Lies from Outer Space: The Martians’ Famous Invasion of New Jersey

Over the course of time, people have been told many lies concerning the Red Planet. Maybe the most renowned one dates back to the late 1880s, when, owing to an error in translation, scientists were led to believe in the existence of canals on its surface – canals instead of channels – which meant that Mars must be inhabited. More recently, in 1976, a lively discussion arose about the “face on Mars”, something that was spotted by the Viking 2 spacecraft in the region of Cydonia and was later dismissed as a mesa whose unusual shadows had cheated the eye. But the biggest lie of all was told in 1938, when a young actor (Orson Welles) decided to play a Halloween trick with the help of the then-rising medium – the radio. It was not really a lie in the strictest sense of the term. It was not a hoax or a fake, either – it was, in narratological terms, what is commonly called the suspension of disbelief pushed to its extreme. In this essay I am going to reconsider this event mainly in the light of two main conditions concerning lying, namely untruthfulness and the intention to deceive. Our specific case is further complicated by a third factor, that is the fact that somebody lies to someone who is believed to be listening in but who is not being addressed. I will also highlight the aftermath of this mass deception which, despite being followed by a number of disclaimers, actually overturned the utopian portrait of Martians, initiating a long literary and filmic theory of alien invasions

Out of Exception, Into Emergency: Fast-forward to Earth Zero

Inevitably interconnected with the “Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene, space race has played a substantial role in the reassessment of humankind’s identity as interplanetary. The growing perception of new possible frontiers beyond the Earth’s borders, whether on the Moon or on Mars, has opened an era of neo-colonial projects involving language(s), culture(s), and media. More than in Elon Musk’s and Robert Zubrin’s recent proclamations, however, my proposal focuses on the durable effect of the myth of nation building on the quest for extraterrestrial territories. It is a fact that the current debate on Terraforming and manned expeditions frequently refers to Pilgrims, pioneers, transplantation, Dream, and Destiny. What lacks almost completely, on the other hand, is the awareness that counter-narrations existed since the beginnings of the century. As early as 1908, in Mars as the Abode of Life, astronomer Percival Lowell insisted that extraordinary measures be urgently taken to keep the Earth from meeting the same destiny as the red planet – that is, to be reduced to a wasteland. Long before climate change, globalization, and world pandemics, Lowell was fully aware that neither our planet nor America were exceptional sites: on the contrary, they were places on the verge of an unprecedented and irrevocable state of emergency. This essay deals with such counter-narrations and with their controversial legacy

Ushering in the Soundscape: For a Poetics of Listening across Time and Space

Remapping the literary canon through listening practices means giving the aural dimension of poetry, prose, or simply language a fascinating chance to match the wonders of visual representation. Fiction and storytelling are actually strongly rooted in the universe of sounds and they often involve something very similar to acousmatics, sound design, soundmarks, and sound icons. Indeed, every text is a soundscape, whether the sounds it contains be realistic, symbolic, or imaginary. The soundscape thus becomes a fertile multifaceted area of intersection between disciplines, since it connects the present and the past, personal experiences and collective drama in times of radical change

SEARCHING FOR SOUNDS IN U.S. LITERATURE: A MULTISENSORIAL, MULTIDISCIPLINARY PROJECT

The aim of this essay is to provide a contribution to soundscape studies from the standpoint of U.S. literature and from a multi-disciplinary approach. The six case studies here included are the result of a project carried out by two groups of upper graduate students and myself during the academic years 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 at the Department of International Studies of the University of Urbino, Italy.1 We examined a selection of literary texts (from the 17th through the 189th century), searching for sounds, noises, silence, talk, conversation, bird songs, whistles, rattles, thunders, etc. with the aim of re-mapping the literary canon from an aural perspective. Given such an ambitious aim, we first had to study the ABC of acoustics, then practise the sound lexicon, and finally match our practical knowledge to the words we found on the written – and seemingly dumb – pages of our books. By reading aloud, both individually and in class, and by discussing our sensations, perceptions, and reactions to the soundscapes we encountered, we slowly discovered a universe which was full of sound and meanings. To this universe we applied the notions we had learnt from scholarly books, relying on the classification of sounds into categories (natural sounds or geophonies, sounds of life or biophonies, human-induced sounds or anthrophonies; see Schafer, Krause), the notions of low-fi and hi-fi soundscape (Schafer), the vibratory nature of sound (Di Benedetto), the findings of auditory neurosciences (Schnupp et al.), auditory spatial awareness (Blesser & Salter), and the concepts of acoustic territorialization, audible identity, and sonic body (Labelle). This essay is also a homage to electronic musician and soundscape pioneer Bernard L. Krause, b. 1938, who in 1968 founded Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes (www.wildsanctuary.com). He was the first to incorporate natural soundscapes as an integral component of orchestration, and in 2007 he demonstrated that it is possible to listen to soundscapes from all over the world and to create archives

A requiem for the body or how we’ll stop worrying and love AI

In Blade Runner 2049 (2017) Denis Villeneuve, a film director who has always been interested in identity and relational dynamics, addresses a crucial issue in contemporary debate, that is, the man-machine relationship in post-human society. By creating a respectful virtual dialogue with Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982), of which it is the sequel, and by implicitly collecting not only the legacy of Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (1968), but the atmospheres and the problems expressed by his various predecessors (from Metropolis, Fritz Lang 1927, up to Ex Machina, Alex Garland 2014), this film creates a shadow game in which the human being is (re)considered no longer in relationship to one, but to several types of "creature". Frankenstein and Jekyll had already challenged the concept of "individual", and Deckard had posed the existential drama of his own fragile identity; nonetheless, in this film the human (or presumed such) being must confront him/herself not only with androids or replicants, but also and above all with creatures that are, in fact, simple holographic softwares. The stakes are very high: our future as human beings in a world that will be increasingly inhabited by impalpable presences whose intelligence could – and will – go far beyond ours. The problematization of the concept of motherhood, the creation of extra-world colonies, the grafting of memories are all issues that today, differently from the 1980s, we feel as much closer to reality than to fiction. The aim of my paper is therefore to interpret the film in light of the ethical, scientific, and human disorientation that affects not only the spectator, but the citizen of our millennium as the planet slips towards an irreversible environmental and social crisis

Quando manca il detective. La presa in carico dell’investigazione in due racconti americani di fine Ottocento

A Whisper in the Dark” by Louisa May Alcott (1877) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) offer an interesting, and not sufficiently investigated, perspective from the point of view of crime studies. Too intelligent and complex to be labelled as simple genre literature, and courted by gender studies, the two stories more aptly belong to Literature tout court, although many features normally lead to place them on the shelves of sensational, thriller, or mystery. The reading I propose stems from the desire to give voice to the two protagonists not only as victims of physical and psychological violence, but as active subjects and real Private Eyes within the narrative

SEARCHING FOR SOUNDS IN U.S. LITERATURE: A MULTISENSORIAL, MULTIDISCIPLINARY PROJECT

The aim of this essay is to provide a contribution to soundscape studies from the standpoint of U.S. literature and from a multi-disciplinary approach. The six case studies here included are the result of a project carried out by two groups of upper graduate students and myself during the academic years 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 at the Department of International Studies of the University of Urbino, Italy.1 We examined a selection of literary texts (from the 17th through the 189th century), searching for sounds, noises, silence, talk, conversation, bird songs, whistles, rattles, thunders, etc. with the aim of re-mapping the literary canon from an aural perspective. Given such an ambitious aim, we first had to study the ABC of acoustics, then practise the sound lexicon, and finally match our practical knowledge to the words we found on the written – and seemingly dumb – pages of our books. By reading aloud, both individually and in class, and by discussing our sensations, perceptions, and reactions to the soundscapes we encountered, we slowly discovered a universe which was full of sound and meanings. To this universe we applied the notions we had learnt from scholarly books, relying on the classification of sounds into categories (natural sounds or geophonies, sounds of life or biophonies, human-induced sounds or anthrophonies; see Schafer, Krause), the notions of low-fi and hi-fi soundscape (Schafer), the vibratory nature of sound (Di Benedetto), the findings of auditory neurosciences (Schnupp et al.), auditory spatial awareness (Blesser & Salter), and the concepts of acoustic territorialization, audible identity, and sonic body (Labelle). This essay is also a homage to electronic musician and soundscape pioneer Bernard L. Krause, b. 1938, who in 1968 founded Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes (www.wildsanctuary.com). He was the first to incorporate natural soundscapes as an integral component of orchestration, and in 2007 he demonstrated that it is possible to listen to soundscapes from all over the world and to create archives