Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini

ISBN-13: 9781907975387 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 198 str.

Emma Bond

Opis

If Madame Bovary's death in Flaubert's 1857 novel marked the definitive end of the Romantic vision of literary disease, then the advent of psychoanalysis less than half a century later heralded an entirely new set of implications for literature dealing with illness. The theorization of a potential unconscious double (capable of expressing the body, and thus also the intimate damage caused by disease) in turn suggested a capacity to subvert or destabilize the text, exposing the main thread of the narrative to be unreliable or self-conscious. Indeed, the authors examined in this study (Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Giorgio Pressburger (1937-) and Giuliana Morandini (1938-)) all make use of individual 'infected' or suppressed voices within their texts which unfold through illness to cast doubt on a more (conventionally) dominant narrative standpoint. Applying the theories of Freud and more recent writings by Julia Kristeva, Bond offers a new critical reading of the literary function of illness, a function related to the very nature of narration itself.

Spis treści

When the lights of health go down': Narratives in Negative 1. On the Kristevan Semiotic: Language, Desire and Subjectivity 2. Hidden Voices: Revelatory Female Illness in Italo Svevo’s Senilità and La coscienza di Zeno 3. Intimacy in Illness and Silence: Giorgio Pressburger's 'La legge degli spazi bianchi' and 'Vera' 4. Street-haunting': Reclaiming the Semiotic in Giuliana Morandini's Caffè Specchi 5. Clues, Traces and Symptoms of the Intimate: Towards a 'Morellization' of the Ill Voice

O autorze

Emma Bond