Papers by Giulia Imbriaco
Between, 2017
The article offers an interpretation of the dinosaur in the Moscow imagery of the late 20th centu... more The article offers an interpretation of the dinosaur in the Moscow imagery of the late 20th century as an allegory of the state in which the Marxist-Leninist ideology found itself in those years: more and more inflated with rhetoric, while more and more devoid of contents. In V. Aksyonov's The Burn (1975-76), in the paintings of the duo Komar and Melamid (A ncestral Portraits, Bolsheviks Returning Home After a Demonstration , 1978-82), in D. Prigov's drawing Horror (1990s) and verses “For the Little George”, in V. Erofeyev's Russian Beauty (1990), and in V. Sorokin's Ice (2002), the prehistoric monster in its different inflections is the embodiment of a black humour, characterized by an ambiguity typical of both the postmodern parody described by L. Hutcheon and the grotesque realism analyzed by M. Bachtin. The artist's effort in becoming another to himself, simultaneously engaging his own culture and disengaging himself from it by way of a sharp irony, is portra...
In organizing the second edition of the Graduate Conference of the PhD programme in Literary, Lin... more In organizing the second edition of the Graduate Conference of the PhD programme in Literary, Linguistics and Comparative Studies at the University of Naples "L'Orientale", which took place in the splendid setting of Palazzo Du Mesnil on 20-21 October 2016, the members of the organizing committee – in full accordance with the PhD coordinator, prof. Carlo Vecce, and the Board of Professors – continued the path traced by their predecessors, remaining faithful to the interdisciplinary dialogue that has characterized our PhD training programme for years. The conference debate was devoted to investigating the concept of limen in its various meanings: limen as threshold, textual and meta-textual margin; limen as border, boundary; limen as extreme limit; limen as in-betweenness, the threshold of consciousness and perception. The concept of limen is referable to what defines, separates, combines, allows the crossing and contamination, the identification or differentiation. It ...
Kathy Acker is one of the writers that more powerfully have exposed the power discourses of the U... more Kathy Acker is one of the writers that more powerfully have exposed the power discourses of the USA between the 1970s and the 1990s. Michel Foucault’s words about how unbearable it is to find out that there is an absence of the self in discourses, so that “in speaking I am not banishing my death, but actually establishing it,” could work as an epigraph for Kathy Acker’s whole work. Her protagonists fight with their own language in order to find their own subjectivity. In their worlds they are plenipotentiaries of the dominant discourse, and demonstrate a high competence in moving between the sign systems connected to their discursive education; but unavoidably they reach the limits of their language and rush for safety by demolishing it, thus opening up new paths of signification and of subjectivity. the article examines how this is effected in Blood and Guts in High School (1978) by intermingling words and images. Dream maps, technical files, pornographic drawings, handwritten notes, doodles and graphic stories graft themselves into the book’s layout and into its array of genres. in that pastiche, semantic codes dissolve in a play of infinite refraction, while a new writing appears.
Vladimir Sorokin’s novels Ochered' [The Queue] of 1983 and Den' oprichnika [The Day of the Oprich... more Vladimir Sorokin’s novels Ochered' [The Queue] of 1983 and Den' oprichnika [The Day of the Oprichnik] of 2006 both share the use of spatial-temporal unity. The analysis proposed in this article shows how the writer uses the narrative continuity between the two novels to build a cyclic time characterized by a different repetition, rather than a real historical progression.
Ochered' is Sorokin’s first novel and it is a product of what Aleksei Yurchak has called late socialism. In those years the ideological discourse underlying the Soviet society was losing legitimacy, showing the discrepancy between goals and means inherent in the socialistic paradox. Sorokin rejects the pride showed by the Soviet world in its will to block the natural rhythm of time and, in an attempt to retrieve it, he highlights the historical immobility of the Brezhnev stagnation. Den' oprichnika, instead, is a dystopia set in a near future that merges elements from different epochs: the tsarist past, the Soviet times and the Putin present. The everyday deeds of Komiaga, an executive officer of the Russian tsar, are transcended in the sci-fi universe, transposed into an atemporal dimension where the individual becomes collective and the difference between the eras becomes inconsistent. The Russian present is depicted as a repetition of past and future totalitarian eras.
The comparison, originating in a shared narrative characteristic, finally highlights the way in which the Soviet atemporality has been broken to be embedded in a broader, profoundly Russian atemporality where a cyclic time takes shape.
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Papers by Giulia Imbriaco
Ochered' is Sorokin’s first novel and it is a product of what Aleksei Yurchak has called late socialism. In those years the ideological discourse underlying the Soviet society was losing legitimacy, showing the discrepancy between goals and means inherent in the socialistic paradox. Sorokin rejects the pride showed by the Soviet world in its will to block the natural rhythm of time and, in an attempt to retrieve it, he highlights the historical immobility of the Brezhnev stagnation. Den' oprichnika, instead, is a dystopia set in a near future that merges elements from different epochs: the tsarist past, the Soviet times and the Putin present. The everyday deeds of Komiaga, an executive officer of the Russian tsar, are transcended in the sci-fi universe, transposed into an atemporal dimension where the individual becomes collective and the difference between the eras becomes inconsistent. The Russian present is depicted as a repetition of past and future totalitarian eras.
The comparison, originating in a shared narrative characteristic, finally highlights the way in which the Soviet atemporality has been broken to be embedded in a broader, profoundly Russian atemporality where a cyclic time takes shape.
Ochered' is Sorokin’s first novel and it is a product of what Aleksei Yurchak has called late socialism. In those years the ideological discourse underlying the Soviet society was losing legitimacy, showing the discrepancy between goals and means inherent in the socialistic paradox. Sorokin rejects the pride showed by the Soviet world in its will to block the natural rhythm of time and, in an attempt to retrieve it, he highlights the historical immobility of the Brezhnev stagnation. Den' oprichnika, instead, is a dystopia set in a near future that merges elements from different epochs: the tsarist past, the Soviet times and the Putin present. The everyday deeds of Komiaga, an executive officer of the Russian tsar, are transcended in the sci-fi universe, transposed into an atemporal dimension where the individual becomes collective and the difference between the eras becomes inconsistent. The Russian present is depicted as a repetition of past and future totalitarian eras.
The comparison, originating in a shared narrative characteristic, finally highlights the way in which the Soviet atemporality has been broken to be embedded in a broader, profoundly Russian atemporality where a cyclic time takes shape.