Apollonius Rhodius

Massimo Fusillo

Apollonius (Rhodius.)

Guido Paduano

Le Argonautiche

Lorenzo Marchese

Gianluigi Simonetti

What is the connection between philosophical enquiries and storytelling in contemporary narrative? Is it possible to outline some features of a so-called philosophical fiction in Western literature throughout the last two centuries? This book aims to provide a plural answer, hosting extensive essays by seven young researchers coming from different fields (Theory of literature, German, American, Russian and Italian contemporary literature, history and evolution of the essayistic form). A short The volume is addressed to all those with a strong interest in both evolution of philosophical speech and history of the novel and has a strong vocation to promote interdisciplinarity in literary studies.

Between Novel-Essay and Narrative Essay

Thinking Narratively

Doriana Legge

Mirko Lino

Mattia Petricola

Gianluigi Rossini

This collection aims to renew our perspective on adaptation and intermedial processes by thinking of them in terms of codes rather than media. As a result, the notion of transcodification emerges as a crucial tool in order to study the circulation of semiotic and aesthetic resources across disciplines, knowledge systems, and cultures. Defined as the transfer of meaning-making potential from one semiotic domain to another, transcodification both includes and transcends intermediality, thus dramatically expanding the scope and research potential of adaptation and intermedial studies. The essays collected here apply this framework to an incredibly wide variety of objects and issues, from the relationship between art and historiography to the visual culture of finance, from contemporary approaches to ekphrasis to the hidden labor of screenwriters, from modern surveillance to digital comics, from fansubbing to the reception of the classical world in the digital age, from medieval theater to the role of videogames in the “war on terror”. By fostering dialogue between radically different disciplines, the book offers a unique approach to the study of semiotic interrelations across the most diverse aspects of human culture.

Literature, Arts, and Media

New Approaches to Transcodification

Marília Futre Pinheiro

Stephen A. Nimis

In the Greek world under the Roman Empire, the tradition of rhetorical learning reached its heyday in the second century A.D., with the cultural movement named as “Second Sophistic”. Despite the emphasis on rhetoric, literary culture lato senso was was also part of it, granting a special place to poetics and literary criticism. In the wake of this hermeneutical and interdisciplinary approach, the papers assembled in this volume explore signi cant issues, which are linked to the narrative structure of the ancient novel and to the tradition of rhetorical training, both envisaged as a web of well-constructed narrative devices.

Poetics and Rhetoric

Modern Literary Theory and the Ancient Novel

Storie, miti e temi sono oggi sempre più disseminati attraverso ogni forma possibile di medium. È quella che Henry Jenkins ha chiamato cultura della convergenza, caratterizzata da prodotti come Matrix, pensati per essere transmediali, ma in fondo più antica di quanto si creda. L’immaginario è sempre stato plurale: polifonico, politeista, polimorfico (un termine, quest’ultimo, con cui Freud definiva il desiderio): e ad alcune di queste disseminazioni è dedicato questo volume. Dopo aver attraversato alcune categorie estetiche fondamentali del mondo contemporaneo (il camp, il sublime, il pastiche), vengono ripercorsi miti (Edipo, Antigone, Medea, Ulisse, Pentesilea, Dioniso) e temi di lunga durata (il mostro, il doppio, la metamorfosi, la finestra, la seduzione, il duello), nella loro metamorfosi infinita fra letteratura, teatro, musica, e soprattutto cinema.

L'immaginario polimorfico fra letteratura, teatro e cinema

Nel multiforme universo creativo di Pier Paolo Pasolini la Grecia è una presenza ossessiva, fin dalle prime traduzioni giovanili. Il mito antico era infatti una potente metafora di quella civiltà contadina magica e sacrale che è stata da sempre il suo vero oggetto d'amore. Apparso nel 1996 e ora riproposto in una nuova versione aggiornata, questo saggio affronta le tre grandi tragedie greche che hanno affascinato Pasolini, dando vita a diverse opere teatrali e cinematografiche: "l'Orestea", rivissuta come utopia politica di una sintesi fra cultura arcaica e cultura moderna; l'"Edipo re", reinterpretato alla luce della psicoanalisi e del proprio vissuto, e infine "Medea", riletta in chiave antropologica, come punto di arrivo di una sfiducia crescente nei poteri del logos occidentale.

mito e cinema

La Grecia secondo Pasolini

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Ophüls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.

Literature, Cinema, Visual Art

The Fetish

Massimo Fusillo

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