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L'esperienza estetica: un varco oltre i limiti del significato
Get PDFTracciare l’essenza di un’opera d’arte è impresa ardua e vana, se l’indagine si limita alle proprietà che questa dovrebbe esemplificare. Tuttavia appare interessante riflettere sull’esperienza estetica della letteratura prendendo le distanze dall’essenzialismo ed ampliando il discorso alle dinamiche che consentono a Montaigne di definirla in qualità di referente della «humaine condition». Non è, infatti, possibile scindere la scrittura dall’esperienza umana: l’arte è provocata dalla vita e la vita è provocata dall’arte, sostiene Bachtin riflettendo sulla relazione logico-congiuntiva fra cultura ed esistenza.Pertanto la riflessione metalinguistica coniuga letteratura e filosofia, prendendo le distanze da qualsiasi vano progetto d’interpretazione categorica per mettere in discussione la prospettiva che vincola la letteratura ai contesti, trascurando il valore principe dei testi. Giovanni Bottiroli afferma che il contestualismo uccide la letteratura, pertanto il testicidio sarebbe causato dal desiderio di ridurre un testo all’artefatto, privandolo della possibilità di essere dinamico e in continua metamorfosi: al contrario l’esperienza estetica desidera tradursi in una pratica sperimentale avulsa da regole stabilite a priori, quasi a esorcizzare l’eredità di una semiotica normativa e di qualsiasi forma di assolutismo essa imponga.L’opera d’arte va, innanzitutto, isolata rispetto all’intentio auctoris, per poter cogliere a pieno l’intentio operis che, nel panorama culturale contemporaneo, offre esempi di lavori che reclamano la propria nudità a scapito di qualsiasi interpretazione riduzionista. Prova calzante è la letteratura labirintica di Yoko Tawada, la cui erranza sospende ogni differenza, collocandosi sulla soglia di infiniti luoghi, culturali e non. Tra ideogrammi e alfabeto tedesco, il linguaggio, privo di pretese logocentriche, approda in una terra nullius. Il velo del fraintendimento e dell’equivoco diventa nuova frontiera dell’esperienza estetica che si apre allo sperimentalismo: laddove il testo si lega indissolubilmente al tema dell’identità che è incertezza, perdita e disconoscimento, la dimensione artistica si colloca dentro e fuori ogni contesto, il contenuto diventa forma in metamorfosi e l’opera d’arte, capolavoro che si fa vanitas proprietatis, disintegra qualsivoglia definizione di carattere o proprietà per assurgere a icastica ostentazione di sé.Portraying the essence of a work of art is a very hard and vain effort if the inquiry is limited to the properties it should exemplify. However it is interesting to consider the aesthetic experience by distancing ourselves from the essentialism and extending our thought to those dynamics thanks to which Mantaigne defines it as a sort of report of the “humaine condition.” As a matter of fact it is impossible to separate writing and human experience: art is created by life and life is caused by art, as Bachtin says while considering the logic-linking relationship between culture and existence.Therefore the metalinguistics consideration combines literature and philosophy and abandons every useless project of categorical hermeneutics in order to challenge the perspective which binds literature to contexts, neglecting the main value of the texts. Giovanni Bottiroli claims that contextualism kills literature, so the text murder would be caused by the desire of reducing a text to an artefact, depriving the possibility of being dynamic and in an endless metamorphosis: on the contrary the aesthetic experience wished to lead to an experimental practice far removed from criteria established a priori, as though it would exorcize the heritage of a normative semiotics and of any sort of absolutism this study of signs dictates.The work of art is to be isolated from the intentio auctoris in order to fully understand the intentio operis, which offers today many examples of works claiming their own nakedness at the expense of any reducing interpretation. A suitable evidence is given by Yoko Tawada’s labyrinthine literature, whose wandering suspends every difference and places itself over the border of endless spaces, either cultural or not. The language flows between ideograms and German alphabet: without logocentric demands, it lands to a terra nullius. The veil of misunderstanding and misinterpretation becomes an original frontier of the aesthetic experience, which spreads to experimentalism: wherever the text indissolubly binds to the theme of identity, that is uncertainty, loss and disavowal, the content becomes shape in metamorphosis and the work of art, masterpiece getting vanitas proprietatis, destroys any definition of property to surge to a vivid ostentation of itself
Riflessioni sull'elemento magico
Get PDFPsicologi come Leon Festinger e linguisti come George Lakoff hanno investigato a lungo il rapporto tra realtà, razionalità ed emozioni. Si tratta di un campo di ricerca che nel corso del tempo ha conquistato sempre più scienziati afferenti alle materie più eterogenee: matematici, filosofi, neuroscienziati, psicologi, linguisti e narratologi. Proprio da questi ultimi e dall’analisi della letteratura relativa al magico nasce uno dei contributi più utili alla comprensione e alla formulazione di una possibile risposta al problema dell’incoerenza umana. La magia e più in generale la credenza nel magico rappresenterebbero infatti una delle forme di comprensione della realtà, in parziale opposizione a scienza e religione. Tale prospettiva rende salienti i lati positivi e negativi della magia, aprendo inoltre una via verso nuove ricerche.Psychologists such as Leon Festinger and linguists such as George Lakoff have long investigated the relationship between reality, rationality and emotions. This is a field of research that over the course of time has conquered many scientists belonging to the most heterogeneous fields, as mathematicians, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists and narratologists. From the latter as well as from the analysis of the literature about the magic has emerged one of the most helpful contributions to the understanding and formulation of an answer to the problem of human incoherence. According to these approaches, the magic, and more in general the belief in magic, represents one of the resources we can resort to in order to understand reality, in partial opposition to science and religion. This perspective makes salient the positive as well as the negative sides of the magic, while at the same time opening a path to new researches
Un tesoro di diavolo: perché gli antieroi seriali sono i nostri protagonisti preferiti
Get PDFNegli ultimi venti anni la serialità televisiva ha prodotto una forma di neo-folklore attorno al quale si aggregano avidi consumatori di tutto il mondo. Questa televisione di qualità ha manifestato sin da subito una certa predilezione per personaggi complessi, dotati di una terza dimensione, quelli che genericamente definiamo antieroi. Essi costituiscono un espediente narrativo che permette la creazione di personaggi interessanti dal punto di vista emotivo e ambigui dal punto di vista morale e nelle serie tv si manifestano in protagonisti in cui convivono qualità positive e, soprattutto, qualità negative. Ma perché questi personaggi, che hanno caratteristiche che criticheremmo severamente nella realtà, ci piacciono così tanto? Quali sono i meccanismi che favoriscono una profonda affezione nei confronti di questi antieroi televisivi? L’affective disposition theory e i sistemi di identificazione e di disimpegno morale potrebbero aiutarci a rispondere a questi interrogativi.In the last twenty years, tv series have been producing a new form of folklore which gathers greedy consumers from all over the world. Quality television immediately showed a certain predilection for complex characters with a third dimension which we generally define “anti-heroes.” They represent a narrative device which allows the creation of interesting characters from an emotional point of view and ambiguous from a moral one. They manifest themselves in the TV series as main characters in whom positive qualities and mostly negative qualities coexist. But why do we like these characters so much even though we would severely criticize them in everyday life? What are the mechanisms that create a deep affection towards these television anti-heroes? The affective disposition theory and the systems of identification and moral disengagement could help us answer these questions
Return to Literature. A Manifesto in Favour of Theory and against Methodologically Reactionary Studies (Cultural Studies etc.)
Get PDFWhat is literature for us today? And what will become of it in the next few years? Our era only seems willing to recognize the complexity of the field of science; whereas as far as literature is concerned, it is still thought that a rigorous training is not necessary and many deceive themselves into thinking that it is possible to do without the analytical tools created in the twentieth century and more recently thanks to theory.The refusal of theory is justified by the most tenacious prejudices, or simply by bad faith. It is believed (or some pretend to believe) that literary theory coincides with the years of structuralism, with the primacy of linguistics, and with the thesis of the intransitivity of language.Reality is quite different. Literary theory is a hybrid space where linguistics, rhetoric, philosophy and the theories of desire merge and interweave. In this space, which undergoes constant renewal, literature is understood to be an intellectual and emotive experience, and an irreplaceable source of knowledge. Literary texts are studied as dynamic objects that are able to cross the borders of the era in which they were produced and enter the “great time” (as Bakhtin called it). However, a text can only expand, like the Japanese flowers that Proust spoke about at the beginning of the Recherche, if it is immersed in the water of good interpretations. And good interpretations are not infinite as Derrida and the followers of reception theory believed. Only doxa is infinite.Literature is a way of thinking. It offers the opportunity for a complex mental experience that no algorithm could ever describe or envisage. By creating characters with flexible identities, literature describes the human condition from the viewpoint of non-coincidence with oneself. It addresses all individuals inviting them to understand their higher possibilities.Yet these possibilities, the investigation of which is where the very vocation of literature lies, have always encountered enormous obstacles. The difficulty in understanding and analyzing those virtually expanding multilateral objects that are literary texts has caused most scholars to limit themselves to reductive and peripheral investigations. This type of research should be called contextualism. It has presented itself in different versions: the history of literature in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, cultural studies (in other words the anti-theory) in the last few decades; but also in the form of an unlimited intertextualism (Derrida), far removed from any social-historic interest. However, all types of contextualism share a common attitude: they deny the individuality of the text, they ignore (or fear) the “labyrinth of linkages” (Tolstoy) that form it, its complexity and its beauty. Therefore, they take refuge in the contexts: the nation, the class, the race, the gender, the ideology, etc. or in the set of texts by the same author or by other authors.The inability to analyze and interpret literature has caused enormous damage. Contextualism destroys literature. These considerations are addressed not only to professors, but also to students in the hope that this damage is not (or will not become) irreversible. We can no longer postpone the rebellion against contextualism and the University requires innovation. The conceptually and methodologically reactionary studies must be fought, even when they masquerade as good intentions and try to hide their intellectual poverty behind stereotypes of ideology
Reading Myself Elsewhere. A Few Notes on Reading Otherwise
Get PDFThis essay investigates the emotional attachments we bring to a book: we will describe the identification processes that reading may involve, and how these processes affect the reader’s experience and identity. When it is authentic, the act of reading cannot be considered as a moment of mirroring, but it includes a more profound identification experience to the extent that reading becomes a sort of event, a gesture that at times may alter the reader’s perception of her identity since, through it, she can access the buried spaces of the unconscious. If it is true that every work demands an interpretation, at the same timethe fruition of literary texts by readers is inextricably linked to their desire for personal knowledge. This is why reading is neither a cognitive nor a psychobiological experience, insofar as it involves a more complex and personal interpretative and intersubjective activity: reader and text become a sort of innovative enterprise through which connections are not only unmasked, but above all continuously created. For the purposes of the discussion and to illuminate better the point I want to make, I will implicate myself and my own personal experience as reader of Sylvia Plath
On Jakobson’s Intersemiotic Translations in Asterix Comics
Get PDFThe original idea of intersemiotic translation created by Roman Jakobson, which implies the translation of one sign system to another, has been specially associated with book-to-film translation and vice-versa, amongst many other possibilities. Within this conception, it has been commonly considered the whole text as well as the fully translated version into another system. However, there is a text type in which several sign systems are constantly interplaying, where the translation into another language or culture would require the consideration of all intersemiotic possibilities so as to “better convey” its meanings to the target readers: we are referring to comics. This work aims to reflect upon the kind of intersemiotic translation that occurs in a comic album that is translated from one language into another, i.e., as understood by Jakobson’s classification as interlingual translation. To develop this idea, some pairs of frames (from French into Brazilian Portuguese) from comic books of the French character Asterix were analysed, seeking to show how the translator handled the comics’ several possible communication modes (words, typography, object images, human expressions and gestures, layouts). From this analysis it was observed that the translator can use one mode (here the multimodality concept is evoked) to translate another, thus surpassing barriers usually established to keep comics images from being altered (due to copyright or any other reasons). In fact, the translator uses different modes of translation, often “retrieving” meanings from other modes—although not always successfully—, but showing great creativity most of the time. Going back to Jakobson’s idea, this work also intends to show that intersemiotic translation is embedded in the other two types of translations suggested by this renowned linguist. Consequently, such classification (intralingual, interlingual, intersemiotic) can be subject to questioning and further development.
L’etica della virtù nei dialoghi di Charles Péguy, Alfred Döblin e Carlo Michelstaedter
Get PDFIn questo saggio l’autore storicizza e studia la rinascita del dialogo come genere letterario all’inizio del ventesimo secolo. Prendendo in considerazione i dialoghi di Charles Péguy, Alfred Döblin, and Carlo Michelstaedter, l’autore dimostra che la nuova forma simbolica novecentesca della tradizione platonica, sebbene sia formalmente preservata, presenta come elemento caratterizzante l’etica come forma di espressione ed esistenza. In questo senso, il dialogo non è, solo, una struttura maieutica, ma piuttosto un luogo di formazione dove i personaggi possono recuperare e costruire la loro identità.In this paper I aim to historicize and study the re-birth of dialogue as a literary genre in the early twentieth-century European culture. By taking into account Charles Péguy, Alfred Döblin, and Carlo Michelstaedter’s dialogues, I argue that the new symbolic form of the Platonic tradition is indeed formally preserved, but its ground is focused on the ethics as form of both expression and existence. In this sense, dialogue is not (just) a maieutic structure, rather is a "Building", where characters can recover and build their own identity.
Perdono e intimità in due storie d’amore: L’uomo che guarda e Suite francese. I tentativi di superare le barriere narcisistiche all’amore nelle teorie di Massimo Recalcati e di François Jullien
Get PDFIn questo contributo presentiamo le versioni dell'amore proposte da Massimo Recalcati e da François Jullien in alternativa all'interpretazione tutta improntata al rispecchiamento narcisistico data da Sigmund Freud. Il confronto con la teoria lacaniana ci permetterà di mostrare il legame dell'amore narcisistico con i meccanismi di difesa dell'Io, in opposizione alle possibilità creative e agli sguardi sul Reale che un amore coraggioso, in quanto rapporto di natura distintiva, può riservare al soggetto. A titolo di esempi delle diverse manifestazioni dell'amore saranno analizzati il romanzo L'uomo che guarda di Alberto Moravia e il film Suite francese di Saul Dibb.In this contribution we present the versions of love proposed by Massimo Recalcati and François Jullien as alternatives to the freudian interpretation, imprinted on the narcissistic reflection. The confrontation with the lacanian theory will show the link between narcissistic love and the Ego's defense mechanisms, in opposition to the creative possibilities that a courageous love, as a relationship of distinctive nature, can reserve the subject. The novel L'uomo che guarda by Alberto Moravia and the movie French Suite by Saul Dibb will be analyzed as examples of brave love
Non è detta l'ultima parola. Il rapporto tra testo e immagine in Point Omega, La carte et le territoire e Autopsia dell'ossessione
Get PDFQuesto contributo intende concentrarsi sulla forma più antica di traduzione intersemiotica: l’ekphrasis. In un’epoca come la nostra, sempre più dominata dalle immagini, praticare l’ecfrasi significa ritenere che le parole, la narrativa e più in generale la letteratura siano in grado di tenere testa all’universo visuale. Per mostrarlo, esaminerò tre opere letterarie del 2010 in cui viene impiegata l’ekphrasis: Point Omega di Don DeLillo, La carte et le territoire di Michel Houellebecq e Autopsia dell’ossessione di Walter Siti.The aim of this paper is to focus on ekphrasis, the oldest form of intersemiotic translation. In an increasingly image-dominated age like ours, using ekphrasis means to believe that words, fiction and more generally literature can compete with the visual universe. In order to show this, three literary works published in 2010 in which ekphrasis is used will be analyzed in detail: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, Michel Houellebecq’s La carte et le territoire and Walter Siti’s Autopsia dell’ossessione
Visual storytelling: morfologia e interculturalismo
Get PDFIl linguaggio visivo utilizza un lessico di frames fissati nella memoria, strategie combinatorie per unire questi frames in unità significative e una grammatica morfologica che governa la combinazione di immagini sequenziali in espressioni coerenti. Il Visual Storytelling è un processo costitutivo e organizzativo della narrazione attraverso segni visivi che, più del linguaggio verbale, è comprensibile e vicino a una lingua adamitica comune all’umanità. In realtà, similmente a quello verbale e gestuale, il linguaggio visivo non è universale ma presenta un lessico, una grammatica e una morfologia fortemente influenzati dal contesto culturale. Dal confronto sistematico tra i comics euro-statunitensi e i manga giapponesi operato presso il Visual Language Lab diretto nei Paesi Bassi da Neil Cohn emerge che le differenze narrative e comunicative in termini di indipendenza e interdipendenza tra Oriente e Occidente si manifestano non solo nel frame visuale dei fumetti, ma anche negli spot pubblicitari e nei siti web relativamente alla focalizzazione narrativa e al punto di vista.Visual language uses a lexicon of memory frames, combinatorial strategies to create meaningful units combining these frames, and a morphological grammar that governs the sequential images combination in coherent expressions. Visual Storytelling is a process of creation and organization of narration through visual signs, which seems to be more understandable than verbal language. Therefore, it seems to be closer to a sort of ʻadamiticʼ language, that is a common language to people from all countries and cultures. Nevertheless just as spoken language and signs language don’t have an universal manifestation, visual language varies according to the cultural context. From the systematic comparison between Euro-American comics and Japanese manga performed by the Visual Language Lab directed by Neil Cohn in the Netherlands, it emerges that narrative and communicative differences in terms of independence and interdependence between East and West are manifested not only in the visual framework of comics, but also in advertising and websites especially regarding narrative point of view and narrative voices