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One of the most typical features of modernity is the acceleration of experience, systematically ruled by the economic principle. In Benjamin's interpretation, Baudelaire's poetry identifies in that acceleration some very notable points: it is a powerful multiplier of the transience of the world; it is the domain of a movement which is paradoxically static and which sustains no change in social structures; and it represents a constitutive threat to poetry. With a radically antagonistic gesture, Baudelaire drafts various strategies to contrast modernity: to give it an accomplished form, which includes all its negativity; to represent authentically his impoverished degraded experience; to fight it with his own means, through poetry of impact and shock.

[rec. di] Stefania SINI, “Contrasti di forme. Boris Èjchenbaum teorico della letteratura”, Milano, Ledizioni, 2018

Literature draws fundamentally on the imagination and thus has the specific ability to identify and highlight new possibilities of human experience, and to understand aspects of reality which a common and inattentive look cannot perceive. Thanks to this form of understanding and interpretation, literature provides a disclosure of the world, and creates the conditions to transform, emancipate or liberate it. Instead, the more naïve versions of philosophical realism, particularly Italian “new realism”, that are bound to direct sensistic perception and are hostile to literary experience, are imprisoned in the concept of the unamendability of reality, and thus are devoid of the conceptual means to conceive a transformation of the world.

BOOK REVIEW: Luca BAGETTO, San Paolo. L'interruzione della legge

Literature provides a specific space for complex reflection, where the events of life and the world are transferred from mere factual reality to a hermeneutical reality. This cognitive shift, basically rejected by the more naïve versions of philosophical realism, allows for a deeper understanding and interpretation of these occurrences. This is particularly evident with the experience of evil, that cannot be confined to a purely empirical dimension.

An analysis of the metaphor of the mirror confirms that literary realism is not a mere and optically objective reflection of reality, as meant by the more naïve versions of philosophical realism. On the contrary, it’s an hermeneutical interpretation of the world, driven by affectivity and emotions.

Emanuele KANCEFF, "L’immagine della Sicilia nei resoconti di viaggio del Settecento. Tra classicità ed emozione romantica", Scicli, Edizioni di storia e studi sociali, 2015 [Book Review]