Papers by Achille Castaldo
Italy and the Ecological Imagination. Ecocritical Theories and Practices, 2022
Taking as a point of departure Agamben’s Heideggerian reflection on the ontology of the animal, m... more Taking as a point of departure Agamben’s Heideggerian reflection on the ontology of the animal, my reading will explore the ways in which the technical strategies of Marcello’s film can help us think about the contemplative force of aesthetic representation as a point of undifferentiation, where the human accesses the lyrical intensity (we can call it pathos, and, beyond a certain limit, sublime) only by stepping back to the impersonal, non-subjective condition that belongs to the animal in the peaceful moments of freedom from need and danger.
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Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing, 2022
This essay investigates the traumatic origin of Anna Maria Ortese's short story The Gold of Force... more This essay investigates the traumatic origin of Anna Maria Ortese's short story The Gold of Forcella (Oro a Forcella). My point of departure is the idea that classical definitions of trauma as a singular, extreme event cannot be used to describe Ortese's experience. A more apt conception is Greg Forter's notion of «systemic traumatization», a low intensity exercise of violence through which sections of the population are kept in subjugation. Given these premises, I overturn Raffaele La Capria's analysis of Neapolitan Chronicles (Il mare non bagna Napoli) as revolving around what he calls «the fear of the plebs»: this might be central for the bourgeois intellectual facing the crowd of the poor in the streets of a metropolis, but, for Ortese, the encounter with that same crowd gets translated into a literary experience that communicates the traumatic existence of the underclass she had known from the inside.
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La Questione Romantica - Rivista interdisciplinare di studi romantici, 2021
Passione d’amore, l’adattamento cinematografico di Fosca girato da Ettore Scola sulla soglia degl... more Passione d’amore, l’adattamento cinematografico di Fosca girato da Ettore Scola sulla soglia degli anni Ottanta, può essere letto come una riflessione sul destino del cinema politico in una fase in cui il ritorno alla dimensione privata sembra prevalere sulle esperienze militanti del decennio precedente. Anche se l’impegno ideologico che caratterizza la produzione del regista negli anni Settanta non può essere riproposto nella stessa forma, esso non viene meno: è anzi riconfigurato e rivitalizzato in una ricerca autoriale che, pur rinunciando a incidere direttamente sul conflitto politico, non rinuncia alla critica della società e degli assetti dominanti. La trasposizione di Scola porta alla luce una violenza storica rimossa che è latente nel romanzo tarchettiano e di cui il film denuncia la presenza al cuore del processo di unificazione nazionale.
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Literature as Document
This essay will reflect upon the insertion of fragments of newspaper articles inside a nov- el, M... more This essay will reflect upon the insertion of fragments of newspaper articles inside a nov- el, Metamorfosi,7 published in 1933 by Dino Terra. The presence of “real world” documents within a fictional work (which itself is largely based on the mon- tage of narrative sequences) was one of the main literary avant-garde devices used in that time to grapple with what was perceived to be a historical reality on the brink of dissolving. As we will see, and as Bloch had anticipated, such practice bears the traces of both an illusion of authentic engagement with re- ality and of a deeper understanding of the chaotic and irrational element from which fascism was able to profit. Metamorfosi proves to be, in this perspective, particularly meaningful: indeed, it is the result of a long development of lit- erary experimentation by an author who, by the second half of the twenties, had carefully reflected on the work of some of the main European modernist writers, especially André Gide, Aldous Huxley, and Alfred Döblin.
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Italica, 2020
This essay proposes a reading of Curzio Malaparte's La pelle (1949) grounded in a comparison with... more This essay proposes a reading of Curzio Malaparte's La pelle (1949) grounded in a comparison with Georges Bataille's conception of a "limitexperience" as a source of literary intensity, the pathetic force able to undo the author's ideological dominance on the work. Taking into consideration the traumatic reality of war and degradation from which the novel originates, my essay examines the contradictions between Malaparte's self-absolutory strategy throughout the book, and the disruptions to the mimetic ow of his prose, where the anxiety generated by the author's personal situation within that historical condition produces what I call a "rhetoric of interruption." Key to my interpretation of Malaparte's text is the use he makes of the medieval iconography of the Triumph of Death and of the literary topos of the plague, both of which play an important role in the construction of La pelle.
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Italian Studies, 2021
This article analyses the link between Italian Autonomy, the Bolognese Movimento del ’77, and ass... more This article analyses the link between Italian Autonomy, the Bolognese Movimento del ’77, and associated literary works: Enrico Palandri’s Boccalone and Andrea Pazienza’s Pentothal. Scholars have generally inter- preted such works as venues for the expression of a fleeting moment of juvenile transgression, subsequently to be overcome. We contend instead that the work of Pazienza and Palandri can be viewed as evidence of the Autonomist project fuelling the Movement, as manifest in their concern with non-hierarchical forms of sociality free from the trappings of capital- ism. This alternative politics emerges in the ‘adolescent tone’ adopted in Boccalone and Pentothal. We argue that, because adolescent writing hinges on (re-)creating communal spaces independent of adult power, these works should not be seen to mark an overcoming of the Movement’s collectivist politics, as scholarship to date has proposed, but as literary spaces that enable us to access the sociality of 1977 and its challenges.
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De Dante a Camilleri. Estudios de literatura y cultura italiana. eds. S. Longhitano, F. Ibarra, Ciudad de México, UNAM y Cátedra Extraordinaria Italo Calvino, 2020
Starting with an investigation of the concept of obscenity, I analyze the first work of Pier Vitt... more Starting with an investigation of the concept of obscenity, I analyze the first work of Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Altri libertini (1980), which was the target of censorship immediately after its release. What the state authority read as an offensive and dangerous element for public morality, I propose to read as the inscription of an experience belonging to the collective forms of life developed inside the so-called ’77 Movement, which had one of its epicenters in Bologna, where Tondelli was based. Altri libertini, which the author defined as “a novel in episodes,” bears witness to the life of the movement both at the thematic and at the formal level. If the “refusal of work” - a key concept for the activism of the Autonomy - seems to be the cornerstone around which the book’s characters weave their stories, the stylistic nature of Tondelli’s writing can be defined, I argue, as a constant attempt to create a form of proximity with the reader, replicating the ecstatic, impersonal form of participation that J-L Nancy saw as the essence of community. I define this peculiar style as “adolescent” to stress its opposition both to the Bildungsroman paradigm, with its exemplary journey toward maturity, and to the “infantile” style of Gianni Celati, which has usually been read as strongly connected with the “collective intensity” of the ’77 Movement. I close my analysis on the figure of the “separate room,” where stylistic and thematic features of Tondelli’s narrative seem to converge in a space that is essential for the existence of storytelling itself – besieged by the external world, dominated by the rule of the adults.
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Forum Italicum, 2020
In this article, I address the critical reception of Nanni Balestrini's narrative work, focusing ... more In this article, I address the critical reception of Nanni Balestrini's narrative work, focusing in particular on the novel Vogliamo tutto (1971). I compare the interpretative model, which sees this text as overcoming the novelistic form and moving toward the epic, with a similar model in György Lukács' foundational text The Theory of the Novel (1916), which sets up an opposition between the novel, understood as an expression of the irrelevance of private existence in our society, and the idea of a ''rebirth'' of the epic as a redemptive collective dimension. In order to investigate the textual mechanisms that generate a reading experience that has been defined resorting to the cliché of the epic, I draw on Lukács' later Aesthetics (1962). In this work, he offers a response to the impasses of his earlier thought by using the concept of catharsis, which explains the effects of a work of art on the reader/ viewer through the pathetic energy generated by the dissolution of the subjective perspective. Through a close reading of key passages from Vogliamo tutto, I show how the rhetorical structure of the text is grounded in a repeated dissolution of the narrative point of view (the narrator's voice) in the collective voice of the workers. I argue that the ''pathetic intensity'' produced by this loss of subjectivity inscribes the communal existence of the political struggles of the time in the immediacy of the reading experience.
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Le Parole e le Cose, 2019
Sembra esserci, nel Martin Eden di Pietro Marcello, un rifiuto della riconoscibilità storica dell... more Sembra esserci, nel Martin Eden di Pietro Marcello, un rifiuto della riconoscibilità storica dell'ambientazione, che non è soltanto indecidibile, ma piuttosto volutamente mobile, oscillante, da un probabile primo Novecento delle scene borghesi (il salotto della famiglia Orsini), all'atmosfera anni 70 delle vie di Napoli, all'irruzione episodica e poi definitiva delle camicie nere. Questa voluta inaccuratezza, che rischia di essere interpretata come un accenno a una presunta emblematicità "senza tempo" della vicenda di elevazione dell'eroe, ha in realtà una rilevanza sociologica, che ci appare subito chiara se confrontiamo l'adattamento cinematografico con il romanzo di London. Quest'ultimo ci mostra ampiamente cosa volesse dire in termini di incessante consunzione psicofisica il tipo di vita cui lo sfruttamento capitalista sottoponeva la folla di individui quasi senza volto che costituivano la working class di Oakland, e da cui Martin Eden si differenzia appena all'inizio della vicenda. Per un qualsiasi esponente di questa classe, la conoscenza storica, ovvero la visione d'insieme del passato che aveva condotto a quel particolare presente, non poteva certo apparire come una scansione ordinata di epoche riconoscibili. Non si tratta soltanto di effettiva ignoranza dei fatti del passato (il che può certamente essere comune anche alla classe più elevata), ma piuttosto dell'assenza della prospettiva storicizzante, di quello sguardo ideologico che riconduce i fatti a una sequenza ordinata in grado di restituire il presente a una certa, seppure implicita, necessità. Per il marinaio che è Martin Eden ai suoi esordi, il passato è una fantasmagoria, un collasso di "motivi storici" in cui sulla differenza e sul cambiamento prevale nettamente quella che è per lui e i suoi simili l'unica "costante," ovvero la condizione di brutale annullamento fisico e mentale. A differenza del romanzo, dove lo scarto qualitativo della prospettiva storica di classe rimane appena abbozzato, il film prova fin dall'inizio a rendere evidente il salto verso questo tipo di visione in cui più delle differenze contano, appunto, le costanti. Il fatto che neanche al culmine della sua "elevazione" culturale il protagonista riesca ad abbracciare il paradigma storico della classe di cui aspira a fare parte (almeno fino alla grande delusione), ci mostra quanto indelebile sia il marchio d'infamia subito negli esordi proletari (si pensi anche a un elemento come i denti guasti di cui Marinelli fa sfoggio nel finale, e il cui significato è molto probabilmente proprio il segno di questa permanenza, piuttosto che il banale manifestarsi di un male spirituale). Di fatti, solo la "narrazione" socialista, presente come un basso continuo nel film (e nel romanzo) eppure lasciata ampiamente indefinita, ci viene presentata come in grado di comporre una visione storica di tipo diverso, in cui la permanenza non sia negata, ma piuttosto messa anch'essa in prospettiva e storicizzata. Se tale prospettiva non viene mai abbracciata, è perché l'innamoramento di Martin per la borghesia, incarnato in quello per Elena-Ruth, ha ormai instillato in lui un veleno per il quale non ci sarà cura, sorta di folle individualismo di rivalsa, contro il quale si può dire che London abbia in effetti scritto l'intero romanzo. Chi ha visto il film sa che la costruzione di un immaginario storico alternativo va ben oltre il costante anacronismo: Marcello ricorre, seguendo quello che è forse il suo più forte carattere autoriale, all'ibridazione del girato finzionale, con esplicita funzione narrativa, con immagini di repertorio di varia provenienza. E nel continuo passaggio dei registri, dove l'inserimento di una terza categoria di immagini (quelle in cui il girato originale insegue, per così dire, l'atmosfera del found footage), il passaggio del tempo è segnato soltanto dalle variazioni di atmosfera prodotte dalla pellicola, in una materializzazione cromatica del tempo stesso in grado di rendere evidente in modo simultaneo il permanere della sofferenza dei corpi proletari, e la fuga dei decenni misurabili solo in termini di speranze deluse di riscatto. In questo apparente caos, il rischio di limitarsi a riprodurre a livello formale la "fantasmagoria" interiore del protagonista è evitato grazie al ricorso al "montaggio a distanza" appreso dal maestro sovietico Artavazd Pelešjan, cui Marcello ha dedicato un documentario nel 2011. È così che la ritmica implacabile con cui ritornano i motivi iconografici accompagna la nostra comprensione della storia, la pagina 1 / 3
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Literature as Document. Generic Boundaries in 1930s Western Literature. Series:Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, Volume: 90. Brill Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2019
This essay will reflect upon the insertion of fragments of newspaper articles inside a nov- el, M... more This essay will reflect upon the insertion of fragments of newspaper articles inside a nov- el, Metamorfosi,7 published in 1933 by Dino Terra. The presence of “real world” documents within a fictional work (which itself is largely based on the mon- tage of narrative sequences) was one of the main literary avant-garde devices used in that time to grapple with what was perceived to be a historical reality on the brink of dissolving. As we will see, and as Bloch had anticipated, such practice bears the traces of both an illusion of authentic engagement with re- ality and of a deeper understanding of the chaotic and irrational element from which fascism was able to profit. Metamorfosi proves to be, in this perspective, particularly meaningful: indeed, it is the result of a long development of lit- erary experimentation by an author who, by the second half of the twenties, had carefully reflected on the work of some of the main European modernist writers, especially André Gide, Aldous Huxley, and Alfred Döblin.
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Studies in French Cinema, 2019
On the surface, Rohmer’s first two Moral Tales deal with romantic episodes in the lives of young ... more On the surface, Rohmer’s first two Moral Tales deal with romantic episodes in the lives of young people. As with his other works, here the director does not make explicit his political point of view. In this paper, the author shows how Rohmer’s construction of these stories functions as a compensatory figuration through which he could cope with the historical problems of his time, namely the Algerian War, which weighed heavily on him both professionally and intellectually in his position as editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma. The author analyses how the formal construction of these two films reflects the ideological framework projected onto them, particularly through Rohmer’s use of memorial perspective (in the form of voice-over) that drives the stories, both told as youthful memories. At the same time, the author shows how this ideology intertwines with a self-deconstructive agency able to undo the coherent production of meaning. This reading shows how Rohmer’s depiction of relationships between men and women – so important for the later development of his cinema – both conceals and transforms a colonial ideology that needed to find a new way to express itself to survive in a supposedly ‘post-colonial’ France.
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This article analyzes the status of the pictorial image when inserted in the film continuum, in t... more This article analyzes the status of the pictorial image when inserted in the film continuum, in terms of its special temporality and its ideological implications. I focus in particular on two works, both inspired on Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto: Valerio Zurlini's La prima notte di quiete (1972) and Andrei Tarkovskij's Nostalghia (1983). In these films, the fresco is used as an ideological tool in order to establish a personal ideology of artistic creation and to imagine the illusion of the extra-temporality of the instant.
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Prison walls are the natural landscape of radical politics as depicted in Italian cinema. The wal... more Prison walls are the natural landscape of radical politics as depicted in Italian cinema. The wall as “the most dreadful device of violence”, namely a device which “never evolved, since it was born perfect” (Bonvissuto), becomes a cinematic device able to provide a material connection between political and personal struggles. The prison, the house. The walls as “petrified, primordial landscape” (Benjamin) against which the cinema stages the failure of struggles for liberation inside society and family: the prison-house becomes in its turn a primary space of acting the struggle in the loneliness of failure. In this paper I address the cinematic construction of space within the “prison-house”, the allegorical interaction between characters and walls throughout the following examples of Italian cinema: Taviani brothers’ San Michele aveva un Gallo (1972): walls as theatrical wing, walls as audience of a private, desperate representation of politics. Dal Fra’s Antonio Gramsci – I giorni del carcere (1977): prisoners obsessively moving along endless walls, their voices, Gramsci’s voice, ghostly explaining pictures to dead hares. Home as prison (there’s no prison like home): Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (1974), Scola’s La famiglia (1987). My aim is also to show a continuity throughout the cultural history of last four decades, drawing a parallel to other television “prisons”, from the first successful American sitcoms of the eighties, to the triumph of reality television.
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Marcello Gallian è stato uno dei principali esponenti dell’avanguardia letteraria romana degli a... more Marcello Gallian è stato uno dei principali esponenti dell’avanguardia letteraria romana degli anni trenta. la sua opera, da molti definita barocca ed espressionista, è oggi quasi del tutto dimenticata, per la scarsità di riedizioni e analisi critiche. il presente saggio si propone di esaminare in modo esaustivo le caratteristiche strutturali della narrativa di questo autore e di fornire un’interpretazione accurata della sua figura.
Marcello Gallian was one of the major exponents of the literary avantgarde in thirties Rome. his writing, considered by many to be baroque and expressionist, has been almost entirely forgotten through the lack of new editions and critical readings. this essay aims to examine in detail the structural characteristics of Gallian’s fiction and to offer an accurate elucidation of the writer.
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Il reality e il carcere, l’esposizione e la distruzione del "segreto". Riflessioni sul film di Ga... more Il reality e il carcere, l’esposizione e la distruzione del "segreto". Riflessioni sul film di Garrone a partire da Blanchot, Baudrillard e Drieu La Rochelle.
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Paper di Achille Castaldo
“horrible vision of a pure work”
Mallarmé
The focus of my talk tod... more Paper di Achille Castaldo
“horrible vision of a pure work”
Mallarmé
The focus of my talk today is on the following questions: Is agony possible in itself, without a starting point, without a solution? Or is it something else?
Agony is a word often used to talk about the city of Naples, with reference to a very large variety of sectors of public life. By randomly opening newspapers, it is easy to read about the agony of the job market, the agony of the transportation system, the agony of the museum system (one only needs to think to the falling apart of Pompei), the agony of the school system, the agony of civil society, etc. But, again, is it agony if it never ends?
!1
A process that could be seen as contrary to agony is gestation, the permanence of a fetus in a womb that should finally lead to a birth. TeatrInGestAzione, Theaters in Gestation, is the name of an “inter-subjective creative system,” as they define themselves, a theatrical group active in Naples since 2006. As for the concept of gestation, we could pose the same question: Can something be defined as gestation if it remains so? If it does not want to lead to any birth?
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CFP by Achille Castaldo
This panel explores the literary phenomenon of the Young Cannibals. The purpose is to redefine th... more This panel explores the literary phenomenon of the Young Cannibals. The purpose is to redefine the role of a narrative lineage that has been stigmatized as excessive and disengaged. The panel aims to analyze the literary and extra-literary components of the Young Cannibals’ works, while proposing new critical perspectives.
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Book Reviews by Achille Castaldo
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Papers by Achille Castaldo
Marcello Gallian was one of the major exponents of the literary avantgarde in thirties Rome. his writing, considered by many to be baroque and expressionist, has been almost entirely forgotten through the lack of new editions and critical readings. this essay aims to examine in detail the structural characteristics of Gallian’s fiction and to offer an accurate elucidation of the writer.
“horrible vision of a pure work”
Mallarmé
The focus of my talk today is on the following questions: Is agony possible in itself, without a starting point, without a solution? Or is it something else?
Agony is a word often used to talk about the city of Naples, with reference to a very large variety of sectors of public life. By randomly opening newspapers, it is easy to read about the agony of the job market, the agony of the transportation system, the agony of the museum system (one only needs to think to the falling apart of Pompei), the agony of the school system, the agony of civil society, etc. But, again, is it agony if it never ends?
!1
A process that could be seen as contrary to agony is gestation, the permanence of a fetus in a womb that should finally lead to a birth. TeatrInGestAzione, Theaters in Gestation, is the name of an “inter-subjective creative system,” as they define themselves, a theatrical group active in Naples since 2006. As for the concept of gestation, we could pose the same question: Can something be defined as gestation if it remains so? If it does not want to lead to any birth?
CFP by Achille Castaldo
Book Reviews by Achille Castaldo
Marcello Gallian was one of the major exponents of the literary avantgarde in thirties Rome. his writing, considered by many to be baroque and expressionist, has been almost entirely forgotten through the lack of new editions and critical readings. this essay aims to examine in detail the structural characteristics of Gallian’s fiction and to offer an accurate elucidation of the writer.
“horrible vision of a pure work”
Mallarmé
The focus of my talk today is on the following questions: Is agony possible in itself, without a starting point, without a solution? Or is it something else?
Agony is a word often used to talk about the city of Naples, with reference to a very large variety of sectors of public life. By randomly opening newspapers, it is easy to read about the agony of the job market, the agony of the transportation system, the agony of the museum system (one only needs to think to the falling apart of Pompei), the agony of the school system, the agony of civil society, etc. But, again, is it agony if it never ends?
!1
A process that could be seen as contrary to agony is gestation, the permanence of a fetus in a womb that should finally lead to a birth. TeatrInGestAzione, Theaters in Gestation, is the name of an “inter-subjective creative system,” as they define themselves, a theatrical group active in Naples since 2006. As for the concept of gestation, we could pose the same question: Can something be defined as gestation if it remains so? If it does not want to lead to any birth?