Authors:Paolo Bugliani, Cristiano Ragni Pages: 1 - 278 Abstract: Questioning the Origins in European and American Culture PubDate: 2022-12-26 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/7222
Authors:Francesco Remotti Pages: 15 - 28 Abstract: This article discusses Ernesto De Martino’s reflections on the end of the world and shows their being perfectly organic to the present-day ‘culture of the Anthropocene’, concerned as it is with the sense of its own ending. While first presenting the end of the world as a physiological cultural theme, which appears in every culture based on either a cyclical or a linear conception of time, De Martino – as this article explains – later came to a more dramatic interpretation, reading the end of the world as an upsetting anthropological risk. To overcome it, he ideated the concept of ‘ethical time’, which allowed to envisage a new kind of history, no longer linked to a particular society or culture, but concerning the whole humanity.
Authors:Joseph Cermatori Pages: 29 - 34 Abstract: Upon his recent death, this article revisits the major contributions of Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann to contemporary debates on theatre aesthetics. Lehmann’s concept of a postdramatic theatre—that is, a theatre that has moved beyond the central importance of dramatic texts—is surveyed some two decades after he made his primary interventions in the field. The article furthermore reviews Lehmann’s influence in the Anglophone discipline of theatre studies and in the global field of theatre production. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/7210
Authors:Chiara Lombardi Pages: 37 - 52 Abstract: The essay deals with the intersections between the representations of the origin and the expressive forms of the sublime, showing how these relationships have great aesthetic relevance in contemporary literature and art, especially in the development of the traditional concept of 'representation' towards the 'non-mimetic' and the 'unrepresentable' PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/7214
Authors:Joanna Orzeł Pages: 53 - 60 Abstract: This article analyses the inspiration for the characters and motifs originating from Greek and Roman mythology in the mythical stories about the beginnings of Poland and Lithuania, from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth formed in 1569. The founding fathers of these states – Lech and Palemon – were often compared to Remus and Romulus, French Faramund or British Brutus of Troy. The most extensive use of antique motifs was made by Jan Skorski, the author of an epic poem about Lech created in 1745. The poet was inspired above all by the Aeneid and the Odyssey. The use of antique motifs by Polish chroniclers and poets was in turn an inspiration for the nobility, who were also “searching” (better: creating) for their antique roots. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6907
Authors:Pauls Daija, Benedikts Kalnačs Pages: 61 - 72 Abstract: This paper traces the main transformations in the formation of Latvian literary culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Looking at these processes from a comparative perspective, we detect four major turning points that are of special interest here. First, we observe how religious literature turns secular during the second half of the eighteenth century in the context of the Popular Enlightenment, and what this change means for the perception of written texts. Secondly, we scrutinize the process in which former readers among ethnic Latvians become interested in writing. Thirdly, we put the dawn of romantic nationalism in Latvian literary contexts into comparative perspective. Finally, we argue that the representation of urban life at the end of the nineteenth century testifies to the swift rise of Latvian literature overcoming the constraints of belated modernity and marking participation in European literary trends. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6642
Authors:Anna-Katharina Gisbertz, Eva Meineke, Stephanie Neu-Wendel Pages: 73 - 88 Abstract: This article presents three modern female writers who (re-)create forms of self-awareness and identity in their literary texts. Sibilla Aleramo, Colette, and Mela Hartwig share the experience of patriarchal hegemony, the lack of a female writing tradition and an avant-gardist search for new identity constructions. All three became successful writers, but only for a short time before they went to exile, were silenced or marginalized. Their approaches include a plurality of voices that range from the re-enactment of the past—through mythologies, childhood, foundation narratives or matrilinear genealogies—to decompositions or destructive fantasies. As contemporaries from different European countries together they paved the way for experimental approaches to the (re-)creation of female writing in the early twentieth century. However, their understanding of the female role also undermines the traditional binarism inducing new forms of expression. By comparing their literature this article highlights their decisive roles in the articulation of subjectivity and suggests to reintegrate their work into the literary canon of European modernism. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6908
Authors:Ilaria Natali Pages: 89 - 100 Abstract: Visions and representations of Hell in the works of J.M. Synge, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats often originate in a conflation of the Irish and Italian literary traditions, where references to Dante’s Divine Comedy are intermingled with elements deriving from old Irish stories of the Otherworld. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6652
Authors:Valentina Monateri Pages: 101 - 118 Abstract: This proposal intends to connect the Studies in Modernisms with the research strand of the creation myths and the narrations of origins (Von Franz). The paper aims to investigate the biblical-sapiential presence, specifically of the book of Qohelet, in a central text of the Euro-American modernism: T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915). Scope of the essay is to analyze, through the lens of the Narrations of Origins in World Cultures and the Arts, the first steps of a modernist Euro-American formal experimentation at the beginnings of the Twentieth century. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6911
Authors:Jelena Ulrike Reinhardt Pages: 119 - 128 Abstract: This paper investigates anthropogenesis, which is the process of becoming human, from an interdisciplinary perspective, namely among science, theatre, and visual arts. The motif of animals locked in a cage – especially apes, but not only – is recurrent when talking about humans and their origin as cultural beings. Relying on some monkey portraits made by Gabriel von Max, in which the animals appear deprived of their freedom, the focus is on Kafka’s short story Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (A Report to an Academy, 1917) and on Elias Canetti’s novel Die Blendung (Auto da Fé, 1935), mainly on a chapter entitled “Ein Irrenhaus” (A Madhouse). In both texts we are confronted with an ongoing metamorphosis, with hybrid figures in which the boundaries between man and ape are blurred. Although in one case the ape becomes a man and in the other the man becomes an ape, so that both metamorphoses proceed in opposite directions, the ultimate goal is freedom. However, this freedom reveals all its problematic nature since escape from the cage does not always mean liberation. The two texts, which are presented as a reinterpretation of the myth of the origin of culture between nostalgia for a distant past and critique of human progress, are essential reflections on the power dynamics at the basis of civilization. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6785
Authors:Stefano Maria Casella Pages: 129 - 144 Abstract: In Eugenio Montale’s poetry of the “second season” (Satura, Diari, Quaderno, Altri Versi: 1960-1980 ca.) the topic of the Origin and End of the Universe, the World, and Man is pervasive and almost obsessive. The poet vets scientific hypotheses (Big Bang, Big Crunch, steady and static Universe), religious narratives (Creation, Apocalypse, Judgement, and the “Four Last Things”), ancient myths (Ekpyrosis and/or Ragnarökkr-Götterdämmerung) in a highly personal and original way. His style, linguistic register and lexicon are deliberately lower; the tone more colloquial and ordinary, ironic, irreverent, debunking, and light-hearted (unlike the higher seriousness of his first three collections Ossi-Occasioni-Bufera). The effects are of intentional de-mythization, parody, trivialization and mockery. Nonetheless, Montale never falters in his punctiliousness, intellectual honesty and rigour, and rare prescience. His attitude mixes Stoic acceptance, superior detachment and deep involvement, anti-dogmatism, irony and self-irony. His main instrument is the word, the expression of a lucid intelligence and of a stringent thought, in an intellectual and verbal tour de force which sees the poet with his head high in his personal “fight with the Angel”. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6651
Authors:Ugo Fracassa Pages: 145 - 156 Abstract: Emilio Villa (1914-2003) was a poet, translator and art critic. He placed the theme of Origins at the center of his work, always considering it in relation with the concept of Èskhaton (the End of Times) and often observing it as an etymologist. After translating a fragment of the Enūma eliš (1939) - the Babylonian creation myth -, as well as the book of Genesis and the entire Odyssey, Villa applied his cosmogonic talent to contemporary art, in favor of the pictorial movement of Informalism. A trace of its peculiar idea of Origins is also found in John Huston’s film The Bible: in the Beginning…, of which he contributed to as a biblical scholar. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6669
Authors:Francesco Capello Pages: 157 - 172 Abstract: Taking its cue from an observation Pavese made in his private journal on the psychoanalytic notion of death drive, the first part of the article examines the manifold developments, throughout the 1920s, of Freud's insight in relation to a mysterious “need to restore an earlier state of things”. Particular attention in this regard will be given to the ideas of Todestrieb, identification, “oceanic feeling”, and prehistory. The article then proceeds to illustrate a number of significant analogies between Freud's treatment of this subject and Pavese's discourse on the category of “primeval”, showing at the same time how the two authors positioned themselves quite differently vis-à-vis what might be termed the fatal attraction of Origins. Lastly, it will be argued that the implicit critique to Pavese's “myth of return” developed by Calvino in the Cosmicomics and other texts from the mid-1960s is informed by assumptions on the psychological significance of the motif of Origins that are fundamentally compatible with those outlined by Freud. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6909
Authors:Federica Rocchi Pages: 173 - 182 Abstract: This contribution aims at presenting the work of the Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar (1946-) who chose to write in German after her emigration. The focus will be on how origin and dislocation are featured in her life and works. Writers who represent migration literature could be better defined when cultural passage is taken into consideration. In this case, Özdamar does built bridges among cultures by connecting Turkey to Germany through the language of both countries. As it can be seen in her collected short stories Mutterzunge (1991), the author’s literary aim seems to be the infinite recollection of fragments of cultures. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6621
Authors:Francesca Medaglia Pages: 183 - 192 Abstract: This essay aims to investigate the myths of origins as an innovative form of storytelling within the contemporaneity. In this light, the new numerous expanded universes produced by transmediality are now able to structure amplified experiences and, at the same time, will provide insights into the universality of creation myths as patterns from which the narrative action radiates. In this sense, this contribution intends to pay attention to Star Wars as an example of a storytelling, within which myth, as a form of literary creation, is used not only in its more traditional guise, but also as a source of new narrative structures of the metamodern sphere. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6603
Authors:Giacomo De Fusco Pages: 195 - 206 Abstract: The autofiction is often defined as a false biography. However, considering how the authors today are used to mediatize their selves, trying to make themselves look like their own character, we can think of autofiction as a true biography of a fictional author. In fact, analyzing the different versions of the of a single author in these kinds of novels, we can see that each has their own biography, and their proper style. Therefore, it is possible to think of them as heteronym of the author, having the same name, giving the result of a quadratic heteronomy which changes the approach that the reader should have to the text. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6677
Authors:Stefano Candellieri, Davide Favero Pages: 207 - 218 Abstract: The reflections brought about in the present paper are developed along a renewed dialogue between psychoanalysis and the human sciences, in particular with semiotics understood as the science of signification, a science, according to the definition that Saussure gave in the early twentieth century, "that studies the life of signs within the framework of social life." The specific object of our reflection is understanding whether and how the mentalization abilities of modern humans have changed along with modern digital media. If what MacIver observed about "anomie" is true, namely, that anomic man "lives on the fragile thread of immediate sensations that have no past as well as no future," the specific structure of social media seems to determine psychosocial processes characterized by the flattening of an existential perspective dimension. Social media, in fact, is marked by a linear dimension, referred to by linguists as syntagmatic, and an extreme redundancy of the other fundamental dimension of language, namely the paradigmatic one. This linguistic and, in our opinion, also deeply psychological imbalance toward a horizontal superficiality "without past and without future" actually configures, in clinical experience, a contiguous-autistic dimension. Psychotherapeutic work then aims more than ever at recovering the capacity for a processual journey, session after session, in order to rebuild a vital "psycho-semio-narrative" capacity. Remembering in order to invent, then, and a "memory of the future" such that the relationship between narrative and Origins is not so much and not only the "narrative of origins," but storytelling as a deeply mental and dreamlike tool to originate a future never before imagined. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/7008
Authors:Monica Venturi Delporte Pages: 219 - 232 Abstract: Among the many archetypal figures that are hidden behind transhumanist thought, the myth of Prometheus is, without a doubt, the one with the greatest semantic force. In the arts, hybrid artistic forms, at the border of different disciplines such as sculpture, performance, dance, biotechnology, information technology, seem to approach this sensibility. How do transhumanist artists use this post-modern "new grammar"' Through which iconographic, technical, symbolic elements the man of the transhumanists is translated into artistic representations' Our analysis, transdisciplinary and cross-cultural, aims to answer these questions through the reading of some works by artists closely next to transhumanism: Orlan, shaper of her own body through plastic surgery, Neil Harbisson, known as the first cyborg, or the Fronte Vacuo’s artists who hybridize themselves with computer slags and artificial intelligences. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6606
Authors:Alberto Rizzuti Pages: 235 - 240 Abstract: A figure suspended between history and legend, Arion is a musician who belongs to the vast category of forgetfulness with which the ancient world abounds. A native of Metimna, a city on the island of Lesbos, at the height of his fame he was the leading artist of the tyrant of Corinth, Periander; who, as part of a grand plan to revitalize the city's fortunes, sent him on a tour - one would say in today's parlance - around Magna Graecia, with the task of performing by illustrating the name and procuring substantial earnings for the coffers of Corinth. Arion racked up a series of triumphs, the last of which was in Tarentum, the city from whose port the ship on which he traveled must set sail to return to his homeland. So far so good, but from here on the waters get muddy and the imagination - of the protagonists, even before of those who narrated their vicissitudes - begins to travel. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/7215
Authors:Carmen Bonasera Pages: 265 - 274 Abstract: This article discusses the notion of space as it relates to the condition of women in history, society, culture, and literature. The concept of space has been widely used by 20th-century feminist theorists as a key metaphor to warn against the marginalization of women from cultural and power discourses. Alternatively, through the idea of a “politics of location”, spatial metaphors were used to highlight the diverse contexts and perspectives pertaining to each individual woman, which must be taken into consideration in contemporary multicultural feminist debates. This article aims at exploring how the notion of space was reframed by Italian scholar Daniela Brogi in her recently published essay Lo spazio delle donne (2022), which precisely revolves around the metaphor of space, and which represents a multifocal take on the condition of women in Italian culture and society and proposes new ways to deconstruct widespread patriarchal logics, as well as new lenses to look at women’s experiences with a view to encouraging opportunities for intercultural growth. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/7003
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