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Vol. 02 No. 2, April 2003

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10222/31202

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    Contents - Belphégor Vol 2 No 2
    (2003-04) Frigerio, Vittorio
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    Cosa c'è di male ad essere poltruomini?
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003-04) Gargiulo, Umberto
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    L'ultima protesi: Figli della pietra e della carne
    (2003-04) Fattori, Adolfo
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    La narrativa italiana contemporanea e il postumano: Tre esempi (con qualche divagazione)
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003) Sorrentino, Piero
    This article attempts to identify a general model that would help us to understand and interpret the relationship between Italian literature and what has been called the "post-human". It does so through the analysis of three short stories by contemporary Italian authors, selected within the complex galaxy of themes and styles that characterises present-day literary creation in Italy. Within roughly the last ten years, art has been able to impose itself as the most significant interpreter in the field of the manipulation of the body, through extreme forms of expression. Literature, however, has also confronted the challenge of "body art". The answer offered by the Italian novelists fluctuates between hybrids made of flesh and metal, mechanical implants and cloned organisms. More than anything, it offers sceptical readers some unexpected associations of meanings, unpredictable directions and a new form of writing.
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    Lo strano caso del Dr. Jekyll e Mr. Hyde, alle radici della cultura di massa
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003) Treanni, Carmine
    In the twenty years between 1850 and 1870, there takes place within the cultural sphere the maturation of a conception of the world based on generalized trust in the virtues of science. From Darwin's theories of evolution, natural and artificial selection (propounded in his books The Origin of the Species, 1859, and The Origins of Man, 1871), to Auguste Comte's positivism, and on to Marx's dialectical materialism and socialism (the Manifesto of the Communist Party is from 1848, and the first volume of Das Kapital of 1867), man, society and the world are described more and more in "objective" and "scientific" terms. This process did the groundwork for the development of what has become known as "mass society", for the takeover of the most forceful industrial capitalism, for consumer society, the modern metropolis and, of course, mass culture. Through a reading of Stevenson's celebrated novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this article will explore the origins of mass culture, its close connection with narrative genres, the movies, and the birth of consumer society, using the "mutation" of the body as a prime metaphor.
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    CRASH: Metafisica dell'ubiquità 
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003) Fattori, Adolfo
    The culture of the twentieth century is characterized by three industrial products: the cinema, the car and science-fiction. All three relate to the way we experience time and space. In his novel Crash, J.G. Ballard uses a science-fictional setting to explore the technologies of the cinema and of the automobile, under the livid contemporary light of consumerism, masochism and the connections between the organic and the artificial.
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    Philip K. Dick: Psichedelici orizzonti, perversi accoppiamenti e nuove alterità 
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003) De Feo, Linda
    In Philip K. Dick's narrative hyper-realism, the description of how artificial beings intensify their natural capacities goes back and forth between drug-inspired hypertrophic suggestions, and the chimerical images that reproduce the media universe's hyper-space. The precognitions of a prophetic imagination, structured around the invasive coupling of mankind and technology, start from the mythical mirage of possible human infinitude, and end up into terrifying nightmares of disintegration - the premonition of a perverse morphogenesis that denies history. The spectral advance of the invincible tomb-world, lair of the ultimate force, able to destroy both time and space, leads to an entropic drift towards which the theories of the futuristic worlds and of the possible dickian multi-verses slide inexorably, with all the paraphernalia of their possibilities.
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    Morphing informatique et hybridation technologique: Des artistes plasticiens à  la recherche de leur double
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003) Guillot, Catherine; Roux, Sandrine
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    Verso una civiltà  di cyborg?
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003) Iannicelli, Gianpaolo
    More and more often, nowadays, we hear talk of biotechnology, of contaminations between natural things and technical products, of hybrid creatures, of androids and cyborgs. And as it often happens, when strongly innovative and destabilising new ideas start circulating widely and are likely to have a lasting impact on our collective world-view, there rise up two opposite categories of interpreters: the apologists and those who warn of the upcoming Apocalypse. Why shouldn't we attempt to bypass this opposition, hobbled by its reliance on value judgments, to try to identify elements that may be more functional for understanding this phenomenon? The most useful heuristic baggage in this field may be a combination of rational scientific discourse, and of those discourses that relate to reality in a more "sensitive" manner, that are more capable than any other of digging into consciousness, the subconscious, imagination: the discourse of art, that through post-modernism, and thanks to authors like Lyotard and Derrida, has achieved considerable respect and dignity in the last few decades. Therefore, the exploration we propose will be conducted using the instruments of Professor Warwick's experiments on the one hand, and the imaginative power of the cinema on the other.
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    Sonhos de Chico Xavier
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003) Fernandes, Magali
    This article deals with a peculiar figure on the Brazilian scene, an author of spiritualist works known as Chico Xavier (April 1910 - June 2002), and in particular with a passage of his biography, which was widely circulated in several popular editions. In this passage he narrates his first visionary experience, when he was still a boy: his mother, who had died, appeared to him in the yard of their house to offer him consolation. Comparing two different versions - a book and a brochure - I try to determine whether this vision can be considered as a sort of daydream.
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    L'ultimo upgrade
    (Dalhousie University. Electronic Text Centre, 2003) Pellegrini, Valerio
    The symbiosis between man and technology is obvious in the robot who is the main character of the movie Bicentennial Man, adapted in 1999 from Isaac Asimov's short story bearing the same title. The humanist search of Asimov's robot (further strengthened in the movie by the imaginative power of computerized graphic creation) meets a new generation of science-fiction fans and embodies once more the old, but always effective marriage between Hollywood and the myth of Frankenstein. The robot, in his progressive disentanglement from his condition as an artificial creature, talks to us about what it means to be human and what creates the identity of a person.