Corpses of Metaphor. Images of Death in David Leavitt and Jamaica Kincaid

This essay analyzes two works, My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid, and "Saturn Street" by David Leavitt, investigating the construction of homosexuality as a process accomplished by resorting to illness (AIDS) and death. In both works, indeed, the slow and dramatic course of AIDS amounts to the progressive unveiling of homosexuality as a social threat or a cause of anxiety and repulsion. The two works are set in different contexts: whereas Jamaica Kincaid refers to the problematic situation of homosexuality in the Caribbean, David Leavitt explores the social and cultural scenario of the 1990s Los Angeles, in the wake of a by now ended utopian confidence in science and technology.  This comparative approach helps us understand the political dynamics through which, in different and, to some extents, opposite realities, the social stigma of AIDS worked as a means to construct homosexual identity and set it apart from the sanitized spectrum of normal and sanctioned sexual behaviors. The point I want to make in this essay is that the corpse is used as an effective metaphor for a dehumanized depiction of male homosexual and ill subjects

Staging the Stigma: Syphilis and Its Metaphors in Claude McKay’s The Clinic

The paper proposes a reading of Claude McKay’s The Clinic (circa 1923) as a text addressing the male diseased body and the clinic as symbolic sites of stigma. More specifically, the male (homo)sexualized body at the center of McKay’s poetic investigation is scrutinized according to two crucial axes of dis-identification: sexuality and ethnicity. Drawing on the Foucauldian genesis of the clinic as a space of signification of illness and of the body, I contend that McKay stages the shift from medical to poetic gaze and scrutinizes the diseased body as a site of stigma and shame to disavow, in order to advocate a new, idealized model of black subjectivity

Un’endiadi impossibile. Parlare di città degli Stati Uniti oggi

This article analyzes several texts, published over the last two decades, which focus on postmodern space and the city in the United States. In particular, it tries to deconstruct the very phrase “American city”, which has been addressed by postmodern theorists as a cultural construct and, consequently, as a primarily theoretical notion. Reading works written by Rem Koolhaas, Michel de Certeau, Marc Augé and Jean Baudrillard vis-à-vis the works of sociologists and urban scientists, like Marshall Berman and Sharon Zukin, the article tries to figure out a new perspective to describe and narrate American cities today, halfway between the abstract postmodern theoretical speculations and the strictly materialist and sociological approach

Falling from the Past. Geographies of Exceptionalism in two novels by Jay McInerney

Celebrating the glamorous 1980s, Jay McInerney has described the fall of the ambitions and delusions of yuppies in New York City. The vibrant atmosphere of his debut novel (Bright Lights, Big City, 1984) comes to a sudden end in Brightness Falls (1987), where the 1987 stock market crash is prophesied and narrated in its consequences on the lives of a young, brilliant couple, Corrine and Russell Calloway. Almost twenty years later, in The Good Life (2006), McInerney takes up Russell’s and Corrine’s stories again, now in the aftermath of September 11. This article focuses on the symbolic economy of the US territory. The 1980s, as they have been represented in Brightness Falls, witnessed the boisterous celebration of New York City and its centrality in the imaginary geography of the USA. When New York apparently starts crumbling under the terrorist attacks, the protagonists of The Good Life ideally (and sometimes physically) go back to their native places. In particular, one of the novel’s central characters, Luke McGavock, who starts an affair with Corrine while they are both volunteering at Ground Zero, returns to his native Tennessee, where is confronted with the memory of the Civil War. From this moment on, the novel starts tracing an implicit and highly thought-provoking parallel between the defeated nineteenth-century South and the synecdochic New York City at the turn of the twenty-first century, whose crash has engendered the dramatic need for the US to face the burden of its own history

Porta dell’anima o amaro nutrimento: il cuore e i segni della vergogna nella cultura americana

The essay focuses on the heart as complex signifier for shame in American literature. It starts off by reading some passages from Thomas Hooker’s texts, arguing that the heart is here to be understood as one of the symbols that most convincingly convey what shame meant for Puritans. Then it reads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, probably the most canonical book about shame of American (and not only) literature, in order to pinpoint the novel’s numerous references to the heart that is, however, emptied of any clear symbolic value, and reduced to a cathacresis, a metaphor deprived of any actual reference. Finally, it lingers on a poem by Stephen Crane, in which the heart, rather than standing for or referring to shame, returns the gaze of the poet/viewer who has identified the savage “Other” described in the poem as the embodiment of shame.Il saggio si concentra sul cuore come significante controverso della vergogna nella letteratura americana. La prima sezione include la rilettura di alcuni brani di Thomas Hooker, pastore puritano, ipotizzando che il puritanesimo americano avesse individuato nel cuore uno dei simboli più convincenti, pure se meno facilmente decifrabili, della vergogna. Il saggio poi procede con la lettura de La lettera scarlatta di Nathaniel Hawthorne (testo emblematico sullo stigma, non solo nella letteratura americana), allo scopo di sottolineare che, in questo caso, il cuore diventa una catacresi, un significante privo di un chiaro riferimento letterale. Infine, l’ultimo testo preso in esame è una poesia di Stephen Crane, nella quale il cuore, più che semplicemente rappresentare la vergogna come stato emotivo individuale e privato, ha la funzione di rovesciare il punto di vista del testo stesso e restituire al poeta/osservatore il senso della vergogna dell’altro