Between

Gothic Technologies

Anna Chiara Corradino — 2025-05-20

This issue focuses on the relationship between Gothic fiction and technological innovation in contemporary culture from different perspectives and media formats. We explore how Gothic narratives have consistently engaged with, and responded to, technological developments—from the early anxieties about scientific discovery in 19th-century literature to contemporary fears surrounding digital media, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. Our contributors examine how Gothic aesthetics have been transformed by new technologies while simultaneously providing a framework for articulating the uncanny dimension of technological advancement itself. The articles in this issue analyze how modern Gothic has evolved beyond traditional oppositions to embrace the fluid boundaries between human and non-human, natural and artificial. We investigate the “phosphorescent” aesthetic of contemporary visual Gothic with its colors and digital distortions, the viral nature of digital urban legends, and the haunted infrastructures of our networked existence. Through diverse case studies spanning literature, cinema, television, and digital storytelling, to podcasts, this issue maps the spectral territories where technology and Gothic sensibilities converge, showing how today’s Gothic is fundamentally shaped by the technological structures and virtual realities that define contemporary experience.

Ghost in the Market. Hauntological and Eerie Finance in Cosmopolis

Aldo Baratta — 2025-05-20

This paper aims to analyze the intersections between the Gothic imaginary and Marxist theory using the speculative tools of hauntology and eerie as defined by Mark Fisher. Specifically, we will investigate how the financialization and digitalization of capital have initiated a process of spectralization of the market. The second part of the paper will be a close reading of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), a novel that stages the ghostly movements of high finance by telling of phantom fluctuations in the stock market, people poised between materiality and immateriality, revivals of Gothic architecture, and defective temporalities.

Pages, Screens, Technology: Helen McClory’s Pretty Dead Girl Takes a Break’s Haunting Narrative

Maddalena Carfora — 2025-05-20

This paper aims to shed light on some characteristics of contemporary Anglophone Gothic literature as they are involved in cultural, social, and technological issues. Drawing on Lars Elleström’s theoretical framework, this contribution examines Helen McClory’s short story Pretty Dead Girl Takes a Break (2015), highlighting how the represented intermedial relationship between literature and screen technology can generate feelings of threat and fright that are deeply connected to a relevant contemporary issue, namely femicide.

The Neon-Gothic: Some Theoretical Considerations

Anna Chiara Corradino — 2025-05-20

This paper examines the use of neon lighting in contemporary Gothic cinema, proposing the definition of a new film subgenre: “neon-gothic.” Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s reflections on “modes of illumination” and Jacques Fontanille’s semiotics of light, it explores how neon—historically linked to twentieth-century consumer culture—is resemanticized in contemporary film. The analysis focuses on three key works: André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe, where the morgue’s white light spectralizes and objectifies the female body; Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, where colored lighting intensifies the commodification of the female body within the fashion industry; and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, in which neon becomes a symbol of the fusion between reality and media imagery. Through Patricia MacCormack’s concept of “cinesexuality,” the paper highlights how neon lighting creates topographical spaces that redefine the relationship between viewer and film, offering new ways to articulate the abject and the erotic.

The Ghost in the Tape Recorder: the Analog Horror of The Magnus Archives and Archive 81

Marco Malvestio — 2025-05-27

This article discusses two horror-themed narrative podcasts, The Magnus Archives (2016-2021) and Archive 81 (2016-2021). It explores the ways in which these podcasts, part of a new culture of aurality, employ the technological specificities of their medium, while at the same time drawing on the tradition of horror and the Gothic. Specifically, it looks at the ways in which these digital podcasts, disseminated over the Internet to audiences who listen to them mostly on their computers or smartphones, remediate media from the past, such as the radio and the tape recorder, and present them as a source of uncanniness and haunting.

A Technicolor Sky. The Spectre of Seriality in Paolo Zanotti

Michele Paolo — 2025-05-27

Paolo Zanotti’s novels are full of ghosts. Yet none of these ever pose a real threat. Zanotti’s worlds are infested by something completely different. They are the poisoned fruits of mediality: false myths and urban legends, chimeras born from an idle mind, fake and stale clichés, very far from the “Stimmung of the abandoned clearings of romance”. This essay, in light of the notion of hauntology proposed by Mark Fisher, focuses on the way Zanotti stages the nostalgic desire for a re-enchantment of the world, sterile, distorted, and alienated by the perverse logic of global capitalism, of mass society, of technological mediation. By analyzing several passages, in particular from Trovate Ortensia!, this essay highlights a common context in Zanotti’s novels: a tendency to escape, or run away, from a condition of anguish, from a hauntological perspective whose recurring sign is a technicolor sky.

Brides and Automata in The Frankenstein Chronicles

Federica Perazzini — 2025-05-27

This article offers an analysis of the television series The Frankenstein Chronicles (TFC), positioning it as a significant contribution to the neo-Victorian revival of the Frankenstein narrative within contemporary televisual seriality. By integrating historical and contemporary anxieties surrounding identity and mortality, TFC underscores the relationship between biotechnological advancements and shifting societal perceptions of life and death. Central to this exploration is the character of Esther Rose, a working-class Jewish seamstress who embodies the monstrous feminine archetype of the Bride of Frankenstein, reinterpreted through a postfeminist lens that highlights her intersectional trauma as a mourning mother. Esther’s narrative serves as a critique of the Victorian patriarchal association of femininity with artificiality, thus emphasizing the ethical dilemmas surrounding scientific progress within the context of capitalist extractivism and the mechanization of marginalized groups.

Gothic technologies in Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s Áwala cu sangui (2000): between fracture and continuity

Kevin Ramier — 2025-05-27

This paper aims to examine the neocolonial dynamics at play in the novel Áwala cu sangui (2000) by Equatoguinean writer Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel. The study draws on postcolonial theories and psychoanalysis to reveal “gothic technologies”. Two technologies stand out: one the one hand, the ship as a technology of control (equally linked to the history of slavery and colonization), and on the other hand, the presence or absence of electrical light, along with its spectral content, embodied by the figure of the “sandjawel”, which reflects the internal contradictions within the postcolonial state. In this sense, the study proposes two interpretations that are not presented here as dichotomous: the gothic as fracture and the gothic as continuity.

Uncanny Autofiction on Stage. About Rimini Protokoll's Uncanny Valley

Dora Rusciano — 2025-05-27

This paper investigates Rimini Protokoll’s interpretation of the Gothic genre in the 2018 play, Uncanny Valley. In this work, the German-speaking theater collective refers to Mashairo Mori’s research on the human reception of humanoid robots to reflect upon human nature and social norms. The play features a naturalistic cyborg resembling the writer Thomas Melle, a co-author of the play. This article will analyze the group’s deployment of the Gothic and uncover the significance of the genre’s entanglement with autofictional narrative in the play. The paper will illustrate the image of Gothic that emerges from the play and investigate its contribution to Rimini Protokoll’s theatre research.

Becoming-Kaijū. The Gothic and the Monsters of the Anthropocene

Andrea Suverato — 2025-05-27

The paper aims to demonstrate how the stylistic features and tropes of the Gothic mode provide an aesthetic representation of Anthropocene phenomena. Drawing on the contrast between «landscape» and «environment» as outlined by Niccolò Scaffai’s ecocritical proposal in Letteratura e ecologia (2017) and the «becoming-animal» theory developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille plateaux (1980), the article analyzes a series of texts in which the figure of the kaijū serves as a means to reflect on the anthropogenic impact on nature and the relationships with various living species. As it will result from the analysis, this process leads to an exploration of alternative ethical models deviating from the dominant one. Special attention will be given, in particular, to the Godzilla film franchise and the short stories The Fog Horn (1951) by Ray Bradbury and Bridezilla (2022) by Kim Fu.

Taking a Free Hand Does not Mean Freedom: The Leopard on Netflix

Clotilde Bertoni — 2025-05-30

We are well aware that each transposition is an independent work, that the principle of fidelity to the source of origin has been passed for a while. But taking a free hand does not always mean to follow a truly free inspiration. In the Netflix series The Leopard, based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s, freedom turns out to be deceptive: on the surface unbridled, in fact bound by hegemonic trends of thought and taste. It is worth examining this issue in depth, as we try to do through the following papers: Clotilde Bertoni analyzes the series’ adherence to the most widespread vision of the novel, and its adaptation to the standards of political correctness; Giulia Carluccio, starting from the episode set in Turin, considers its relationship with the novel, with Luchino Visconti’s film based on it, and with the broader imagery superimposed on them; Stefania Rimini connects it to the recurring features of the current period dramas, then focusing on its representation of environments and landscapes.

So that things do not stay as they are: «Buy The Leopard»

Clotilde Bertoni — 2025-05-30

We are well aware that each transposition is an independent work, that the principle of fidelity to the source of origin has been passed for a while. But taking a free hand does not always mean to follow a truly free inspiration. In the Netflix series The Leopard, based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's, freedom turns out to be deceptive: on the surface unbridled, in fact bound by hegemonic trends of thought and taste. It is worth examining this issue in depth, as we try to do through the following papers: Clotilde Bertoni analyzes the series’ adherence to the most widespread vision of the novel, and its adaptation to the standards of political correctness; Giulia Carluccio, starting from the episode set in Turin, considers its relationship with the novel, with Luchino Visconti's film based on it, and with the broader imagery superimposed on them; Stefania Rimini connects it to the recurring features of the current period dramas, then focusing on its representation of environments and landscapes.

«It is in Turin that we must stay now». Adaptation dynamics in the global world

Giulia Carluccio — 2025-05-30

The «collapse of time»: performance aesthetics

Stefania Rimini — 2025-05-30

Strategies toward Diamond Open Access: State of the Art, Case Studies, Narrative

Giovanni Campolo — 2025-05-31

DIAMAS and CFRAT-OF are two projects aimed at developing a common strategy for Diamond Open Access within the European Research Area. Their results and outcomes are being published throughout 2025. This article provides a brief overview of selected results, addressing both technical and policy-related aspects. Specifically, it summarizes elements of the Croatian and French national strategies, which are then repurposed to suggest potential changes to the Italian national strategy. The accuracy of the Italian narrative is brought into question. Could the Italian case also be understood as a literary problem? Exploring this question may offer valuable insights for the broader Open Access movement.

A New Section: Unpublished in Italy. Critical Essays in Translation

Mattia Petricola — 2025-05-31

A short introduction of the new section of «Between» focused on Italian translations of international essays in literary theory and criticism.

Phenomenology of Reading

Mattia Petricola — 2025-05-31

Poulet’s classic article on the aesthetic experience of literature is here translated in Italian for the first time. Phenomenology of Reading occupies an interesting place both within the landscape of Poulet’s own critical production and within the broader context of literary theories that, between 1960 and 1980, explored the aesthetic experience of literature in relation to the act of reading. Inspired by Proust, Poulet conceives of reading as the act of subjectivizing within ourselves a consciousness that is not our own. This other consciousness is the work itself, whose textual objectivity—that is, the words that compose it and convey its meanings—serves as a vehicle for the subjectivity that animates it and which constitutes the true core of that consciousness. This theoretical framework carries profound philosophical implications: in a world where our consciousness is condemned never to fully grasp another person’s interiority, knowing and understand it as if it were our own, the experience of literature offers the possibility of doing precisely that.

Fabio Vasarri (ed.), Scrivere l’impotenza e la frigidità. Crisi di genere dall’Ottocento a oggi

Margareth Amatulli — 2025-05-31

Review of Scrivere l’impotenza e la frigidità. Crisi di genere dall’Ottocento a oggi edited by Fabio Vasarri.

Fabio Vittorini, Queer bodies. Identità trans nella letteratura e nei media. Da fine Ottocento agli anni Settanta; Queer bodies. Identità trans* nella letteratura e nei media. Dagli anni Settanta a oggi*

Elia A.G. Arfini — 2025-05-31

Recensione of Queer bodies. Identità trans* nella letteratura e nei media. Da fine Ottocento agli anni Settanta (vol. I). Queer bodies. Identità trans* nella letteratura e nei media. Dagli anni Settanta a oggi (vol. II) by Fabio Vittorini.

Guido Mattia Gallerani, Roland Barthes. Dalla vita al testo

Silvia Baroni — 2025-05-31

Review of Guido Mattia Gallerani's Roland Barthes. Dalla vita al testo.

Martin Puchner, Literature for a Changing Planet

Corrado Confalonieri — 2025-05-31

Review of Martin Puchner's Literature for a Changing Planet.

Remo Ceserani, Un’idea diversa dell’Europa. Otto saggi sull’identità transnazionale europea

Davide Dobjani — 2025-05-31

Review of Remo Ceserani's Un’idea diversa dell’Europa. Otto saggi sull’identità transnazionale europea edited by Stefano Lazzarin e Pierluigi Pellini.

Laura Melosi (ed.), Abitare il genio. Per un Atlante delle Case d’Autore

Guido Mattia Gallerani — 2025-05-31

Review of Abitare il genio. Per un Atlante delle Case d’Autore edited by Laura Melosi.

Carlo Baghetti, Labour Narratives. Appunti per una teoria transmediale

Lorisfelice Magro — 2025-05-31

Review of Carlo Baghetti's Labour Narratives. Appunti per una teoria transmediale.

Giulia Fabbri (ed.), Narrazioni dall’Antropocene. (Pre)visioni della crisi ambientale nella letteratura e nella cultura visuale

Marco Malvestio — 2025-05-31

Review of Narrazioni dall’Antropocene. (Pre)visioni della crisi ambientale nella letteratura e nella cultura visuale edited by Giulia Fabbri.

Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug, Giuliana Pieri, Intermedia in Italy. From Futurism to Digital Convergence

Edoardo Panei — 2025-05-31

Review of Intermedia in Italy. From Futurism to Digital Convergence by Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug, Giuliana Pieri.

Christine Baron, Le tribunal du récit. Désire de justice et littérature

Tiziano Toracca — 2025-05-31

Review of Christine Baron's Le tribunal du récit. Désire de justice et littérature.

Valentino Baldi, Nel delirio. Letteratura e malattie della mente

Emanuele Zoppellari — 2025-05-31

Review of Valentino Baldi's Nel delirio. Letteratura e malattie della mente.