliana Bruno nell’Atlante delle emozioni (trad. it. 2015) di leggere i racconti di viaggio come percorsi emotivi che possono essere mappati, che guardano il soggetto nella sua interazione con gli spazi e la loro configurazione architettonica, in quella rete di corrispondenze fra motion ed emotion, sight e site, che rappresentano secondo me un paradigma teorico aperto e fluido molto efficace nella lettura di questi testi.

The 2020 restrictions of freedom due to Covid-19 pandemic non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as stay-at-home orders – colloquially known as lockdowns – were significant, prolonged practices of estrangement which involved our perception of space. The situation we experienced urged us to question our understanding and use of space in new ways, such as: the categories, or metaphors we use to represent them, the distinctions we adopt to characterize places and spaces, among others. The articles presented in this issue take up this challenge, proposing a reflection on different types of confined spaces, which span across different discourses and fields (literature, sociology, geography, architecture, etc.). The papers are inspired and stimulated – implicitly or not – by the spatial revolution, we all faced during the “lockdowns” of 2020.

Detective Dante (2005-2007) is a comicbook miniseries written by Lorenzo Bartoli and Roberto Recchioni. The eponymous hero, Henry Dante, is a violent policeman who, haunted by the ghost of his wife, moves from New York to the fictional ‘Paradise City’. The series, composed by 24 issues divided in three cycles (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), is noticeably influenced by the Divine Comedy both in its general outline and in some single episodes; nevertheless, it ultimately tells an original story. Through a close reading of the first issue as well as more general considerations about the series in its entirety, this paper investigates the intertextual relations between Detective Dante with the Divine Comedy. In the context of Dantean comics, this series exhibits a number of unusual traits: its references are thematical and narratological, rather than graphic; it contaminates elements from the Commedia with a modern and noir setting, generating unique combinations; most importantly, it subverts the well-established hierarchy between literary source and comicbook adaptation.

Multimediality, crossmediality, intermediality, transmediality. Over the last three decades, media (as well as comparative) studies have been characterized by the emergence of new categories, aimed at describing and analysing the variety of relations established by different media in the age of convergence. Despite their widespread diffusion in many research fields, however, these categories still lack a shared and stable meaning, having eluded any attempt of theoretical systematization so far. As a consequence, they tend to overlap semantically, making it impossible for scholars to share a common vocabulary. The objective of this paper is to propose a meta-theoretical rearrangement of the abovementioned categories, with the aim of outlining a systematic taxonomy in which each term can find a definition and a position.

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy does not only illustrate the afterlife as a world theatre. In the course of its reception, this long narrative poem has also become an extraordinary media event. The ‘verbal images’ and the particularly imaginative visions designed by the Italian poet have resulted in a kind of iconic commentary on the Divine Comedy from the 14th century to the present. On the one hand, these examples of a highly intermedial reception of Dante’s poem refer to the original text, but on the other hand they transpose rather freely the poem into the visual medium, which leads further and further away from the ‘sensus spiritualis’ of the Divine Comedy. The paper traces this long tradition on the basis of representative examples, such as John Flaxman’s as well as Pitt Koch’s illustrations or Salvador Dalí’s watercolours commenting on the Divine Comedy, Inferno XVII.

This paper focuses on one of the most unique experiments in the history of television: A TV Dante, a fourteen-episode mini-series aired between 1990 and 1991, partly directed by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway, partly directed by Raoul Ruiz. We will analyse A TV Dante as an early attempt to explore the aesthetic potential of television seriality adopting an avant-garde approach towards a fundamental work of the Western canon. More specifically, we will compare Phillips-Greenaway and Ruiz’s approaches to the Inferno in order to highlight the formal, aesthetic and conceptual strategies that guide their respective works. Drawing on Phillips’ previous illustrations for the Inferno, the British duo creates an abstract video-otherworld through the use of collage and a rich visual symbology. On the other hand, Ruiz chooses a thoroughly contemporary re-reading of the cantica by setting the action in Santiago de Chile and moving between political commentary and surreal, hauntingly mysterious scenes.

The heritage left by the literary experiments of the Silver Age and of the avant-garde was almost forgotten until the 1960s, when dissent towards the socialist realism’s guidelines became stronger and the cultural underground started to take shape. In this context, some authors re-discovered the achievements of the 1920s’ literature and mixed them with the feelings and perceptions of the Soviet man. One of them was V. Gubin, whose povest’ Illarion i Karlik is a clear sample of this attempt of recreating the connection, previously abruptly broken, between the underground culture of the 1960s and the Silver Age. The aim of this paper is to focus on Illarion i Karlik, underlining the connection between his artistic sensibility and the explorations of Andrei Bely, who started to pursuit the complete metricalization of the prosaic text. This rhetorical device indeed constitutes the basis of the novel and offers a sample of how aesthetics became the main way of resistance against the regime.

Taking into account In Patagonia (1977) and the critical debate around it, this paper analyses how Bruce Chatwin changed the literary representation of places, undermining the traditional dichotomy between “truth” and “fiction”, and why the poetics of “Chatwinesque”—a term coined by his editor Susannah Clapp—became paradigmatic for contemporary non-fiction narrative.

The aim of the paper is the analysis of the Photojournal, an autobiographical photo-text dispositiv that Annie Ernaux composes as a preface to the volume of her works, Écrire la vie (Gallimard, 2011). The biographical section of the volume becomes an autobiographical premise, where the author combines 70 photos and 100 passages from her journals to explain the reasons of her writing. The pictures illustrate the material reality and the diaries express the subjective reality: two conditions that allowed the writing of the author's works. The analysis of the phototextual composition highlighted two depth effects: the palimpsest and the collage. Through the layers overlapping of the documents reproduced, Ernaux translates into the space of the pages, the time of the autobiographical narration (as well as in the prose of Les Années, 2008). The digital remediation of the diaries allows to Ernaux to reconstruct a continuously evolving self, a nomadic being always shifting from a passage another. Through the computer screen Ernaux not only is reflected in her past, but she finds a “Display of One's Own”, which continue the research on the impersonal form of autobiographical narration and the fade out of the self.

The paper aims to read David Forster Wallace’s essay “The View From Mrs Thompson” (appeared in the October 25, 2001 issue of Rolling Stone) through the exegetic filter of trauma theory, in order to interpret the manner the author chose to account for his own account of the horror of 9/11, which he experimented not directly, but mediated by the screen of a television in a Midwest living room, namely Mrs Thompson.

Metro Manila, in the comics series Trese, is a mega city inscribed by hybridity and cultural simultaneity. The stories that assemble there are built from a specific cultural base: local lore, urban legend, and the mundane features of Philippine city life. This paper investigates, through Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, three ‘living spaces’—the cemetery, the dormitory, and the exclusive subdivision—that take the place of the traditional home, highlighting how communal and multivalent such spaces are, and how narratological strategies in comics allow that heterotopic quality to surface.

The aim of this paper is to discuss two recent works on the bourgeois in literature: Il borghese fa il mondo. Quindici accoppiamenti giudiziosi edited by Francesco de Cristofaro and Marco Viscardi, and Franco Moretti's The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature.

Il contributo si propone di ripercorrere la carriera di Gianni De Luca (1927-1991), illustratore dal grande talento e inesausto sperimentatore in grado di innovare profondamente il linguaggio del fumetto. Ci si soffermerà in particolar modo sul suo lavoro più originale, ovvero la cosiddetta “trilogia shakesperiana”: composta dagli adattamenti a fumetti di tre drammi del Bardo – La tempesta, Amleto, Romeo e Giulietta – e pubblicata sul settimanale cattolico Il Giornalino tra 1975 e 1976, la “trilogia” fu illustrata facendo ricorso a uno storytelling tanto semplice quanto rivoluzionario nel quale la consuetudinaria frammentazione della pagina in vignette andò via via scomparendo. L’ultima delle tre storie a essere realizzata, Romeo e Giulietta, è composta esclusivamente da doppie splash pages, ovvero da grandi vignette che occupano entrambe le pagine (la pari e la dispari) che il lettore si trova contemporaneamente davanti agli occhi mentre sta sfogliando l’albo. Sull’ampia tavola orizzontale così ottenuta i personaggi sono raffigurati più volte, in una serie di pose che ne suggeriscono il movimento in relazione alla fissità dello sfondo e orientano senza possibilità di errore la lettura. Un apparente azzardo semiotico che produce un utilizzo anticonvenzionale ma efficace del linguaggio fumettistico. Oltre che sulla trilogia shakesperiana, vetta della professionalità e dell’inventiva deluchiana, il paper si sofferma anche su Il commissario Spada, serie scritta da Gianluigi Gonano che De Luca illustrò mirabilmente, sempre per le pagine del Giornalino, dal 1970 al 1982.

In Greece, contemporary literature and theatre often resort to myth, above all to the Atrides, when they reflect on their recent history. In the last few years the theatre has been interested in Cassandra, the enigmatic prophetess who is the last witness of the collapse of civilization and visits our present on the weak raft of Memory and Tradition. Ancient Greeks killed her but modern Greeks still need her: in a country severely affected by the crisis, they are unable to describe the catastrophe. The authors focus on the problem of the logos: which language will Cassandra use to talk to XXI century? They also wonder which is her home in the post-mythical and post-modern era. The aim of this paper is to underline the original Greek approach to this mythical character: three paradigmatic plays (Flourakis’ Kassy, 2006; Pontikas’ Neighing, 2009; Dimitriadis’ Annunciation of Cassandra, 2009) employ a frantic, anti-conventional narration in the attempt to find the logos that conveys what can hardly be disclosed.

The purpose of this paper is to read the TV series Game of Thrones as a great contemporary narration in which themes and forms of epic and tragic genre intersect and are reconfigured. By analyzing the main narrative sequences of the plot, it will be shown that Game of Thrones stages an original version of oedipal conflict, which plays a key role in the conceptualization of fight between generations, at the confluence of individual aspirations and community rules. This point of view enables to investigate the subjects’ roles and functions in relation to their family units and to the social collectivity, in a serial narration fully focused on fighting for dynastic succession and on the management of power in times of war and turmoil. It will be proposed that the peculiar configuration of the oedipal theme in Game of Thrones deeply resonates whit the dynamics of increasing financial and social crisis of contemporary times.

As many other experimental writers of the XX century, the nouveaux romanciers have paid a particular attention to the role and the scope of the tragedy in the modern world. By questioning its conceptual and prototypical structures they thus wished to understand its everlasting influence on our civilisation and, at the same time, to undercover its ideological underpinnings. That’s perhaps the reason behind their fascination for the long vexed questions related to status of the tragic hero in the contemporary age; the same questions which, since the beginning of the Fifties, aroused a heated debate among themselves. Robbe-Grillet – the leading light of the group – regarded indeed such figure with a certain suspicion because of its close connection with the notions of “fate” and “destiny”; while other novelist, as Michel Butor, rather praised its potential as a metaphor of the human condition. The aim of my paper to provide an overview of their production from Les gommes (1953) and L’emploi du temps (1956) to Sphinx en chapeau (1984) in order to highlight their different approaches to the same subject – the story of Oedipus – as well as the differences between their own artistic visions.

This paper analyzes the concept and perception of melancholia in Luciano Bianciardi’s works, in the context of his cultural framework and especially the American authors he deeply knew as translator. Through close reading and discourse analysis, the melancholia originating from Bianciardi’s critique to contemporary life and his simultaneous tragic inability to find a suitable alternative is traced in some of his literary works and compared to the American antecedents. The conclusion pinpoints the similarities between the social and cultural representation brought about by authors such as Saul Bellow and John Barth, and the (even more complex and contradictory) reading of Italian society of the Sixties performed in Bianciardi’s works.

It is generally assumed that the tragic becomes a philosophical theory at the end of the eighteenth century, when Schelling and Hegel consider a genre (the tragedy) and draw from it a philosophical thought (the tragic). Before then, writes Szondi, there was no theory of the tragic, but only a poetics of the tragedy. I do not wish to criticize this assumption but rather to show that, before the philosophy of the tragic, there was an idea of the tragic (though fragmented and non systematic) that influenced and prepared its theory. In this paper, I will study its origins and its development through the analysis of the early modern uses of the words tragedy and tragic.