italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
Cari colleghi,
I invite those interested in our proposed session to read on. This Italian literature session will be part of the NEMLA 2011 conference in New Brunswick, NJ (USA) from April 7 to 10.
Literature and Corporalia:
All we have to do is look at the works of Isabella Santracroce, Simona Vinci and Giancarlo Pastore to see that the notion of the body has changed over the centuries. As a new body defies canon and language, we ask: how can literature address the body? Pastore’s Medusa causes us to change our thinking of the body and literature itself. Vitaliano Trevisan’s and Laura Pugni’s stories are played out on and through the body; Aldo Nove’s stories challenge the effects of media on the body, its role in re-shaping the body. With the advent of cynernetic worlds, the role of body and the locus of thought and experience in bodies has also changed. Consider Avoledo’s L’elenco telefonico di Atlantide: our selves live, more than ever, through the mediation of technology – a vicarious, thus ‘out-of-body’, experience. In that regard, we can view the body as metaphor: the works of the Italian Cannibale group have been seen as an annihilation of canon as much as the physcial body presented within them ; in that sense, Tommaso Lisa’s pornographic opus is parody of the metaphorical body of literature ravaged by a sort of perverse, reactionary Academia. In the past, we have seen the body placed in question almost exclusively in the contexts of science fiction, but some have also considered the issues of gender, sexuality, and identity: consider Donna Haraway’s rather seminal “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991). More recently, such scholars as Massimo Lollini, Giuseppe Longo, Roberto Marchesini, Mario Perniola, and Roberta Tabanelli have commented on the role of the body in the literature and media of our post-human society. But much more needs to be discussed and written; we constantly need to rethink our corpus, as physical body and as canon.
This panel examines the body as literary corpus and/or as representation in literature: That which concerns us is the “topic of the body, its mediatization, its modification, and even its disappearance” (G. P. Renello) in a post-human society. Is identity in the body or elsewhere? Is the body itself ‘textual’? Please submit 250-400 word abstracts (in English or Italian) about the representation of the body in modern or contemporary Italian literature to Gregory Pell at [log in to unmask]
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