CoSMo | Comparative Studies in Modernism

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2024-06-29T23:14:41+02:00

CoSMo 24 (fascicolo completo).

Scarica il Sommario

2024-06-30T10:07:26+02:00

Sommario del numero.

Le ideologie del fantastico

2024-06-30T10:07:24+02:00

Introduzione al numero.

Fantastico e ideologia

2024-06-30T10:07:34+02:00

For decades, Italian critics have regarded the fantastic as the disengaged and escapist genre par excellence. This article investigates two episodes in this long history: a critic’s essay and a writer’s novel. While the critic, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, belongs to the group of interpreters who consider the fantastic a form of escapism without an authentic grip on reality, the writer, Giancarlo Buzzi, in his novel Il senatore (The Senator) shows how the fantastic can become an effective instrument of ideological critique of the capitalist and industrial system.

Nuances fantastiques

2024-06-30T10:07:41+02:00

The fantastic universes of Rhys Hughes, Mélanie Fazi and Ana T. Pereira lead the reader to a subversion of the current understanding of contemporary urban habits, in opposition to the idea that the fantastic plays a “defence of the status quo” (Monléon 1990). These three authors elaborate on how the fantastic “traces limits on cultural epistemological and ontological framings” (Jackson 1981). This epistemological aspect of the fantastic meets the epistemological dimension of the ideology (Eagleton 1991), because ideologies “are multilayered symbols of reality that brought together complex ideas” (Freeden 2003). The fantastic, with its absurd and unusual fictional universes, subverts the symbols of predictable cosmovisions. The purpose of this study is to examine the strategies and tools developed in order to ponder the ethical and ideological values in the short stories “Corneropolis” and “The City That Was Itsef” by R. Hughes, “La cité travestie” by M. Fazi and “A rua sem nome” by A. T. Pereira.

Mères vampires et créatures hybrides

2024-06-30T10:07:50+02:00

Among the developments in vampire fiction over the last thirty years, the treatment of maternity and the hybrid stand out. The female vampire has imposed her fertility and dominant social functions. We seek to demonstrate how this phenomenon is part of the current dismantling of the patriarchal vision of women, while at the same time highlighting a certain obsolete feminism, and ultimately aligning itself with current feminist demands. The proliferation of hybrid creatures is also significant in our view and is of particular interest because of its link with the divisive debate surrounding transhumanism and eugenics. Finally, using specific examples, we look at the contemporary questions about the future of humanity raised by the alliance of these two trends.

Post 9/11 Fears and the Latin American Fantastic

2024-06-30T10:07:53+02:00

The relationship between fantastic narrative and ideology has rarely and obliquely been the subject of the ever-growing literature on the genre. In this paper, I read the New Weird in Latin America (Sanchiz & Bizzarri 2020) as a site uniquely able to register – but also actively engage in – epochal shifts that are having a profound impact on our relationship to ideology. Žižek’s reading of the era-defining changes produced by the 9/11 terror attacks is mobilized to explore three key elements of Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate: first, its Weird treatment of the “enemy within” and its reconfiguration of the Cortazarian trope of the “casa tomada”; second, its use of a very particular double-first-person narrator who refuse(s) or fail(s) to identify a real (political) enemy and instead scapegoat(s) multiple (female) Others; third, the impact of this same hallucinatory narrative voice on the perception of the shocking ecological catastrophe which, though central to the plot, undergoes what Žižek terms “derealization.” In turn, these readings offer new perspectives on how the Argentine and Latin American New Weird are opening up new forms of the fantastic that are able to better account for the impacts of contemporary (un)realities on gendered subjectivities; and might, ultimately, be able to offer ways of narrating ourselves out of ecosystem collapse.

Paredes de piel

2024-06-30T11:03:33+02:00

The present article considers the short story “Pesadilla” (Deshoras 1982) by Julio Cortázar, with the purpose of reflecting on the representation of the protagonist’s sick body, and the fantastic dynamic that it reveals, as a discursive device that reflects and criticizes the social perversion that the last Argentine dictatorial regime carries out. The theoretical hypothesis that drives this study is based on the observation of the fertile relation between the representation of the character’s body and the articulation of the fantastic mechanism in the stories of Julio Cortázar, that allow us to think of the body as a function of fantastic logic (Cannavacciuolo 2020). According to this approach, in the story considered, Mecha’s body becomes the inter-mediate element (Lugnani 1983, Bhabha 1994) between the two ontological orders of different nature that collide in the story, as well as the point of friction that externalizes the ambiguity of fantastic element. The next step is the analysis of the construction of the protagonist's corporeal gestures as infralanguage (Galimberti 2013 [1983]); since the young woman's body becomes an area where a slippery meaning is generated, which allows access to oblique and heterogeneous ontological and epistemological orders and structures and, with them, allude to another story, silenced by verbal language and where lies the unsolvable mystery of where the sinister element comes from.

El encierro de Cervantes

2024-06-30T10:07:44+02:00

The following article analyzes three theater pieces produced during the dictatorial and post-dictatorial periods in late 20th-Century Argentina: El acompañamiento (1981) by Carlos Gorostiza, ¡Ladran, Che! (1994) by Carlos Alsina, and La razón blindada (2005) by Aristides Vargas. The essay explores the way these plays rewrite and re-signify Cervantes’s Don Quixote as means to reflect upon topics like captivity, freedom, the disciplinary State (Foucault), and utopia. The appearance of Don Quijote in these plays—either as a character or an ideal—helps us understand the role of the fantastic as an artistic response and as an alternative to the horror engendered in the context of dictatorial regimes.

“El oro de Bizancio se fatiga en San Marcos”

2024-06-30T11:06:39+02:00

Considering Venice as seminal literary topos as many Hispanic and Hispanic American writers of the second half of the XX century did, in this article we analyze different texts by Juan Perucho who ‘portrays’ the lagunar city steeped in history. They are little-known texts, with dense literary and historical references, from “lyrical cells” (cf. P. Gimferrer) to short fabulations in prose; where the historiographical precision -always questionable- is created telling deliberately improbable stories that are paradoxically much more truthful than the real one. From these texts emerge that inventing a ‘fantastic’ Venice serves Perucho precisely to demonstrate -as Calvino did with his trilogy Our Ancestors, in the same years- that it is easier to approach a “revivalistic” interpretation of history (cf. C. Argan) i.e. imagining an anachronistic revitalization of the past, instead of believing that it is possible to narrate the lost past of a unique place only by knowing it historically.

La espada justiciera de lo fantástico

2024-06-30T10:07:58+02:00

This article proposes an approach to the stories “Parabellum” and “El pacto”, by Juan Marsé, from the ideological component and the theories of the fantastic. Both stories arise from an article by the Catalan writer about the memoirs of a Spanish politician who falsifies his memories during the Spanish Transition. In response, Marsé demonstrates his discontent by writing two stories in which the supernatural works as a way of condemning the actions of politicians. The aim of this paper is to study the background of the narratives, the figure of the implied author —which allows a glimpse of the empirical author's ideology— and the impossible facts with which the realist planes are transgressed and the fantastic is articulated.

El encuentro entre lo fantástico y lo distópico en “La biblioteca fantasmal” de José María Merino

2024-06-30T10:07:29+02:00

In “La biblioteca fantasmal” (2021), José María Merino creates the fantastic effect by adding aspects of the uncanny to the realistic plot of the story, the protagonist's visit to a Swiss library. On the level of perception, the referential contexts of Zurich and Madrid serve as a backdrop for the hero's encounter with a deceased friend while, on the level of discourse, the structure of the Zurich library strangely coincides with the fictional spaces in some of Borges' texts. Moreover, these same modalities set off a dystopian process: slight modifications in the appearance of the cities mentioned generate a total urban disintegration, which is reflected in a decomposition of literary masterpieces. Compromising both the human future and the narrative itself, the encounter between the fantastic and the dystopian emphasizes the socio-cultural relevance of the story and intensifies the hesitation experienced by the reader.

Dispositivi schermici e frontiere metavisuali

2024-06-30T10:07:36+02:00

By considering one of the latest works by the contemporary Lithuanian filmmaker Šarūnas Bartas, this paper aims to show why Frost (2017) can be considered an ideal example for research on screenology. More specifically, the article focuses on the way screens, as comprehensive and pervasive visual apparatuses, affect not just Frost’s visuality but also its own narrative, proposing how screens (be they human faces, rear-view mirrors, YouTube windows, smartphone lenses, found footage or archive pictures) are both visual and metavisual elements in Frost’s storytelling. The here renamed “directional”, “anthropomorphic”, “convergent”, and “environmental” screens are pointed towards the Ukrainian outpost while turning themselves into border and frontier aesthetic devices that set an ongoing visual trespassing in space and time. Ultimately, the variety of theoretical contributions and the extensive and multi-perspective approaches help to reveal the inevitable denseness of the screen contemporary notion.

Dalla storia al mito, dalla parodia all’antiutopia

2024-06-30T11:04:58+02:00

1922 was the year of publication of two important science-fiction novels: Karel Čapek’s Továrna na absolutno (The Absolute at Large) and Aleksej Tolstoy’s Aèlita. The paper aims to propose an analysis of these two examples of middlebrow literature to highlight the relationships between History, Myth, parody, and anti-utopia.

“Si va e si torna insieme”

2024-06-30T10:07:47+02:00

The hypothesis of the present work is that contemporary dystopian and (post)apocalyptic imaginaries, beyond their good intentions, can become, unconsciously and paradoxically, instances of acceptance of the status quo and of the dominant model. Based on a reading of two recent Latin American novels (Rafael Pinedo’s Plop and Emiliano Monge's Tejer la oscuridad), a critique of this imaginary is proposed by the analysis of the implicit cultural assumptions of this discourse. It is suggested that the representation of a post-apocalyptic society, based on the idea of a return to a primordial and natural barbarism of human beings, has clear origins in Western thought and that – in order to make the critical power of the eco-dystopian discourse effective – it would be useful to radically revise our imagery in a truly anti-evolutionary and anti-progressive perspective.