The corpse, the machine, the garden: immagini di guerra e ideologia pastorale in The Orchard Keeper

Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper is generally considered to be a requiem for the Southern pastoral idyll. Critics have already noticed how the author makes use of the classic "machine in the garden" motif to exemplify the destructive effects of historical and technological progress on the mythical dimension of the pastoral world. This detrimental intrusion is embodied in the novel by an enigmatic "government tank" and by the hidden corpse of a military veteran turned highwayman. Through the interpretation of these symbols as figurations of both WWI and WWII, this essay posits the centrality of war itself as the main threat to the pastoral order of life

A feeling you cannot name, clocks and time in William Faulkner’s the sound and the fury and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree

This essay is devoted to a thematic comparative analysis of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. Focusing on the recurring watch motif, the aim is to show the evolvement of a pivotal issue in Southern US literature: the troubled relationship with (social) time and history. The comparison is triggered by some passages in which McCarthy clearly rewrites Faulkner’s novel. Quentin Compson, the narrator from the second section of The Sound and the Fury, is obsessed with the passing of time – a fixation which is embodied in the watch that his father gave him. Cornelius Suttree shares the same obsession about time and clocks, and, just like Quentin, he is also tormented by an ambiguous relationship with the Southern aristocratic society he is part of. The Sound and the Fury and Suttree are hence tied together in their critique of the social neuroses of the South through the depiction of a biased sense of time

A Darkness Endemic to Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward’s Haunted Places

The literature of the Southern United States has always been expression of a multilayered connection with ‘place,’ a complex term encompassing identity, history, and politics. Because of its distinctive history, the South’s literary landscapes are often haunted by real and metaphorical ghosts: simulacra of the region’s burdensome and blood-soaked legacy. A narration that acknowledges the existence of specters further complicates the representation of southern space through the polysemic, unpredictable connection with the netherworld. The traditional chronotope of the South, that of the self-supporting idyll, is forced to interact with a repressed, troubling beyond. Haunted places enable forms of counter-communication that challenge the status quo, because, as Jacques Derrida writes, addressing ghosts is also a quest for justice that goes beyond the living present. In the case of a political author like Jesmyn Ward, the commitment to justice is clearly expressed in her use of gothic tropes as a way to channel and revive the suffocated voices of the past. Ward’s work questions the present and restores the dark corners of her native Mississippi’s history. Through theories of literary spaces and hauntology, this essay analyzes Ward’s militant poetics, and how they are grounded in the relationship between immanent and transcendental landscapes

Post-Southern Geographies: Space and Literature in the Contemporary American South

From a geocritical standpoint, American gothic literature historically relies on the symbolical space of the wilderness: a labyrinthine parapsychological realm of darkness and irrationality, and a rhetorical inversion of pastoral motives. The traditional sense of place of the American South stems from society’s projected cultural values on the environment and from a strict separation of Garden and Wasteland. This separation was no longer held after agricultural capitalism swept the region in the 1920s and 1930s, changing the landscape forever and bringing about semiotic chaos in what was once an orderly landscape of Jeffersonian descent. With the advent of the post-southern era, as described by Martyn Bone, literature struggled to redefine pastoral and gothic chronotopes in a quest for new geographical grounds in which the fragmented collective identity of the region could be rooted. Through the analysis of contemporary southern works, this essay aims at re-defining pastoral and gothic spaces in post-southern America

Southern Wastelands: Alas, Babylon, The Road, and the A-Bomb in the Garden

The U.S. South has often been depicted as the closest incarnation of an American Eden. From John Smith’s works, through Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, to W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, the southern states elicited comparison with a luxuriant natural paradise and an ecological (and, after Jefferson’s treatise, democratic) utopia. Southern Gothic destroyed the South’s pastoral pretensions on a socio-anthropological level, but not until recently this region was used as an overtly post-apocalyptic locale that replaced the image of the garden with that of a barren deathscape. Even if works such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Omar El-Akkad’s American War, and Frank Owen’s South don’t openly address nuclear scenarios, they evoke an imagery that, through the death of the biosphere, climatic disaster and the destruction of the status quo, re-inscribes and updates Cold War terrors into ecologically, existentially and politically conscious narratives that, inspired by atomic aftermaths, investigate the collapse of the U.S. South’s Edenic imagination, and of American society at large. Situated at the intersection between post-apocalyptic culture, social criticism, and environmental issues, this essay will analyze contemporary literary depictions of the U.S. South as a dystopian wasteland

reliability analysis of centralized versus decentralized zoning strategies for paratransit services

Abstract ADA paratransit services are a very large and ever-growing industry providing door-to-door transportation services for people with disability and elderly customers. Paratransit system, however, just like all other public transportation systems, suffers from travel time variability due to various factors and as a result gives its customers unreliable services. Although service reliability is a very important aspect in transportation study, it has not received much attention in the paratransit research community. A quantitative study evaluating the paratransit service reliability under different zoning strategies is yet to be found. This research filled this gap. Statistical models were proposed to represent travel time variability. Simulation experiments based on real demand data from Houston, Los Angeles and Boston were performed to quantitatively compare the reliability performance of centralized and decentralized operating strategies under different travel time variability levels. Results showed that the decentralized strategy, compared to the centralized no-zoning strategy, substantially improves the reliability of paratransit in terms of on-time performance. This research provides a framework for paratransit agencies to evaluate the service reliability of different organizational strategies through the simulation method

Safety at LCs in Italy: evidence from the Safer-LC Project

n/

The impact of land use characteristics for sustainable mobility: the case study of Rome

Sustainable mobility requires actions to reduce the need for travel, to promote modal shift, to reduce trip lengths and to increase efficiency of transport system. Public transport could play an important role to solve part of the needs previously reported. Starting from these remarks, the present paper analyse the role, the importance and the impact of land use characteristics to develop services able to compete with automobile use. This analysis is carried out by studying the real world case of the city of Rome in Italy. The results of the test carried out highlight the importance of density of residences and activities, the need for a good quality access system to the transit services stops and the importance of the configuration of the transit network, identifying the best way to connect the different districts of the urban area. However, single actions are not sufficient to achieve a sustainable transport system: these actions can be successful only if they are planned in a complex unique system that helps the synergic development of the effects of the single actions proposed

A southern mode of the imagination: spazio e mito nella narrativa di Cormac McCarthy

Oggetto di questo studio è l’analisi del ruolo dello spazio nei romanzi appalachiani di Cormac McCarthy. Attraverso una geografia ibrida, tanto realistica quanto espressionistica, l’autore evoca lo spazio mitico per eccellenza del sud statunitense: il giardino prelapsario delle rappresentazioni pastorali. Critici come Jay Ellis e Georg Guillemin hanno individuato la predominanza del setting sui personaggi e le trame dei romanzi di McCarthy, aprendo la via a una lettura di tipo geocritico/ geopoetico, essendo la rappresentazione dello spazio il luogo testuale ove indubbiamente la poetica dell’autore si realizza appieno. In virtù del suo ibridismo, la geografia di McCarthy è una matrice, un terzospazio fluido che, se di frequente risponde ai canoni della pastorale, più spesso mostra quello che Lewis P. Simpson ha definito come il suo opposto estetico e simbolico: il gotico. Il genere pastorale è tipicamente espressione di un ordine divino e, nel caso del Sud, di uno sguardo retrospettivo e malinconico che interpreta il presente sul modello di un passato idealizzato. Lo spazio gotico (nella definizione di Ruth D. Weston), al contrario, è irrazionale, caotico e imprevedibile. Se la critica ha generalmente posizionato l’autore in osservanza o trasgressione delle strutture mitiche tradizionali, è mia opinione che un approccio efficace debba contemplare una compresenza di questi paradigmi. L’opera di McCarthy è dedicata agli uomini nello spazio, ed è caratterizzata da un’erraticità di fondo che è un continuo tentativo di orientamento ideologico. Il vagabondaggio continuo dei personaggi diviene espressione di un’alienazione dal territorio che, storicamente, è stato per il Sud luogo di definizione identitaria e culturale, racchiusa nel concetto ubiquo e sfuggente di sense of place. La pastorale come mito e mappa, e il gotico come anti-mito e labirinto, forniscono dunque gli strumenti ermeneutici fondamentali per comprendere la dialettica tra spazio e personaggi in McCarthy, e, di conseguenza, l’evoluzione del tradizionale sense of place nella narrativa del Sud contemporaneo

Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious

The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of space and the different layers of significance associated to it in the Image Comics series Manifest Destiny. The American frontier epic still stand as one of the vastest and most important mythological sources of the US. The frontier space is not of course limited to its geographical dimension – at least from 1893 onwards, when the “closure” of the frontier and the publication of the Turner Thesis made it a polysemic “place” in which psychological, political and social elements met and conflicted with one another. Since the definition of this space was always dependent upon ideological stances, its depiction has always oscillated between the poles of Utopia and Dystopia, blending realism, imagination and ideology. Manifest Destiny is not an exception – its spatial dimension conjugates history and mythology, while also showing the strong influence of popular culture and pulp culture’s horror and weird literature, mainly via its most famous author: H. P. Lovecraft. Through the use of some classical outlooks on the American frontier like Frederick Jackson Turner and Richard Slotkin’s theses, together with some more general contributions on the cultural and narrative meaning of space like Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, Yi-Fu Tuan’s human geography and Ruth D. Weston’s analysis of the gothic space, the essay goes through the “mindscape” projected by Manifest Destiny’s geography and addresses its symbolic and allegorical meaning. As a result, the series’ unconventional take on American mythology and its iconoclastic political agenda are thoroughly deconstructed and examined