Watery Existence: immaginari dell’acqua tra arte e letteratura nella poetica modernista

Giulia Gorgoglione

doi:10.13125/2039-6597/333

Giulia Gorgoglione University of Milano "IULM"

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/333

Keywords: Death by water, To The Lighthouse, Ophelia and water, Virginia Woolf, Water Imaginary

Abstract

Water has always been an element of border and threshold, both as a political frontier between nations, and in the symbolic value of transition between life and death, between the real world and beyond, between silence and narration. Modernist poetry is characterized by the presence of this element (Woolf, Eliot) both as a term of reflection on the human existence and as a symbol of human life in its flexibility, inconsistency, strength and dissolution.

This article looks at the different implications of visual and literary works that are substantiated in the imagination of the water. Water represents the creative desire of the narration (Virginia Woolf, The Waves) that runs smoothly in the recesses of the human psyche, and contrasts with the aridity of silence that corresponds to a lack of logos. Water represents a desire for origins (To The Lighthouse), but also for maternal death (death by water) and total dissolution.

Visual arts mirror this awareness, especially in the extensive series of depictions of the character of Ophelia (Margaret MacDonald, WGSimmonds, Steck). Water is here the dominant pictorial element, symbol of the innate human tendency to cross the boundary between the human and divine.

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Author Biography

Giulia Gorgoglione, University of Milano "IULM"

Giulia Gorgoglione has accomplished her PhD in Comparative Literature (2011) with a dissertation on Shakespeare between Modernism and the Avant-gardes: 1900-1920, analyzing the presence of Shakespearean subjects in modernist and avant-gardes paintings and illustrations.

She graduated in English Language and Literature from Milan University with a final thesis (MA) on “The Art of the Portrait and the aesthetic of the novel: a comparative analysis in Henry James and Virginia Woolf” (2006).

Her publications include essays on “Maternity scenes in Virginia Woolf” (ACME, vol. LXII, fascicolo III, settembre-dicembre 2009, pp. 63-84) and “Wyndham Lewis: Kermesse e la cultura popolare degli Apache Danse des Apaches” (in Faites claquer vos langues: plurilinguisme et avanguardes, a cura di Franca Bruera e Barbara Meazzi, Bruxelles, Peter Lang, 2011).

The main interest of her research is the dialogue between pictorial art and literature in modernist England, with a particular focus on how modernist narrative techniques have been influenced by new art movements at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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Watery Existence: The Imaginary of Water in Modernist Art and Literature

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References