508 research outputs found
«Everything is intermedial». A Conversation with Lars Elleström
No full textLars Elleström needs no introduction to intermediality and comparative literature scholars. Massimo Fusillo and Mattia Petricola had a conversation with him just a few weeks before the publication of his new, major theoretical work. The conversation discusses the evolution of Elleström’s theory over the last decade, his formation and influences, Peirce’s semiotics, the history of intermediality, and the notion of media literacy
Watching God in the electronic noise: Philip K. Dick, Bill Viola, and the (video) art of speculative fiction
No full textThis study represents as an attempt to make sense of a rather curious coincidence. In Philip K. Dick's novel A scanner darkly (1973-1977), a character named Tony Amsterdam experiences a mystical vision after an acid trip. God appears to him in the form of «showers of colored sparks, like when something goes wrong with your TV set». In the same year 1973, a young Bill Viola creates Information, a work of video art featuring showers of colored sparks that are eerily similar to the ones seen by Tony Amsterdam.
On the one hand, this article investigates the cultural substratum that the two works have in common vis-à-vis their construction and use of abstract video; it is upon such a substratum that this bizarre coincidence depends. On the other hand, it aims to explore how the speculative use of screens and telecommunication technologies can mediate the religious, the sacred, and, most of all, the mystical.
The first two sections examine Tony Amsterdam’s experience in the context of A scanner darkly, discussing its relation to mysticism, to other episodes in the novel and to Dick’s biography. In section three, I interpret Information as a self-reflexive work of meta-video, proposing to read its aesthetic effect as the result of an electronic ouroboros: a circular video system in which input and output are coincident. Section four bridges the two works by reading them in the light of Jeffrey Sconce’s notion of ‘electronic elsewhere’ (2000) and John Durham Peter’s reflections on the idea of communication (1999). Finally, section five proposes a parallel between the semiotics of visual perception in A scanner darkly and the semiotics of Viola’s abstract video ar
«I’ll kill him and I’ll eat him!»: Peter Greenaway and the cinematic Trauerspiel
No full textThe career of British director Peter Greenaway, now more than four decades long, has often been animated by a profound interest in what one may call the aesthetics of death. This is particularly true for his 80s and 90s films, which explore a wide array of strategies for the staging and ritualization of death. In The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & Her Lover (1989), for the first time, this interest takes Greenaway into the territories of the tragic.I propose to rethink the fundamental relationship that Greenaway’s film entertains with the narrative and aesthetic forms of the tragic. More precisely, I suggest to interpret The Cook in the light of the reflections on the Trauerspiel (mourning-play) that Walter Benjamin elaborates in The Origin of German Tragic Drama [Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels]. After giving a short account of the first macro-section of Benjamin’s essay, I will argue that the opposition between the Thief and the Lover mirrors the Trauerspiel’s opposition between Tyrant and Martyr, that Benjamin regards as one of the conceptual cores of this theatrical form. This, in turn, reflects the presence in the film of a more abstract conflict between two systems for the construction of knowledge and experience. By drawing on Benjamin’s study, I will trace this conflict back to the opposition between nature and books in baroque culture.The battle between the Thief/Tyrant and the Lover/Martyr takes the form of a succession of rites and counter-rites for the (un)making of social bonds, and the film constructs these rites by clearly referring to the Christian imagination and its subversion. I will contend that the motif of the subversion of the Holy Communion can provide us with a unifying key for the interpretation of the film. From a semiotic perspective, this manipulation consists in the substitution of what our culture constructs as food with its dysphoric counterparts: decay, excrement, and human flesh
Introduction: Researching Queer Death
No full textThe present article serves as an introduction to the dossier What do we talk about when we talk about queer death?, edited by M. Petricola. This introduction briefly interrogates the premises, scope, and objectives of Queer Death Studies (QDS) in such a way as to complement the views expressed by the contributors to this collection. I will begin to discuss the premises on which QDS are based in a preamble focused on Italo Calvino’s book Mr. Palomar. Section one will provide a more systematic and analytical perspective on these same premises. I will move on to reconstruct some crucial moments in the genealogy of QDS in Section two and conclude by sketching a research program for QDS in Section three
The Chinese encyclopedia and the living dead. A queer approach to categorization and taxonomy in comparative literature
No full textThis article presents a case study in queer hermeneutics dealing with the construction
of a corpus in a comparative study. More specifically, I propose to queer the category ‘living dead’
by restructuring its internal taxonomy. This will be achieved through the intersection of two
approaches to categorization, both developed in the field of cognitive sciences as elaborations
of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance’: Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory and George
Lakoff’s discussion of classification strategies in the Dyirbal language. I will then analyze the
epistemological implications that derive from restructuring the taxonomy of the living dead in the
light of the notion of ‘nonce taxonomy’, described by Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet.
My aim will be to show, firstly, that Rosch and Lakoff could provide nonce taxonomy with the theoretical
support it needs; and secondly, how the field of comparative literature could be queered
through the systematic use of prototype-based and nonce-taxonomic categorization
Mattia Petricola, I mondi dell’oltremondo. Dante e la Commedia dal fantasy alla fan fiction
No full textReview of Mattia Petricola's I mondi dell’oltremondo. Dante e la Commedia dal fantasy alla fan fiction.Recensione del libro di Mattia Petricola, I mondi dell’oltremondo. Dante e la Commedia dal fantasy alla fan fiction
Into the Video-Inferno: Vertical Television, Experimental Seriality and the Moving Collage in A TV Dante
No full textThis paper focuseson one of the most unique experiments in the history of television: A TV Dante, a fourteen-episode mini-series which aired between 1990 and 1991, partly directed by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway, and partlyby Raúl Ruiz. We will analyze A TV Danteas an early attempt to explore the aesthetic potential of television seriality through theadoption ofan avant-garde approach towardsa fundamental work of the Western canon.We will begin by analyzing Phillips’ illustrated Infernoas a work aimed at constructing amulti-layered andtotalizing representation of the Inferno’s own reception, of the history of mediality and of Phillips’ own identity as an artist. We will then show how the poetics of Phillips’ and Greenaway’s A TV Danteare shaped by what we may call the aesthetics of the moving collage. We will finally focus on Rúiz’s A TV Dante, which dismantles all coherent narrative structures, transforming Dante’s Infernointo a series of powerful images, symbols and visions
«Everything is intermedial». A Conversation with Lars Elleström
No full textUna conversazione con il Presidente dell'Associazione di studi sull'Intermedialità, Lars Ellstrom, che esplora le varie declinazioni contemporanee del concetto, le sue applicazioni ad altre epoche, le sue intersezioni con la semiotica e con la letteratura comparat
Into the Video-Inferno: Vertical Television, Experimental Seriality and the Moving Collage in A TV Dante
No full textThis paper focuses on one of the most unique experiments in the history of television: A TV Dante, a fourteen-episode mini-series aired between 1990 and 1991, partly directed by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway, partly directed by Raoul Ruiz. We will analyse A TV Dante as an early attempt to explore the aesthetic potential of television seriality adopting an avant-garde approach towards a fundamental work of the Western canon.
More specifically, we will compare Phillips-Greenaway and Ruiz’s approaches to the Inferno in order to highlight the formal, aesthetic and conceptual strategies that guide their respective works. Drawing on Phillips’ previous illustrations for the Inferno, the British duo creates an abstract video-otherworld through the use of collage and a rich visual symbology. On the other hand, Ruiz chooses a thoroughly contemporary re-reading of the cantica by setting the action in Santiago de Chile and moving between political commentary and surreal, hauntingly mysterious scenes
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