Articles and essays by Marco Petrelli
Iperstoria, 2020
The literature of the Southern United States has always been expression of a multilayered connect... more The literature of the Southern United States has always been expression of a multilayered connection with 'place,' a complex term encompassing identity, history, and politics. Because of its distinctive history, the South's literary landscapes are often haunted by real and metaphorical ghosts: simulacra of the region's burdensome and blood-soaked legacy. A narration that acknowledges the existence of specters further complicates the representation of southern space through the polysemic, unpredictable connection with the netherworld. The traditional chronotope of the South, that of the self-supporting idyll, is forced to interact with a repressed, troubling beyond. Haunted places enable forms of counter-communication that challenge the status quo, because, as Jacques Derrida writes, addressing ghosts is also a quest for justice that goes beyond the living present. In the case of a political author like Jesmyn Ward, the commitment to justice is clearly expressed in her use of gothic tropes as a way to channel and revive the suffocated voices of the past. Ward's work questions the present and restores the dark corners of her native Mississippi's history. Through theories of literary spaces and hauntology, this essay analyzes Ward's militant poetics, and how they are grounded in the relationship between immanent and transcendental landscapes.
The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of space and the different layers of significance as... more The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of space and the different layers of significance associated to it in the Image Comics series Manifest Destiny. The American frontier epic still stand as one of the vastest and most important mythological sources of the US. The frontier space is not of course limited to its geographical dimension – at least from 1893 onwards, when the “closure” of the frontier and the publication of the Turner Thesis made it a polysemic “place” in which psychological, political and social elements met and conflicted with one another. Since the definition of this space was always dependent upon ideological stances, its depiction has always oscillated between the poles of Utopia and Dystopia, blending realism, imagination and ideology. Manifest Destiny is not an exception – its spatial dimension conjugates history and mythology, while also showing the strong influence of popular culture and pulp culture’s horror and weird literature, mainly via its most famous author: H. P. Lovecraft. Through the use of some classical outlooks on the American frontier like Frederick Jackson Turner and Richard Slotkin’s theses, together with some more general contributions on the cultural and narrative meaning of space like Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, Yi-Fu Tuan’s human geography and Ruth D. Weston’s analysis of the gothic space, the essay goes through the “mindscape” projected by Manifest Destiny’s geography and addresses its symbolic and allegorical meaning. As a result, the series’ unconventional take on American mythology and its iconoclastic political agenda are thoroughly deconstructed and examined.
Some kids were afraid to walk through strange places in the dark, but she wasn't.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper is generally considered to be a requiem for the Southern pas... more Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper is generally considered to be a requiem for the Southern pastoral idyll. Critics have already noticed how the author makes use of the classic "machine in the garden" motif to exemplify the destructive effects of historical and technological progress on the mythical dimension of the pastoral world. This detrimental intrusion is embodied in the novel by an enigmatic "government tank" and by the hidden corpse of a military veteran turned highwayman. Through the interpretation of these symbols as figurations of both WWI and WWII, this essay posits the centrality of war itself as the main threat to the pastoral order of life.
This essay is devoted to a thematic comparative analysis of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the ... more This essay is devoted to a thematic comparative analysis of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. Focusing on the recurring watch motif, the aim is to show the evolvement of a pivotal issue in Southern US literature: the troubled relationship with (social) time and history. The comparison is triggered by some passages in which McCarthy clearly rewrites Faulkner’s novel. Quentin Compson, the narrator from the second section of The Sound and the Fury, is obsessed with the passing of time – a fixation which is embodied in the watch that his father gave him. Cornelius Suttree shares the same obsession about time and clocks, and, just like Quentin, he is also tormented by an ambiguous relationship with the Southern aristocratic society he is part of. The Sound and the Fury and Suttree are hence tied together in their critique of the social neuroses of the South through the depiction of a biased sense of time.
Reviews by Marco Petrelli
Review of Narrazioni della distruzione: scrivere la Seconda guerra mondiale (Fictions - Studi sul... more Review of Narrazioni della distruzione: scrivere la Seconda guerra mondiale (Fictions - Studi sulla narratività XIII).
Roma, Giulio perrone Editore, 2017, pp. 228.
Recensione di Marco Petrelli 1 Questo numero di Fictions, rivista di studi dedicati alla narrativ... more Recensione di Marco Petrelli 1 Questo numero di Fictions, rivista di studi dedicati alla narratività, esce a ridosso del centenario del primo conflitto mondiale ma sceglie di concentrarsi sulle "modalità con cui la letteratura ha cercato di fare i conti con la Seconda guerra mondiale" (9). Nell'introduzione al volume, il curatore Giorgio Mariani motiva questa scelta definendo l'eredità letteraria del primo conflitto mondiale "perlopiù consolidata" (9), sottolineando invece come la Seconda guerra mondiale proietti ancora un "cono d'ombra" sulla nostra epoca. Mariani mostra come l'identità discorsiva e paradigmatica dell'ultimo conflitto sia tutt'ora ambigua e facile a piegarsi a letture propagandistiche e semplificative, le stesse che hanno creato la vulgata della guerra che vide contrapposte forze del bene (gli alleati) e del male (l'asse), e che furono riproposte anche in occasione della famigerata Global War on Terror inaugurata dall'amministrazione Bush Jr. Proprio la volontà di superare questo manicheismo eidetico, mi sembra, anima i saggi raccolti in questo volume, tutti in un certo senso dedicati alla disamina di prospettive eccentriche, liminali, decisamente in contrasto con il paradigma dominante martellato nella storia dai vincitori. Jonathan Vincent, nel saggio d'apertura, analizza una folta serie di romanzi americani pubblicati negli anni successivi alla conclusione del conflitto e ambientati in Italia, definita una "zone of radical otherness" (18). La radicale alterità del teatro italiano viene utilizzata da Vincent per mostrare tanto l'applicazione sciovinista del paternalismo imperialista statunitense quanto le dinamiche di etero/auto-rappresentazione in atto nelle truppe stanziate nella penisola. Se è innegabile che "war-making has often been the principal engine of state-making" (29), il pregio dell'analisi di Vincent è proprio nel mostrare come questa dialettica abbia generato risposte letterarie radicalmente opposte. Se da un lato l'esempio di A Bell for Adano (John Hersey, 1945) segue pedissequamente il paradigma del sopracitato paternalismo interventista, dall'altro, romanzi come Casualty (Robert Lowry, 1946) e The End of It (Mitchell Goodman, 1961), illustrano invece la drammatica crisi d'identità di chi vede crollare ogni antinomia riconoscendo nel "nemico" il suo stesso autoritarismo e militarismo. Umberto Rossi compie un differente e interessante slittamento di prospettiva. Sostituendo all'opposizione "orizzontale" dello scontro ideologico una dimensione letteralmente "verticale," Rossi analizza il sottogenere
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Articles and essays by Marco Petrelli
Reviews by Marco Petrelli