Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti

This article analyses a small selection of texts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with the aim to shed new light on the role that the experience of combat during the First World War played in the evolution of the narrative of the body in Marinetti’s imagination. Different pre-war narratives of the body will be first analysed and then placed against the backdrop of the cultural productions of the war years. Specific attention will be paid to the images of the prosthetic body with a wider look onto other social discourses (medical science, politics, propaganda). The article will argue that Marinetti re-writes and adjust his earlier narratives of the body and highlight the ambivalences and social fantasies, mostly relevant to gender and sexuality, underlying them

Dall’ut pictura poësis all’ut musica pictura: un percorso francese tra sette e ottocento

The article tackles the crisis of it pictura poesis as an aesthetic concept, which occurs between the 18th and 19 centuries. The undermining of this principle, which had been indeed the main pillar of academic theory, coincides with the beginning of a theoretical reflection on the autonomy of the pictorial language from the verbal one. By dwelling on French culture on the transition between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, the author aims to demonstrate how the musical pattern played a fundamental role in the development of such a reflection. On the one hand, Lessing refuses the principle of ut pictura poesis and acknowledges poetry as a free art, while restricting the features of painting and sculpture, considered as just aiming to represent beauty. On the other, French theoreticians foster an alternative reflection pivoting on the linguistic features of visual arts, thus freeing them from the subordination to the literary model. By means of a reconstruction starting from Roger de Piles and encompassing also Paillot de Montabert and Delacroix, the article stresses in particular the role that instrumental music as an anti-mimetic art performed in stimulating a new discussion on the autonomy of the pictorial code

Entering the Simulacra World. Aesthetic and Cultural Phenomenologies in Literature, Media, and the Arts

This issue of Between aims to investigate the phenomenology of simulacra and their range of functions (conceptual, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and in the media). What is meant here by ‘simulacrum’ is any artificial creature or phantasm that imitates or replicates the outward form and/or behaviour of living beings, especially human beings. By doing so, it blurs the boundaries between life and artifice, human and non-human. As a notion, ‘simulacrum’ covers a variety of hybrid, liminal and often spectral figures populating the premodern, modern and contemporary imagination: from statues to puppets, from golems to homunculi, from automata to robots, from cyborgs to avatars and, ultimately, Artificial Intelligence. The case studies collected here lay the groundwork for an inquiry wherein literary works are assessed from both the point of view of textual analysis and in connection with the compelling relevance that the theme of simulacra has been gaining in the cultural sphere, including contemporary debates on the ‘trans-‘ and ‘posthuman’

«Le goût pour Michel-Ange renaîtra». Stendhal et la postérité de l’œuvre d’art

Questo articolo si propone di mettere in luce un aspetto della produzione di Stendhal sulle arti visive, facendo leva sull’”Histoire de la peinture en Italie” (1817) e su altri testi. Nello specifico, si nota in Beyle un approccio storicista che lo porta a mettere in guardia il lettore sulle differenti abitudini visive e sui diversi codici culturali del pubblico a lui contemporaneo quando si confronta con opere del passato, legate a contesti completamente diversi. Stendhal sottolinea frequentemente l’abisso che separa l’epoca moderna da quelle antiche, e la necessità per lo spettatore di cercare di avvicinarsi alla mentalità del pubblico delle opere del passato per poterle comprendere in profondità

L’Atala de Chateaubriand et l’Atala de Girodet : la beauté de la mort

Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Atala au tombeau, 1808. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Anne-Louis Girodet : le peintre de l’ut pictura poesis Vous avez déjà touché, Messieurs, le touchant épisode du Génie du christianisme, qui fournit à M. Girodet l’occasion, périlleuse pour tout autre, de se mesurer sur le même terrain avec le chantre d’Atala, et aussi le rare avantage de faire douter entre les deux ouvrages, lequel auroit le plus contribué à la célébrité de l’autre... Comment savoir en effet qui a le ..

Entering the Simulacra World. Aesthetic and Cultural Phenomenologies in Literature, Media, and the Arts

This issue of Between aims to investigate the phenomenology of simulacra and their range of functions (conceptual, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and in the media). What is meant here by ‘simulacrum’ is any artificial creature or phantasm that imitates or replicates the outward form and/or behaviour of living beings, especially human beings. By doing so, it blurs the boundaries between life and artifice, human and non-human. As a notion, ‘simulacrum’ covers a variety of hybrid, liminal and often spectral figures populating the premodern, modern and contemporary imagination: from statues to puppets, from golems to homunculi, from automata to robots, from cyborgs to avatars and, ultimately, Artificial Intelligence. The case studies collected here lay the groundwork for an inquiry wherein literary works are assessed from both the point of view of textual analysis and in connection with the compelling relevance that the theme of simulacra has been gaining in the cultural sphere, including contemporary debates on the ‘trans-‘ and ‘posthuman’