Between

Fragments of life as a whole. On the public dimension of dwelling

2025-01-20T10:17:31+01:00

This issue focuses on dwelling as a practice, an experience of lived space narrated by literature, the arts, and the media. This implies a special focus on the significant crossings of these inhabited spaces, on the encounters, the relationships that are formed and the encounters that take shape there. Contributions address the public dimension of dwelling, which can be a temporary or continuous experience, and can take place either in institutional, social or cultural spaces privileged by literary and artistic representations or in scarcely travelled, unseen, and unthought-of places.

From Locus Amoenus and Heterotopia to a New Posthuman Oikos: M. Haushofer’s Die Wand/The Wall

2024-12-11T17:17:01+01:00

Haushofer’s work has long been misunderstood, although the authoress rather anticipated central issues of feminism. Her modernity is particularly evident in Die Wand/The Wall (1963), her masterpiece, which, thanks to its great interpretative potential, not surprisingly contributed to the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the writer’s entire oeuvre. It is also the only novel that does not focus on the private and claustrophobic sphere of the domestic dwelling. The peculiarity of this text lies in the fact that, on the one hand, it is still highly topical and, on the other, its different interpretations complement rather than exclude each other, thus paving the way for always new hermeneutic approaches. This paper offers a posthuman reading of the text, which traces the stages of the protagonist’s metamorphosis as a progressive dissolution of the self and of its anthropocentric perspective in an ‘entanglement’ of space-time reticular interconnections and in a ‘fusion’ of the human with the animal and even the inorganic kingdom. In this way, although the ambivalent initial mountain idyll suddenly seems to turn into a heterotopic open-air prison, it ultimately proves to be a space for the protagonist’s ’re-location’ in a new paradoxically ‘public’ oikos of nature.

The Metropolises and the Disenchantment of the World. The Representation of Gentrification in Vincenzo Latronico’s Novels

2024-12-10T16:32:41+01:00

In recent years, in most Italian cities, major urban redevelopment projects have been launched in an attempt to brand the metropolitan spaces, to raise the quality standards of the regenerated environments, and to adapt them to the international canons of a homogenized urban style. Gentrification processes redraw the map of cities, disrupt the identities of urban communities, determine an increase in the real estate value of the “regenerated” neighborhood and the surrounding ones, and push the weakest services and activities to the outskirts of the city, as well as the less economically competitive social strata. Our interest is to analyze the representation of this phenomenon in Italian contemporary literature, especially in the works of Vincenzo Latronico, focusing attention on the socio-cultural effects and existential implications that this new space dominated by the late capitalist discourse provokes on the inhabitants of the city.

«God is Silent, Venice Remains». Aesthetic Perspectives on Dwelling and Literary Traversal of Venetian Space

2024-12-10T16:33:33+01:00

The article explores the concepts of transit and dwelling within the urban spatiality of Venice through literary analysis. It begins with an examination of Josif Brodskij’s Watermark, followed by an exploration of Guido Ceronetti’s philosophical perspective as presented in Un viaggio in Italia. By adopting a critical-philosophical approach, the analysis delves into the thematic and aesthetic elements of both texts, grounded in the authors’ viewpoints. The article then discusses comparative aspects, preceded by an overview of relevant theoretical frameworks. Through a focus on the creative processes of the works, a shared philosophical alignment is highlighted.

Collective Forms of Storytelling in Suburban Novels

2024-12-10T16:33:31+01:00

This article explores the public dimension of dwelling in two American suburban novels that employ collective forms of storytelling and exemplify the deep entanglement between narrative form and sense of place. Drawing on research at the intersection of narratology and new formalism, the article will demonstrate the inextricable relationship between narrative form and spatiality. While sociocultural representations of suburban space have typically understood it as a static backdrop, the analysis focuses on four strategies displayed by the we-narrative in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides to convey a deeper understanding of the collective experience of the suburbs.
The article then discusses the spatial forms underlying Eugenides’s novel and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. While the former builds on the spatial form of the whole as a site for negotiating individual and collective experience, The Ice Storm relies on the form of the hierarchical network to represent the spatial and sexual entanglement of dysfunctional suburban families while formally disrupting it through pseudo-multiperspectivity.

Public Life and Private Life in Modern Novel. First investigations

2024-12-10T16:26:32+01:00

This essay aims to identify and reconstruct the main stages of the progressive reversal of the trend (in favor of the latter) in the relationship between public and private life through the development of the Western novelistic tradition. The investigation takes into account a sample of texts that, in their own way are also indicative of the historical and social phases that the novel has traversed: from the court society of the late seventeenth century to the present day, passing through the inevitable turning points represented by the revolutions in the eighteenth century and the rise of the bourgeoisie during the nineteenth century.

The Labyrinth under Ash Tree Lane. Dwelling in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

2024-12-10T17:00:52+01:00

Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 novel House of Leaves revolves around a mysterious building that hides an apparently infinite subterranean labyrinth of supernatural origin. Through various typographic techniques that creatively leverage on the space of the printed page as a complex visual devices and textual artifices meant to create atmospheric effects, the author establishes what could be defined as a spatial condition. The reader’s experience is thus not neutral, since it deeply engages the embodied and affective spheres. In this paper, the analysis and discussion of these devices describes how, under some specific circumstances, the spatial dimension embedded in literature can indeed become inhabitable, sustaining the emergence of dwelling practices.

Corpus without Heimat. On the Literary Mythification of the Habsburg Iconosphere

2024-12-10T17:01:17+01:00

The present contribution intends to probe the literary mythification of the Habsburg iconosphere. The exposition spreads through the Heimat-less texts of the authors orphaned by the dissolution of Austria-Hungary (Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil…), pivoting primarily on Joseph Roth’s novels. The analyzed texts distinguish themselves for the manifest ideological function of the mythification’s process.

Back to the self. The interiorized intérieur of Edmond De Goncourt and Mario Praz

2024-12-10T17:01:50+01:00

Between the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of home is connected to certain ideals, aesthetic as much as existential: a refuge from the world, a mirror of the soul, a voluntary prison, a custody of collections. The personality of the individual, particularly the intellectual, becomes the centre of a different way of living. A new taste in furnishing is also emerging, which absorbs the values of Aestheticism and transforms them into a complex ‘ensemble’ of furniture, objects, bibelots, works of art, draperies, carpets and various fabrics, and books, i.e. into an articulate and autobiographical ‘mise‐en‐scène’. For some authors, the furnishing of oneʹs home also becomes a literary theme, as for Edmond De Goncourt (La Maison dʹun Artiste, 1881) and Mario Praz (La casa della vita, 1958), in which personal life is continually, and voluntarily, intertwined with furnishings.

The Art of Dwelling in Public. Domestic and Public Space in Milena Jesenská’s Fashion Reportages of 1920-22 Vienna

2024-12-10T16:26:19+01:00

Drawing on feminist urban studies (Stratigakos 2015, 2008; Blau 2015, 1999; Fitz-Krasny 2019), I revisit the early journalistic work of Milena Jesenská: the fourteen pieces that report from Vienna under siege in the aftermath of WWI for the Czech-language Prague-based periodical Tribuna, and yet, in a fashion column. As I argue, these texts illustrate new spaces of dwelling, namely how it is possible to dwell “in public”. Jesenská’s narratives capture eating habits according to wealth, occupation, class, personal expectations, ideology, and gender. Her literary ethnography of 1920s Vienna blurs the public/private divide. Specifically, her texts render the coffeehouse as a site of “fashionable poverty” that allows for the emergence of a new flaneuse, bohemian (and Bohemian), lifestyle. In Jesenská’s literary practices, the café becomes an icon of a libertine and decadent life for all, with a radical aesthetic: the obsession with a single idea (self-branding), expensive meals on credit (financial credibility and gift economy), and allegedly promiscuous sexual bonds connotes the coffeehouse as the most liminal of the spatial negotiations.

Autogeography. Saul Steinberg as Narrator of Spaces, from Self-mythology to City Criticism

2024-12-10T16:26:59+01:00

For over 60 years, Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) used his pen to explore a wide range of spaces, from the piazzas and arcades of Italy to the main streets and brownstones of the United States. Places he lived in and that he remembered, but also criticized. This essay aims to revisit some of the steps of Steinberg’s “autogeography,” following as a leitmotif the idea of inhabitable space which prefers a continuous metamorphosis of functions to over-defined boundaries. Through his drawings, Steinberg offers a fragmentary yet remarkably coherent contribution to the twentieth-century debate on the urban environment, alongside those of Bernard Rudofsky and Le Corbusier.

The Room and the Cell. Queer Spectrality in Sarah Waters’s Affinity

2024-12-10T17:02:39+01:00

This paper discusses the representation of spaces in the novel Affinity (1999) by Sarah Waters. Specifically, it investigates the representation of a public space (the prison) and a private space (the house), and the ways in which they intertwine and mirror each other. By adopting the critical tools of Carla Freccero’s queer spectrality, this paper explores the representation of the homosexual relationship between the two female protagonists, and how it is connected to the representation of the spaces of the novel. Waters creates a series of dichotomies (visible/invisible, public/private, confinement/liberation) that end up being different faces of the same oppression imposed on the protagonists.

The Public Dimension of Homosexual(S) Dwelling in the Sinosphere: Parks in Pai Hsien-Yung’s Crystal Boys And Mu Cao’s Poems

2024-12-10T17:03:32+01:00

The experience of the public dimension of dwelling varies considerably according to the different positions of individuals in the social space in which it takes place. This essay is interested in investigating how literature, as a form of social critique and analysis, can explore this side of the public dimension of dwelling, focusing on the representation of parks as places of homosexual dwelling in the works of Pai Hsien-yung and Mu Cao. After examining the implications of social space for the dynamics of dwelling in the city, with a focus on unequal relations of class and sexuality, the essay maintains the focus on space by discussing the role of literature as a representational space, before moving on to a close reading of the texts under consideration in order to analyze how parks are approached in terms of dwelling for stigmatized homosexual men and how their public dimension is questioned and reassessed. The essay concludes that the experience of the public dimension of dwelling is inseparable from the modalities of its interaction with the larger social space of which it is a part.

The House as Liminal Space in Alice Munro’s Female Gothic

2024-12-10T16:26:51+01:00

Alice Munro’s work is part of a subgenre of the contemporary Gothic known as the Southern Ontario Gothic, which realistically depicts typical small-town life in Southern Ontario, particularly in regards to the gender dynamic. Munro’s Southern Ontario Gothic draws from the rich tradition of the 18th-century British Gothic, which was influenced by public spaces such as cathedrals, monasteries, and churches, particularly in their theatricality. In her short stories, Alice Munro crafts an architectural space based on the liminal space between the private and the public, where the characters’ inner strangeness, uncertainty about what is true or not true, what is ‘seen’ and ‘known,’ and the unheimlich of the domestic place turned public become key elements. The house turns into a nursing home or a quasi-school room, and the tension between inner/outer spaces engenders human strife. The melodramatic turn of events, almost comedic in its distorted grotesque, comes from the fact that an outsider in some kind of quasi-professional capacity is allowed access into the private space of others.

Dwelling in Subaltern Spaces. Contemporary Representations of Italian New Mobilities

2024-12-10T16:24:44+01:00

This essay presents a reflection on the spaces of recent Italian outgoing migrations (generally referred to as “new mobilities” in the national debate) and on how the ontological condition of recent “expats” is defined by the way in which they dwell in these new spaces of mobility. An analysis of the terminology of impermanence deployed to refer to recent outgoing mobilities reveals how such terminology is intended to create a discontinuity with historical Italian emigration and with the subaltern positions that Italian emigrants have come to occupy both in their country of origin and in their countries of destination.
Through the analysis of three case studies – a blog that has also become a book, Donne che emigrano all’estero. Storie di italiane nel mondo (2016), the documentary La Deutsche Vita (2013), and the web series Italianers (2015-2016) – the essay examines how the anxiety associated with a possible inherited subalternity resurfaces in recent narratives of relocation.

The Chronotope of the Road as an Interstitial Space for the Development of a Common Anthropocenic Consciousness

2024-12-10T16:33:25+01:00

The article aims to explore how an anthropocenic consciousness capable of restoring a sense of planetary community emerges through an unusual experience of the (non-)place of the road. Reading some selected extracts from the novels of Pecoraro, Trevisan and Vinci, it is possible to understand how the analysis of a situation of individual crisis could lead to a reflection on the general condition of the human being in post-capitalist society.

The Anti-conquest of Space/Time in Graham Greene’s Africa

2024-12-10T16:33:36+01:00

This paper seeks to explore via a postcolonial lens Graham Greene’s peculiar handling of space-time in Journey without Maps, a travel account of his trek through Liberia, and his African novel The Heart of the Matter, set during WWII in Sierra Leone. The attempt to cut across generic borders to examine the meanders of discourse draws upon David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire, where various tropes are held up for critical scrutiny as focal mediators of colonial perspectives on other cultures. However, the overriding argument is informed by Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the anti-conquest which suggests that even empathetic attitudes toward Africa can be underwritten by European, white, male privilege. Of particular interest is Greene’s honest vision coupled with the tenacity of Africanist discourse that resurfaces as a transposition of physical movement across foreign lands into a journey through the library to encode a Western existentialist angst à la Conrad. A further displacement involves the incorporation of an idealized African space-time into a psychic drama of the individual and collective Western self. The ultimate effect of these double gestures is that Graham Greene assumes the paradoxical posture of the liberal colonizer.

At the Edge of Existence. Transgressive Spatialities that Subvert Expectations and Orders in Aphra Behn’s The Fair Jilt and The History of the Nun

2024-12-10T17:03:54+01:00

Throughout history, the figure of the nun has exerted an incredible fascination on writers, much like the mysterious and inaccessible places where they resided – specifically nunneries. However, the dichotomous nature of convents and monasteries – confinement and freedom – is a fundamental element through which these spaces could be reimagined. Indeed, these institutions are of great scholarly importance because they stand at the intersection of different social and cultural spheres and serve as a reflection of perspectives on gender, religion, and politics. This is perfectly illustrated in Aphra Behn’s The Fair Jilt (1688) and The History of the Nun (1689). In her novellas, Behn compares the experiences of women living in enclosed spaces to highlight the contradictory liminal spaces where legitimate socio-cultural forms are reshaped.

Dwelling in Madness. Spaces of Resistance and Homologation in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

2024-12-10T17:04:12+01:00

This paper aims to analyze Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, by highlighting the multiple interactions between the character Esther’s madness and her relationship to public spaces. The city of New York, the interstitial spaces like streets and trains, as well as her neighborhood and the heterotopia of the asylum, are all places where she repeatedly stages her very own performance. For each of them, Esther’s engagement with mental issues is a way of responding to or escaping multiple conflicting desires and social pressures.
Finally, the paper attempts to show the problems with categorizing The Bell Jar as a Bildungsroman: Esther’s reintegration into public life is actually not an active process of self-improvement or development, but a coercion to stage a socially approved norm.

Museum Stuff? Inside the Fences of Culture

2024-12-10T10:12:25+01:00

Oppressive, mysterious, everyday dwellings; institutional places, mental places as well: libraries and museums are such contradictory public build-ings. This issue deals with the topic (after a foreword by the editor), through a contribution about libraries by Guido Mazzoni and one about museums by Sergio Pace.

Rethinking Dwelling: Design, Public Spaces, Sustainability. A conversation with Francesca La Rocca

2024-12-10T10:12:24+01:00

The interview with Francesca La Rocca is aimed at exploring the relationship between the public and private spheres with reference to dwelling. La Rocca examines these issues through the lenses of architecture and design, starting from the legacy of the radical avant-garde movements of the 1970s, with a particular focus on figures such as Andrea Branzi and Ugo La Pietra. She reflects on the role of design in harmonizing the relationship between nature, technology, and everyday life by delving into key themes such as cosmic hospitality, environmental sustainability, the necessity of dynamic public spaces, and the significance of the body and sensory experience in design processes. Through a complex and interdisciplinary perspective, the experience of inhabiting a place emerges as an act of negotiation between human, social, and environmental needs, oriented towards an inclusive and sustainable future.

Inhabiting the Space of Naples

2024-12-10T10:12:19+01:00

In this issue, we resume the “In Discussion” section; the focus is on one of the most important and complex public spaces in the global cultural and civic landscape: the city of Naples. We will refer to some recent books, such as Napoli. Contro il panorama by Giovanna Silva and Lucia Tozzi; and Privati di Napoli by Alessandra Caputi and Anna Fava; not forgetting other studies, novels and films on the subject. The Campania metropolis has been-and continues to be-a laboratory from which literary and artistic, political and social experiences have sprung. The body of the city, the spaces of its inhabitants have reflected dynamics and changes in Italian society throughout modernity. Writers and intellectuals have analyzed and represented those changes, often related to the themes of environment, cultural heritage and, today, ecological emergencies. Discussing them in this issue are two scholars who have devoted important books and essays to these subjects: Giancarlo Alfano and Anna Fava.

The Urban and Textual Space of Naples between Disembowelment and Gentrification

2024-12-10T09:44:46+01:00

In the second half of the 19th century, the city of Naples underwent impressive urban and social transformations, which were foreshadowed and documented by a wide constellation of literary and nonfiction texts. This essay aims to investigate the ways in which literary and nonfiction texts described and produced the urban transformations of Naples in those years. This story, in fact, can be seen as an example of how literature and urban space are the outcome of a dialectical relationship.

The Arabesque of Disaster. A Spatial Model of Neapolitan Literature

2024-12-10T10:12:21+01:00

The essay examines briefly come significant works published between the 1950s and the first decade of the 21st century in order to show the endurance over time of a representation of the city of Naples inspired by a spatial typology that reduces verticality to a horizontal tangle and transforms historical conflict into the emergence of natural drives.

Simone Marsi, Il racconto del passato. La formazione del canone letterario italiano, tra programmi ministeriali, manuali scolastici e storiografia letteraria (1861-1945)

2024-12-10T10:12:18+01:00

Review of Simone Marsi's Il racconto del passato. La formazione del canone letterario italiano, tra programmi ministeriali, manuali scolastici e storiografia letteraria (1861-1945).

Stefano Bartezzaghi Chi vince non sa cosa si perde. Agonismo, gioco, guerra

2024-12-10T10:12:16+01:00

Review of Stefano Bartezzaghi's Chi vince non sa cosa si perde. Agonismo, gioco, guerra.

Espérance Hakuzwimana, Tra i bianchi di scuola. Voci per un’educazione accogliente

2024-12-10T10:12:14+01:00

Review of Espérance Hakuzwimana's Tra i bianchi di scuola. Voci per un’educazione accogliente.

Chiara Trebaiocchi, Reschooling society. Pedagogia come forma di lotta nella vita e nell’opera di Franco Fortini

2024-12-10T10:12:13+01:00

Review of Chiara Trebaiocchi's Reschooling society. Pedagogia come forma di lotta nella vita e nell’opera di Franco Fortini.

Alberto Melloni, Storia di μ Lorenzino don Milani

2024-12-10T10:12:22+01:00

Review of Alberto Melloni's Storia di μ Lorenzino don Milani.

Adolfo Scotto di Luzio, L’equivoco don Milani

2024-12-10T10:12:11+01:00

Reveiw of Adolfo Scotto di Luzio's L’equivoco don Milani.

Alessandro Gazzoli, Estranei. Un anno in una scuola per stranieri

2024-12-10T10:12:10+01:00

Review of Alessandro Gazzoli's Estranei. Un anno in una scuola per stranieri.

Benoît Crucifix Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel

2024-12-16T09:23:17+01:00

Review of Benoît Crucifix's Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel.

Elisabetta Bartoli, Carla Francellini, Roberto Ludovico (a cura di) “Dossier I pianeti della fortuna: Renato Poggioli intellettuale, critico e traduttore” (Semicerchio: Rivista di poesia comparata, LXIX, 2023/2)

2024-12-10T10:12:06+01:00

Review of the issue “Dossier I pianeti della fortuna: Renato Poggioli intellettuale, critico e traduttore”
(Semicerchio: Rivista di poesia comparata, LXIX, 2023/2) edited by Elisabetta Bartoli, Carla Francellini, Roberto Ludovico.

Klaus W. Hempfer, Fundamentals of Literary Theory

2024-12-10T10:12:04+01:00

Review of Klaus W. Hempfer's Fundamentals of Literary Theory.

Gloria Scarfone, Anatomia del personaggio romanzesco. Storia, forme e teorie di una categoria letteraria

2024-12-10T10:12:03+01:00

Review of Gloria Scarfone's Anatomia del personaggio romanzesco. Storia, forme e teorie di una categoria letteraria.

Claudio Lagomarsini, L'invenzione dell'intreccio. La svolta medievale nell'arte narrativa

2024-12-10T10:12:01+01:00

Review of Claudio Lagomarsini's L'invenzione dell'intreccio. La svolta medievale nell'arte narrativa.

Samuel Beckett, Romanzi, Teatro e Televisione

2024-12-10T10:12:00+01:00

Review of Samuel Beckett Romanzi, Teatro e Televisione edited by Gabriele Frasca.

Marie-Ange Fougère et Philippe Hamon, Dictionnaire littéraire de la scatologie. D'Aristophane à Pierre Michon

2024-12-10T10:11:58+01:00

Review of Dictionnaire littéraire de la scatologie. D’Aristophane à Pierre Michon edited byMarie-Ange Fougère et Philippe Hamon.

René Wellek, Austin Warren, Teoria della letteratura

2024-12-10T10:11:57+01:00

Review of Teoria della letteratura by René Wellek e Austin Warren.