Nuovi media, nuova letteratura : tre storie di rimediazione in Italo Calvino e Paolo Volponi

Author / Creator

Lima, Eleonora, 1983- author

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Online

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Summary

Relying on the concept of 'remediation' as the necessary reconfiguration that any medium is urged to undergo whenever a new one enter the equation, this work investigates how the Italian writers It...

Relying on the concept of 'remediation' as the necessary reconfiguration that any medium is urged to undergo whenever a new one enter the equation, this work investigates how the Italian writers Italo Calvino (1923-85) and Paolo Volponi (1924-94) interacted with the advent of new technologies. By developing an analytic discourse over their interest in technology and new communication strategies, the purpose is to expand the idea of remediating literature beyond the consuetudinary boundaries of the 'digital era.' The introduction, aimed at connecting Calvino and Volponi's positions with the contemporary literary panorama, is followed by three chapters, each devoted to the comparative study of texts dealing with a specific change in the mediasphere. The first chapter analyzes how both authors choose the image of the moon as a metaphor of poetry opposed to technological development. In Calvino's story Luna e Gnac (1956) the new medium opposed to the celestial body is a neon sign, whether in the passage from Le Mosche Del Capitale (1989) Volponi presents a dialogue between the Moon and a computer. The second chapter analyzes the impact of cybernetic theories on Volponi's novel La Macchina Mondiale (1965) and Calvino's story Priscilla (1967) and investigates their reception of cybernetics theories around automata and artificial intelligence. Cybernetic researches allowing for identification of a mechanic and linguistic essence common to humans and machines influenced the two author's narratives, as well as their consideration over the status of literary communication. The last chapter focuses on Calvino's stories La Decapitazione Dei Capi (1969) and L'ultimo Canale (1984), and Volponi's novel Il Sipario Ducale (1975). These works investigate the role of television during a period of political turmoil: for Calvino, the May 1968 protests and the Prague Spring in the first story and the after-Moro Affair in the second one; for Volponi, the Piazza Fontana bombing. Television is analyzed in these texts as a pivotal cultural actor in such tense political climate. The interdisciplinary perspective, combined with close textual analysis serves the purpose of demonstrating how the specificity of the literary medium can only be analyzed fruitfully by taking into consideration its contextual dimension.

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