Mi scuso per aver dovuto spostare ulteriormente l'orario del ricevimento. Purtroppo sono arrivata alle 12.45 e non c'era più nessuno ma fortutamente ero riuscita a mettere l'avviso. Onde non incorrere di nuovo in errori e spostamenti vi informo che metterò il prossimo ricevimento tra il 1 e il 2 luglio ma vi dirò con precisione l'orari solo quando saprò con sicurezza se ci saranno altri incontri o riunioni.
BM
giovedì 20 giugno 2013
mercoledì 19 giugno 2013
sabato 24 marzo 2012
http://www.edizioniesi.it/dettagli_articolo.php?id=729&tipologia=libri&titolo=Universi_del_fantastico:_per_una_definizione_di_genere
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Cod. ISBN: 9788849518849 | ||
Pubblicato nel: ottobre 2009 |
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Numero Pagine: 180 |
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Formato: 17x24 |
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Prezzo: Euro 21,00DESCRIZIONE:Universi del fantastico: per una definizione di genere è una raccolta di saggi che intende esplorare lo sconfinato, multiforme ed eccentrico territorio del fantastico agli albori del nuovo millennio, uno spazio per sua natura troppo variegato per essere ‘contenuto’ in una semplice definizione. Con un percorso che va dal teorico al filosofico, dal letterario al cinematografico, attraversando paesi e generi diversi, gli autori hanno delineato una possibile mappa dell’arcipelago del fantastico, riconoscendone caratteristiche e affinità, ma anche sollevando dubbi e rinnovando, così, l’annosa querelle: cos’è il fantastico? L’unica certezza dei curatori è quella di essersi affidati ad alcuni dei maggiori esperti del campo, affiancati da giovani studiosi: Carlo Bordoni, Maria Teresa Chialant, Enzo Langellotti, C. Bruna Mancini, Giuliana Scalera McClintock, Carlo Pagetti, Oriana Palusci, Patrick Parrinder, David Punter, Eric Rabkin, Romolo Runcini, Donatella Trotta.I CURATORI Romolo Runcini ha insegnato Sociologia della letteratura presso l’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli. Tra le sue pubblicazioni: Illusione e paura nel mondo borghese da Dickens a Orwell (1968); Il romanzo fantastico (1978); I cavalieri della paura (1989); Il sigillo del poeta. La missione del letterato moderno dalla Corte alla città nella Spagna del Siglo de Oro (1991); La paura e l’immaginario sociale nella letteratura, I, Il Gothic Romance (1995); Enigmi del fantastico (2007). Ha diretto numerose riviste. E’ Presidente dell’Associazione Culturale ‘Calibando’, dedita allo studio del fantastico in arte e letteratura. C. Bruna Mancini è ricercatrice di Letteratura inglese presso l’Università della Calabria. Ha pubblicato saggi su Shakespeare e le riscritture contemporanee, fantastico, mostruoso, immaginario urbano. Si occupa anche di translation e gender studies. E’ autrice di Sguardi su Londra. Immagini di una città mostruosa (2005). Ha curato e tradotto The Mercenary Lover / L’amante mercenario di Eliza Haywood e Angelica, or, Quixote in petticoats / Angelica, ovvero Don Chisciotte in gonnella di Charlotte Lennox. E’ vice_presidente dell’Associazione Culturale ‘Calibando’. |
giovedì 22 marzo 2012
http://www.liguori.it/schedanew.asp?isbn=3982
Charlotte Lennox
Una commedia in due atti
Angelica, or, Quixote in Petticoats (1758), apparso originariamente in forma anonima, è stato da tempo associato alla penna e all´ingegno di Charlotte Lennox, che avrebbe riscritto per il palcoscenico il suo romanzo più famoso, The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752), al fine di ironizzare e criticare il mondo del teatro che, nel Settecento, s´apriva ancora con sospetto e diffidenza alla scrittura femminile. La commedia, in due atti, s´incentra su amore, erotismo, arte della seduzione e allude ai pericoli derivanti dalla lettura del romance francese secentesco e dalla frequentazione del teatro, intesi come finzione e inganno. In Angelica, arte teatrale ed arte della seduzione coincidono grazie agli stratagemmi metateatrali orditi dal libertino, Incostante, per far innamorar di sé Angelica, l´eroina del testo teatrale; eppure, le strategie amorose enumerate dalla stessa Lennox in “The Art of Coquetry”, celebre poesia pubblicata nella raccolta Poems on Several Occasions (1747), rivelano che è Angelica la vera tramatrice-seduttrice occulta che, dosando sguardi e comportamenti, spinge Incostante a “riformar la propria vita”.
Charlotte Lennox
Angelica, ovvero Don Chisciotte in gonnella/Angelica, or, Quixote in petticoats
Una commedia in due atti
Traduzione, cura e introduzione a cura di C. Bruna Mancini
Collana: Angelica
ed.: 2006
ISBN:
978-88-207-3982-9
pp.: 200
eISBN:
978-88-207-4594-3
singoli capitoli a partire da€ 2,99Angelica, or, Quixote in Petticoats (1758), apparso originariamente in forma anonima, è stato da tempo associato alla penna e all´ingegno di Charlotte Lennox, che avrebbe riscritto per il palcoscenico il suo romanzo più famoso, The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752), al fine di ironizzare e criticare il mondo del teatro che, nel Settecento, s´apriva ancora con sospetto e diffidenza alla scrittura femminile. La commedia, in due atti, s´incentra su amore, erotismo, arte della seduzione e allude ai pericoli derivanti dalla lettura del romance francese secentesco e dalla frequentazione del teatro, intesi come finzione e inganno. In Angelica, arte teatrale ed arte della seduzione coincidono grazie agli stratagemmi metateatrali orditi dal libertino, Incostante, per far innamorar di sé Angelica, l´eroina del testo teatrale; eppure, le strategie amorose enumerate dalla stessa Lennox in “The Art of Coquetry”, celebre poesia pubblicata nella raccolta Poems on Several Occasions (1747), rivelano che è Angelica la vera tramatrice-seduttrice occulta che, dosando sguardi e comportamenti, spinge Incostante a “riformar la propria vita”.
http://www.liguori.it/schedanew.asp?isbn=3569
Eliza Haywood
The Mercenary Lover/ L´amante mercenario, dato alle stampe da Eliza Haywood nel 1726 durante il primo periodo della sua brillante carriera letteraria, è un breve romanzo incentrato sull´arte della seduzione, su amore ed erotismo, sulla brama di potere e danaro, tutti elementi che l´autrice condivide con la tradizione narrativa tardosecentesca francese e inglese. In esso la romanziera riscrive paro-dicamente il genere della nouvelle francese d´argomento erotico-amoroso, arricchendolo con il gusto per la satira politica e di costume e ricorrendo ad un´accorta contaminazione di variegati modelli narrativi, tra i quali il racconto utopico, il romanzo realistico, pastorale/erotico ed epistolare. L´amante mer-cenario si configura, così, come campo di sperimentazione narrativa e di ricerca di nuove modalità scritturali che avrebbero confermato il pieno successo del novel. Inoltre, per la sua vena trasgressiva – sia in ambito letterario che politico/sociale e morale – Haywood fu presto additata e condannata come licenziosa e immorale, una «penni-vendola svergognata» la quale, facendo della scrittura un mestiere competitivo e reddi-tizio, era considerata dai letterati suoi contemporanei una prostituta della letteratura.
L'amante mercenario/The Mercenary Lover
Traduzione, cura e introduzione di C. Bruna Mancini
Collana: Angelica
ed.: 2003
ISBN:
978-88-207-3569-2
pp.: 286
libro a stampa € 18,00The Mercenary Lover/ L´amante mercenario, dato alle stampe da Eliza Haywood nel 1726 durante il primo periodo della sua brillante carriera letteraria, è un breve romanzo incentrato sull´arte della seduzione, su amore ed erotismo, sulla brama di potere e danaro, tutti elementi che l´autrice condivide con la tradizione narrativa tardosecentesca francese e inglese. In esso la romanziera riscrive paro-dicamente il genere della nouvelle francese d´argomento erotico-amoroso, arricchendolo con il gusto per la satira politica e di costume e ricorrendo ad un´accorta contaminazione di variegati modelli narrativi, tra i quali il racconto utopico, il romanzo realistico, pastorale/erotico ed epistolare. L´amante mer-cenario si configura, così, come campo di sperimentazione narrativa e di ricerca di nuove modalità scritturali che avrebbero confermato il pieno successo del novel. Inoltre, per la sua vena trasgressiva – sia in ambito letterario che politico/sociale e morale – Haywood fu presto additata e condannata come licenziosa e immorale, una «penni-vendola svergognata» la quale, facendo della scrittura un mestiere competitivo e reddi-tizio, era considerata dai letterati suoi contemporanei una prostituta della letteratura.
http://www.liguori.it/schedanew.asp?isbn=3844
C. Bruna Mancini
Sguardi su Londra
Immagini di una città mostruosa
ed.: 2005
ISBN:
978-88-207-3844-0
pp.: 384
eISBN:
978-88-207-3850-1
mercoledì 21 marzo 2012
Reviewed by C. Bruna Mancini
http://www.anglistica.unior.it/content/lidia-curti-and-susanna-poole-eds-schermi-indiani-linguaggi-planetari
In the Introduction to his celebrated Colonial India and the Making of
Empire Cinema (2000), Prem Chowdhry observes that “empire cinema”
(including productions of the 1930s and 1940s by both British and
Hollywood filmmakers), provides the major manifestation of the classical
binary opposition between colonial Self and colonized Other, encoded
in colonialist discourse as a dichotomy necessary to domination. Empire
films contributed to a vision of the Empire which emphasized “the unique
imperial status, cultural and racial superiority and patriotic pride not
only of the British but of the entire white western world”. Thus cinema
emerged as the most influential propaganda vehicle in order to maintain
the status quo in Britain and its colonies. Films like The Lives of a Bengal
Lancer (1935, by Henry Hathaway, with Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone,
and Richard Cromwell), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, by Michael
Curtiz with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Patrick Knowles), Wee
Willie Winkie (1937, by John Ford, with Shirley Temple, Victor McLaglen
and C. Aubrey Smith), The Drum (1938, by Zoltan Korda, with Sabu,
Raymond Massey, Roger Livesey), and Gunga Din (1939, by George
Stevens, with Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr) served
to prevent non-alignment, sociopolitical changes and revolt, while
sustaining the importance of the strategic role of British presence in the
colonies – India, in particular – for the ‘protection’ of the native inhabitants.
After all, as Winston Churchill affirmed on 18 March 1931, in his famous
speech “Our Duty in India”, the British people had to fight hard in order
to maintain their “Indian Empire” and not to be led blindfold into a trap;
obviously, their “mission” had a religious as well as a highly moral
connotation, strictly connected to their glorious past and to the untamed
spirit lodging in their breast:
What spectacle could be more sorrowful than that of this powerful country
casting away with both hands, and up till now almost by general acquies
cence, the great inheritance which centuries have gathered? What spectacle
could be more strange, more monstrous in its perversity, than to see the Viceroy
and the high officials and agents of the Crown in India labouring with all their
influence and authority to unite and weave together into a confederacy all the
forces adverse and hostile to our rule in India? … It is a hideous act of selfmutilation,
astounding to every nation in the world. The princes, the Europeans,the Moslems,
the Depressed classes, the Anglo-Indians – none of them know
what to do nor where to turn in the face of their apparent desertion by Great
Britain. (emphases mine)
Using the encoding/decoding model masterly developed by Stuart Hall,
based essentially on “dominant”, “negotiated” or “propositional” responses,
Prem Chowdhry also demonstrates that, in the Thirties, Indian spectators
inhabited a realm of ramifying differences and contradictions, stretching
from acceptance to resistance. But this question seems even more complex
if we consider that, as Lidia Curti puts it in her Introduction to Schermi
indiani, linguaggi planetari, India’s devastated and partitioned territory –
a diversified continent in terms of climate, geography, language and culture,
putting into question the very concept of ‘nation’ – also makes the
expression “Indian cinema” an abstraction; the term reflects the
diversifications of a place which is in fact a complex connection of different
countries and cultures. Curti observes how:
the various historical constructions show a cinema that is linked from its very
beginning to traditional forms of Indian theatre, with its interweaving of natural
and supernatural, its fixed frontal positioning, its frequent use of close ups and
stylization. The general intention – at least before the arrival of sound – was
that of maintaining the characteristics of live theatre, through the presence of
a narrator in the cinema and intermezzos of music, dance and song, elements
that were to become an essential part of Bollywood film language. This hybrid
narrative technique, with its interpolation of songs, dances and comic sketches,
also goes back to classical Sanscrit theatre and popular religious ceremonies.(12)
Moreover, after Independence, the Indian government mainly
reproduced the inequalities and subalternity of the so-called ancien
régime, exerting a “dominance without hegemony” to recall the title of
Ranajit Guha’s renowned book of 1997; subsequently, many migrants
from the Indian subcontinent reached the former ‘centre’ of the Empire,
building new multiethnic urban communities which had to face a never
dormant resurgence of xenophobia, hostility, and violence. The movies
realized by Hanif Kureishi, Stephen Frears, Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair, and
Gurinder Chadha perfectly portray this hybrid “geography of diaspora
and multidiaspora”, also considering its “transversal passages”; because,
instead of a unidirectional displacement from the colonies towards the
so-called motherland, many migrants paths touched Uganda, Madagascar,
Guyana, and the Caribbean. Curti asserts in this respect that for the
“directors, both male and female, who had been born and brought up in
Britain, often with mixed race parentage, this implied a temporary return
to a ‘home’ that was no longer home in the full sense of the term, in
order to find their roots or, more probably, to set their films in their land
of origin”(22).
Thus the filmic corpus becomes the real post-colonial, ‘in-between’
space, in which ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ can reciprocally observe each
other and provide feedback. Several interesting examples of this productive
and intense cultural exchange are attentively analyzed in the present
volume. I refer in particular to “Linguaggi e percorsi in Aparajito di Satyajit
Ray” by Fiorenzo Iuliano (27-43), “La ‘scrittura’ cinematografica di Hanif
Kureishi” by Annalisa Spedaliere (63-80), “L’altra India: Fire di Deepa Mehta”
by Laura Sarnelli (83-95), “A casa e altrove: il cinema di Mira Nair” by
Alessandra Marino (97-115), “Il cinema di Gurinder Chadra” by Serena
Guarracino (117-137), and “Mitografie di riscatto femminile: Banditi Queene
di Shekhar Kapur” by Raffaella Malandrino (139-154), each of which
concludes with a list of “Key words” and “Things to Ponder”, clearly aimed
at stimulating further discussion. The questions raised range from contacts
between the different cinematographies and/or cultures to concepts of
identity, gender-genre and subalternity, and again to the centre/borders,
empire/nation, global/local oppositions. Constant references are also made
to the rich critical apparatus developed in the fields of Cultural, Postcolonial,
Subaltern, Feminist and Post-Feminist Studies.
In short, as Susanna Poole writes in her Afterword, “Bollywood come
cinema ‘altro’”, if a film is a “stratified construction” in which different
languages, stories and temporalities cross and come to a new life, the film
spectator is also to be considered as a cultural construction, a complex
crossing of languages, (his/her)stories, spaces, and times. Hence Bollywood
too, a popular cinema with few aspirations to becoming experimental, can
create disturbance, destabilization, and (positive) crisis. In fact, its multigenre
representation does not respect all the conventions of ‘our’ narrative
cinema, constantly putting into question – both metaphorically and stylistically
– the classical Occidental viewpoint, centered on the identification of the
spectator with “a main male protagonist”, in Laura Mulvey’s words, and a
straight progression of the story line. Thus, in a way, Bollywood ‘exceeds’ –
in Edward Said’s definition – the norms of the Occidental (film) culture,
questioning our deepest beliefs and certainties, and depicting a reconciled,
non-existent national imagery in order to create an idealized community as
well as a coherent (and necessarily mythical) national identity:
In a territory inhabited by about a billion people talking over 800 different
languages and belonging to a multiplicity of ethnic and religious groups,
Bollywood offers a world view that in its absolute unreality may be shared by
all. ... But the production of a homogeneous, coherent identity bears with it a
form of violence: the exclusion of the internal ‘others’, the affliction shared by
numbers of former colonies rebuilt as nation states. (164-5)
This temple of dreams and desires – as I would define Bollywood cinema
– is the ‘cinema of otherness’ par excellence (“un altro cinema, un cinema altro’,
ma anche il cinema di un altro”, Poole writes, craftly playing with
the term ‘altro’/other). In fact, in Imag(in)ing Otherness: Filmic Visions of
Living Together (1999), S. Brent Dale affirms that: “A cinema of otherness
would be one in which the structure of production and the style of a
finished film would necessarily be different than what we are expecting
to see, indeed, what we have been trained to see. For those of us raised
on Hollywood cinema, a cinema of otherness would be unrecognizable”.
Using different narrative modes and techniques (from those of the
Occidental ‘norm’), based upon a different way of viewing, different
rhythms, the mythical re-invention of the past and the instability of personal
and collective identity, Bollywood creates an unattainable dream:
Faced with the partial failure of the emancipation of the Indian people,
and the substitution of colonial power with that of the multinational
companies allied to local governments, the dream of an equalitarian,
independent country has given way to the dream of Bollywood. Only the
perfection of its artifice, together with its absolute cultural recognizability,
allow it to represent for millions of Indians an ideal motherland India, an
India of absence and desire.(175).
C. Bruna Mancini, Sguardi su Londra. Immagini di una città mostruosa. Liguori Editore. ISBN: 88-207-3844-9.
David Skilton
http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2006/skilton.html
<1> Great cities – that is large as well as eminent cities – have always cast a spell over the imagination, and London is still, even after the loss of Empire, recreated as an object of wonder at least once in every generation. An engaging and adventurous book from Italy, dealing with monstrous images of London, is fitting recompense for the long devotion of thousands of British authors to Italy. The London in Bruna Mancini’s account is not the “new Rome” vaunted by London authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except in so far as the monstrousness of the city derives from the “opes, fumum, strepitumque”, the wealth, smoke and hubbub, which these authors loved to quote, applying Horace’s description of one great imperial city to a later one. The equation of London with ancient Rome was already made in Italian in the mid-eighteenth century, when Piero Verri wrote to his brother in 1767 to express how far in advance England was of the Continent:
<2> This lively and immensely readable book is one of the latest a not inconsiderable number of Italian contributions to our understanding of the literature, visual art and filmography of London. Like most of its predecessors, it is fascinated by late-Victorian images, steeped in mystery, indefinability and suggestions of the supernatural, but it takes in a larger sweep, finding pre-echoes of these things in accounts of London after the Great Fire, and reaching forward to film, psychogeography and futuristic visions, and concluding in a perceptive treatment of “cyberbia”, an electronic and virtual city. Along the way we have been shown how the concept of the metropolis as a text to be read and interpreted appears in belles lettres long before it enters literary criticism, and how this text is a net formed from the intersection of innumerable narratives. Here the semantic pair, text/textile (testo/tessuto), is frequently called into service, but this, and other verbal tricks are not simply clever shows of postmodernity, but genuinely help the reader into the argument. Here, one feels, one is in the hands of a critic who relishes and exploits disjointed, postmodern units of sense, but at the same time enjoys the architectural craft of building complex sentences and massive paragraphs, all under impeccable syntactic control, as though the book were a verbal transposition of Piranesian visions of monstrous, perpetual prisons.
<3> The effect is quite different from that of the similar material when it appears in Peter Ackroyd’s work, for example. The latter enhances the strangeness of fact and perception partly by locating things, by saying, in effect, “here, on this familiar street, is such and such”. After all, to the Londoner, the metropolis, however oppressive and incomprehensible at times, is also the place in which one confidently gets on the number 73 bus. Dr Mancini is an observer from without, and the unalleviated strangeness of her London is shocking and revealing. Although she does not deal with the recent upsurge in interest in the experiences of immigrants to London, the reader is suddenly confronted with a complex of phenomena which convey the awfulness (in both senses) of the city to those who are devoured by it. All this, of course, is to say that Dr Mancini is following in the robust Italian tradition of finding a theme or genre, and working at it relentlessly. The monstrousness of London fits perfectly into a tradition which is strongly informed by ideas, which takes naturally to notions of utopias and dystopias, and which looks back half a century to the volcanic eruption of the stranger aspects of romanticism and the gothic in the work of Mario Praz.
<4> There are a few, unimportant errors or geography or nomenclature in the book, but such things occur in all writing on London, even by Londoners. We all have our own versions of the city which we stand by, and these versions are probably only held together by an overarching belief that somewhere there is a taxi-driver with the perfect “Knowledge”. What Dr Mancini reveals to us is the existence of very serious Italian work on London, set in an urban sociology which is only partly translated in English. It seems that there is an alternative world of research to tap into here, and there is no better way into it than by means of Dr Mancini’s lively book. Something of its quality can be seen in an article of hers in an earlier issue of Literary London Journal, “Imagined/Remembered Londons” (2.2 September 2004).
David Skilton
http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2006/skilton.html
<1> Great cities – that is large as well as eminent cities – have always cast a spell over the imagination, and London is still, even after the loss of Empire, recreated as an object of wonder at least once in every generation. An engaging and adventurous book from Italy, dealing with monstrous images of London, is fitting recompense for the long devotion of thousands of British authors to Italy. The London in Bruna Mancini’s account is not the “new Rome” vaunted by London authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except in so far as the monstrousness of the city derives from the “opes, fumum, strepitumque”, the wealth, smoke and hubbub, which these authors loved to quote, applying Horace’s description of one great imperial city to a later one. The equation of London with ancient Rome was already made in Italian in the mid-eighteenth century, when Piero Verri wrote to his brother in 1767 to express how far in advance England was of the Continent:
My friend, it is natural that our self-esteem resents our national inferiority, and yet the English are right insofar as they have a marked superiority over the whole of the European continent. They are not wrong when they regard foreigners as slaves since the Europeans, owing to their political institutions, are actually slaves ...These same advantages led to London becoming the first city to experience characteristically modern stresses and anxieties, and this duality in its historical relations with the rest of Europe produces in Mancini an excited mix of horror at what we have, and envy that we have had it so long and in such striking measure.
<2> This lively and immensely readable book is one of the latest a not inconsiderable number of Italian contributions to our understanding of the literature, visual art and filmography of London. Like most of its predecessors, it is fascinated by late-Victorian images, steeped in mystery, indefinability and suggestions of the supernatural, but it takes in a larger sweep, finding pre-echoes of these things in accounts of London after the Great Fire, and reaching forward to film, psychogeography and futuristic visions, and concluding in a perceptive treatment of “cyberbia”, an electronic and virtual city. Along the way we have been shown how the concept of the metropolis as a text to be read and interpreted appears in belles lettres long before it enters literary criticism, and how this text is a net formed from the intersection of innumerable narratives. Here the semantic pair, text/textile (testo/tessuto), is frequently called into service, but this, and other verbal tricks are not simply clever shows of postmodernity, but genuinely help the reader into the argument. Here, one feels, one is in the hands of a critic who relishes and exploits disjointed, postmodern units of sense, but at the same time enjoys the architectural craft of building complex sentences and massive paragraphs, all under impeccable syntactic control, as though the book were a verbal transposition of Piranesian visions of monstrous, perpetual prisons.
<3> The effect is quite different from that of the similar material when it appears in Peter Ackroyd’s work, for example. The latter enhances the strangeness of fact and perception partly by locating things, by saying, in effect, “here, on this familiar street, is such and such”. After all, to the Londoner, the metropolis, however oppressive and incomprehensible at times, is also the place in which one confidently gets on the number 73 bus. Dr Mancini is an observer from without, and the unalleviated strangeness of her London is shocking and revealing. Although she does not deal with the recent upsurge in interest in the experiences of immigrants to London, the reader is suddenly confronted with a complex of phenomena which convey the awfulness (in both senses) of the city to those who are devoured by it. All this, of course, is to say that Dr Mancini is following in the robust Italian tradition of finding a theme or genre, and working at it relentlessly. The monstrousness of London fits perfectly into a tradition which is strongly informed by ideas, which takes naturally to notions of utopias and dystopias, and which looks back half a century to the volcanic eruption of the stranger aspects of romanticism and the gothic in the work of Mario Praz.
<4> There are a few, unimportant errors or geography or nomenclature in the book, but such things occur in all writing on London, even by Londoners. We all have our own versions of the city which we stand by, and these versions are probably only held together by an overarching belief that somewhere there is a taxi-driver with the perfect “Knowledge”. What Dr Mancini reveals to us is the existence of very serious Italian work on London, set in an urban sociology which is only partly translated in English. It seems that there is an alternative world of research to tap into here, and there is no better way into it than by means of Dr Mancini’s lively book. Something of its quality can be seen in an article of hers in an earlier issue of Literary London Journal, “Imagined/Remembered Londons” (2.2 September 2004).
http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2004/Mancini.html
Imagined/Remembered Londons
C. Bruna Mancini
<1> In his famous essay The Image of the City (1960) Kevin Lynch asserts that writers have contributed to create the cities we inhabit, as their architects and builders. In fact, the image of the city -- created by literature and painting, and perfected by the cinematographic language[1] -- precedes the city itself; even better, it is through it that the traveller seems to be attracted into its texture/web of streets, buildings, monuments. For example, we can evoke the figure of Goethe irresistibly charmed by Rome, or Marco Polo anxious to reach the golden cities of Katai, or even Proust who, in his Recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), can solemnly affirm that, in addition to - and prior to - being real cities, Florence and Venice are names full of dream and imagination.
<2> The urban image, portrayed by the artists in their works, becomes an icon with a vigorous expressive meaning. It makes the city legible, memorable, imaginable. Close to every single real city, standing out in all its concreteness, there is an imaginary, remembered, narrated/narrative city;[2] or better, there are many different imagined cities born of dreams, utopic visions, haunting nightmares, disturbing contexts. Thus the urban text(ure) gives birth to powerful and inseparable "doubles" of itself: imagined, unreal, or even hyperreal cities whose magic and seductive images make them more real than "the" real.[3]
<3> In the second chapter of La città postmoderna/The Postmodern City, Giandomenico Amendola writes that nowadays the boundary between reality and image is weak, labile, ephemeral: the lived city, the desired city and the imagined city tend to merge.[4] So the real city looks more and more like the imagined ones. The urban/architectonic space becomes a linguistic/poetical space, the space of imagination.[5] Through imagination and memory, the narrated/imagined cities cause the real world to be absorbed by an imaginary one, acquiring a powerful symbolic value.
<4> Significant in this sense seems to be (the image of) London, a city which has always held a remarkable hold over the artistic imagination. Lawrence Phillips -- in an editorial suggestively entitled "Literary London: An Old, New Subject?", in the first issue of Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London[6] -- remembers "the biggest aggregation of human life, the most complete compendium of the world" described by Henry James at the end of the nineteenth century;[7] the London of Malcom Bradbury's "aesthetic realism"; the theatricality/simulation of Wordsworth's London; the topography bound to gender/genre in the cities of Fanny Burney and Charles Dickens; the London seen through the "alien" eyes of authors such as Krishnabhabini Das, Lee Kok Liang, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul. And again, I would add the grotesque, caricatural London portrayed by William Hogarth and Gustave Doré;[8] the dark and dangerous London of many detective and spy stories; the cataclysmatic London of the future predicted by the authors of the British New Wave.[9]
<5> In the novel entitled City of the Mind (1991) Penepole Lively writes:
<6> London is not only (no longer) a large metropolis but a powerful image, a symbol, the texture of our desires and/or of our fears; an "unreal city", like that appearing in The Waste Land (1922), which recalls urban images of the past and of the present (maybe of the future, too, if we observe it through the eyes of the old and blind Tiresias) giving them a mythical aura.[12] Fragments, memories, emblems of cities full of meaning which act as the vestiges of a noble tradition of culture, similar to the literary ruins which close the poem.[13]
<7> Suitably, only in the streets of this infinite, uncanny urban text can Virginia Woolf survive her demon, getting lost in the crowd. In "Street Haunting: A London's Adventure" (1930), for example, she discovers the most secret sensations of her soul, becoming part of an endless army of anonymous pedestrians. And, again, in "Flying Over London", Woolf imagines herself hovering in an airplane over London. With a typically refined cinematographic visivity/vision, the earth falls down and the sky comes down. The airplane is immersed, swallowed in it. The domes, the roofs, the buildings, the tangle of streets vanish, fade away, crumble, fly, sucked far away:
<10> But all these (urban) features also remind me of the black, dangerous, ambiguous London described in some of the films produced by Alfred Hitchcock in his "British period" - The Lodger. A Story of the London Fog (1926), Sabotage (1936), and The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), for example -- in which the metropolis defines itself as the ideal place where thrill and suspense can develop, expand and grow; an enormous, broaden cobweb; an eyrie of murderers, spies, assassins, conspirators, and bloody monsters. After all, London is the city of Jack the Ripper and Mr Hyde, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and James Bond. Its Babel hugeness, the danger and mystery of its labyrinthine routes, its pubs shrouded in mist, the endless stream of people and vehicles in its streets are icons everybody can recognize, even before seeing/visiting it personally.
<11> We all know London is a metropolis of sharp contrasts, anonymous areas, poor streets and green parks, transgressive acts and multicultural encounters; a "world city", or better, "The Great World of London" that Henry Mayhew observed from his fire balloon in 1862 and that Mario Maffi still describes in his book entitled Londra. Mappe, storie, labirinti (2000) as real or imaginary stratifications of past and present, of literary and cultural suggestions and cross-references which exercise a singular magnetism on the walker. The many, numberless narrative/narrated Londons melt into the real one, almost engulfing, absorbing, phagocytizing it. The image of London -- portrayed, communicated and spread through the different media (literature, painting, cinema, television, music ...) -- transforms the city into a multifaceted symbol, the space of memory and imagination. To the point that there seems to be no more one (real) London but many (imagined/remembered) Londons: the product of our imagination, our (hi)story/imaginary, our dreams and/or nightmares, our inner space/landscape, our mind.
Endnotes
[1] See Giandomenico Amendola, La città postmoderna. Magie e paure della metropoli contemporanes, Bari, Laterza, 1997 (in particular pp. 115-6) and Marisa Galbiati "Proiezioni urbane. La realtà dell'immaginario" in Proiezioni urbane. La realtà dell'immaginario, a cura di Marisa Galbiati, Milano, Tranchida Editori, 1989 (in particular pp. 14-16). The city narrated/produced by the cinema creates a "secondary reality" which tends to prevail over the (primary /daily) "reality". [^]
[2] See Cristina Giorcelli "Introduction" to Città reali e immaginarie del continente americano (a cura di C. Giorcelli, Camilla Cattarulla, Anna Scacchi, Roma, Edizioni Associate Editrice Internazionale, 1998) and Gianni Puglisi - Paolo Proietti, Le città di carta (Palermo, Sellerio, 2002). [^]
[3] Compare Jean Baudrillard, Lo scambio simbolico e la morte (Milano, Feltrinelli, 1979) and Simulacri e impostura (Bologna, Cappelli, 1980) and Mario Perniola, La società dei simulacri (Bologna, Cappelli, 1980). [^]
[4] "Il confine tra realtà ed immagine si fa oggi labile - ammesso che esso abbia ancora valore. Città vissuta, città immaginata e città desiderata tendono a fondersi. Si va verso la scomparsa del confine tra realtà ed immaginazione e il prevalere della seconda sulla prima in nome di un maggiore realismo. La città definita reale tende ad assomigliare sempre più a quella immaginata" (Ammendola 1997: 38). [^]
[5] Gastone Bachelard talks about a power superior to nature which joins to the function of the real a seducing, charming, awakening function of the unreal (La poetica dello spazio, Bari, Edizioni Dedalo, 1975, pp. 24-25). [^]
[6] Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, Volume 1, Number 1, http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/. [^]
[7] In the short but intense London, written in 1888 and published in 1905 in the collection English Hours. [^]
[8] In his famous engravings -- Over London-By Rail (1872), Ludgate Hill (1872), London Bridge (1872), Docks (1872), Houndsditch (1872)- Gustave Doré showed everything the Victorian optimism wanted to hide: the noise, the uproar, the misery, the dirt, the crime, the despair, the vapour of a huge metropolis. [^]
[9] See also my essay "Writing and Reading the Urban (Hyper)text of London" published in the review Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche, X MMIII Dipartimento di Letterature e Civiltà Anglo-Germaniche della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell"Università degli Studi di Trieste. [^]
[10] Penelope Lively, City of the Mind, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 65-67. [^]
[11] See my essay "Writing and Reading the Urban (Hyper)Text of London", Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche, X MMIII Dipartimento di Letterature e Civiltà Anglo-Germaniche della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell"Università degli Studi di Trieste, 2004. [^]
[12] It's a mythical London, made unreal by the thick and brown fog of a winter dawn, half way between purgatory and hell, and yet a place of regeneration, rebirth; a London transformed into a symbol of desolation which: "What is the city over the mountains/Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air/Falling towers/Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London/Unreal" (vv. 371-376). [^]
[13] "I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/Shall I set mu lands in order?/ London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down/Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina/Quando fiam uti chelidon -- O swallow swallow/Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie/These fragments I have shored against my ruins/When the Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe/Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata./Shantih shantih shantih" (vv. 423-433). [^]
[14] Viginia Woolf, "Flying Over London", in The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays, London, The Hogarth Press, 1950, pp. 107-108. [^]
[15] "Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge, dingy immensity of London port, is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean, clear, social assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families, second-rate shops, inexplicable people who in a once fashionable phrase do not 'exist'. All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times, do suggest to this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some tumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines of the affected carcass and protudes such masses as ignoble, comfortable Croydon, as tragic, impoverished West Ham" H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, with an Introduction by C. M. Joad, London & Glasgow, Collins, 1962, pp. 97-8. [^]
[16] Ibid, 95. [^]
[17] Also Mario Maffi, in his Londra. Mappe, storie, labirinti (Milano, Rizzoli, 2000), affirms that the urban background of New Cut, Lambeth Walk and Vauxhall Road -- where Chaplin survived when he was a boy -- acts as a powerful subtext of the films realized in that period of his career. [^]
Imagined/Remembered Londons
C. Bruna Mancini
<1> In his famous essay The Image of the City (1960) Kevin Lynch asserts that writers have contributed to create the cities we inhabit, as their architects and builders. In fact, the image of the city -- created by literature and painting, and perfected by the cinematographic language[1] -- precedes the city itself; even better, it is through it that the traveller seems to be attracted into its texture/web of streets, buildings, monuments. For example, we can evoke the figure of Goethe irresistibly charmed by Rome, or Marco Polo anxious to reach the golden cities of Katai, or even Proust who, in his Recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), can solemnly affirm that, in addition to - and prior to - being real cities, Florence and Venice are names full of dream and imagination.
<2> The urban image, portrayed by the artists in their works, becomes an icon with a vigorous expressive meaning. It makes the city legible, memorable, imaginable. Close to every single real city, standing out in all its concreteness, there is an imaginary, remembered, narrated/narrative city;[2] or better, there are many different imagined cities born of dreams, utopic visions, haunting nightmares, disturbing contexts. Thus the urban text(ure) gives birth to powerful and inseparable "doubles" of itself: imagined, unreal, or even hyperreal cities whose magic and seductive images make them more real than "the" real.[3]
<3> In the second chapter of La città postmoderna/The Postmodern City, Giandomenico Amendola writes that nowadays the boundary between reality and image is weak, labile, ephemeral: the lived city, the desired city and the imagined city tend to merge.[4] So the real city looks more and more like the imagined ones. The urban/architectonic space becomes a linguistic/poetical space, the space of imagination.[5] Through imagination and memory, the narrated/imagined cities cause the real world to be absorbed by an imaginary one, acquiring a powerful symbolic value.
<4> Significant in this sense seems to be (the image of) London, a city which has always held a remarkable hold over the artistic imagination. Lawrence Phillips -- in an editorial suggestively entitled "Literary London: An Old, New Subject?", in the first issue of Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London[6] -- remembers "the biggest aggregation of human life, the most complete compendium of the world" described by Henry James at the end of the nineteenth century;[7] the London of Malcom Bradbury's "aesthetic realism"; the theatricality/simulation of Wordsworth's London; the topography bound to gender/genre in the cities of Fanny Burney and Charles Dickens; the London seen through the "alien" eyes of authors such as Krishnabhabini Das, Lee Kok Liang, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul. And again, I would add the grotesque, caricatural London portrayed by William Hogarth and Gustave Doré;[8] the dark and dangerous London of many detective and spy stories; the cataclysmatic London of the future predicted by the authors of the British New Wave.[9]
<5> In the novel entitled City of the Mind (1991) Penepole Lively writes:
Everyone is talking, shouting. Language hangs in the night air and throbs in giant lettering above shops and theatres. A column of buses stands pulsing in a traffic jam: Gospel Oak, Putney Heath, Clapton Pond, Wood Green. Matthew and Alice pause on the pavement and he thinks of the city fung out all around, invisible and inviolate. He forgets, for an instant, his own concerns, and feels the power of the place, its resonances, its charge of life, its coded narrative. He reads the buses and sees that the words are the silt of all that has been here -- hills and rivers, woods and fields, trade, worship, customs and events, and the unquenchable evidence of language. The city mutters still in Anglo-Saxon; it remembers the hills that have become Neasden and Islington and Hendon, the marshy islands of Bermondsey and Battersea. The ghost of another topography lingers; the uplands and the streams, the woodland and fords are inscribed still on the London Streetfinder, on the ubiquitous geometry of the nderground map, in the destinations of buses. The Fleet River, its last physical trickle locked away underground in a cast iron pipe, leaves its name defiant and untamed upon the surface. The whole place is one babble of allusions, all chronology subsumed into the distortions and mutations of today, so that in the end what is visible and what is uttered are complementary. The jumbled brick and stone of the city's landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time. Language takes up the theme, an arbitrary scatter of names that juxtaposes commerce and religion, battles and conquests, kings, queens and potentates, that reaches back a thousands years or ten, providing in the end a dictionary of reference for those who will listen. Cheapside, Temple, Trafalgar, Quebec, a profligacy of Victorias and Georges and Cumberands and Bedfords -- there it all is, on a million pairs of lips every day, on and on, the imperishable clamour of those who have been here before.[10]In this passage the real London transforms itself into a fantastic, hypnotic image full of historical/social references as well as of personal/mental visions. The urban topography becomes an infinite hypertext[11] encoding the whole (hi)story of the city, its citizens, its buildings, its streets, its monuments, the events that have happened and that still happen in it: fragments/links of a past and a present which take the form of unreal/phantasmal mental images. Years, centuries, millennia melt together as the remembered, imagined city overlaps the real one.
<6> London is not only (no longer) a large metropolis but a powerful image, a symbol, the texture of our desires and/or of our fears; an "unreal city", like that appearing in The Waste Land (1922), which recalls urban images of the past and of the present (maybe of the future, too, if we observe it through the eyes of the old and blind Tiresias) giving them a mythical aura.[12] Fragments, memories, emblems of cities full of meaning which act as the vestiges of a noble tradition of culture, similar to the literary ruins which close the poem.[13]
<7> Suitably, only in the streets of this infinite, uncanny urban text can Virginia Woolf survive her demon, getting lost in the crowd. In "Street Haunting: A London's Adventure" (1930), for example, she discovers the most secret sensations of her soul, becoming part of an endless army of anonymous pedestrians. And, again, in "Flying Over London", Woolf imagines herself hovering in an airplane over London. With a typically refined cinematographic visivity/vision, the earth falls down and the sky comes down. The airplane is immersed, swallowed in it. The domes, the roofs, the buildings, the tangle of streets vanish, fade away, crumble, fly, sucked far away:
Nothing more fantastic could be imagined. Houses, streets, banks, public buildings, and habits and mutton and brussels sprouts had been swept into long spirals and curves of pink and purple like that a wet brush makes when it sweeps mounds of paint together. One could see through the Bank of England; all the business houses were transparent; the River Thames was as the Romans saw it, as paleolithic man saw it, at dawn from a hill shaggy with wood, with the rhinoceros digging his horn into the roots of rhododendrous. So immortally fresh and virginal London looked and England was earth merely, merely the world. Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood kept his finger still on the lever which turns the plane downwards. A spark glinted on a greenhouse. There rose a dome, a spire, a factory chimney, a gasometer. Civilization in short emerged; ... Now, however, there were often movements in the streets, as of sliding and stopping; and then gradually the vast creases of the stuff beneath began moving, and one saw in the creases millions of insects moving. In another second they became men, men of business, in the heart of the white city buildings. ... There were blocks in the city of traffic sometimes almost a foot long; these had to be translated into eleven or twelve Rolls Royces in a row with city magnates waiting furious; and one had to add up the fury of the magnates; and say - even though it was all silent and the block was only a few inches in length, how scandalous the control of the traffic in the City of London. But with a turn of his wrist Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood flew over the poor quarters, and there through the Zeiss glasses one could see people looking up at the noise of the aeroplane, and could judge the expression of their faces. It was not one that one sees ordinarily. It was complex. "And I have to scrub the steps," it seemed to say grudgingly. At the same, they saluted, they sent us greeting; they were capable of flight.[14]<8> This image/representation of London remembers to me another view of the city, this time seen from a train running through a metamorphic landscape, which appears in Tono Bungay (1906) by H. G. Wells. At the end of the fourth chapter, George Ponderevo -- protagonist and omniscient narrator with a backward perspective -- comes to the city, on a dull and smoky day, by the South Eastern Railway. Stage by stage, George can observe the multiplication of houses, the diminishing interspaces of market garden and dingy grass, the big factories, the gasometers and the wide reeking swamps of little homes, more of them and more and more; to the east, he can see a queer, incongruous forest of masts and spars. He marvels at this boundless world of dingy people, whiffs of industrial smell, van-crowded streets, tall warehouses, grey water, crowded barges, broad banks of indescribable mud. Cannon Street Station appears to him as "a monstrous dirty cavern" with trains packed across its vast floor:[15]
I could fill a book, I think, with a more or less imaginary account of how I came to apprehend London, how first in one aspect and then another it grew in my mind. Each day my accumulating impressions were added to and qualified and brought into relationship with new ones, they fused inseparably with others that were purely personal and accidental. I find myself with a certain comprehensive perception of London, complex indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some way a whole that began with my first visit and is still being mellowed and enriched.<9> This impressive description/"imaginary account" of London outlines an endless, boundless landscape, an immense crowd of people going to and fro on a pavement always covered with mud, under a grey and hopeless sky. The city appears to George as a second-hand dress, slovenly, harsh and irresponsive. An image I instinctively connect with the tangle of streets, courts, and alleys plunged in the direst poverty which appear in some films interpreted and directed by Charlie Chaplin during the first two decades of the twentieth century: Easy Street (1916), Police (1915) and The Kid (1921), for example. In them the city defines itself as a dangerous place full of snares and traps, inhabited by thieves, cheats and poor wretches. The dark gorges, the decrepit buildings, the dirty lanes, the black basements transform themselves into an elastic, porous fabric; a sort of enormous circus scenography in which the famous clown/tramp, masterfully interpreted by Chaplin, uses every single element of the urban environment in a very paradoxical way. Thus the urban image undergoes a kind of ironic splitting -- both tragic and comic -- and the audience can easily decode it as a poetic reminder, a bitter and satiric reaction to the rude London he lived/survived during his childhood.[17]
London!
At first, no doubt, it was a chaos of streets and people and buildings and reasonless going to and fro. I do not remember that I ever struggled very steadily to understand it, or explored it with any but a personal and adventurous intention. Yet in time there has grown up in me a kind of theory of London; I do think I see lines of an ordered structure out of which it has grown, detected a process that is something more than a confusion of casual accidents, though indeed it may be no more than a process of disease.[16]
<10> But all these (urban) features also remind me of the black, dangerous, ambiguous London described in some of the films produced by Alfred Hitchcock in his "British period" - The Lodger. A Story of the London Fog (1926), Sabotage (1936), and The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), for example -- in which the metropolis defines itself as the ideal place where thrill and suspense can develop, expand and grow; an enormous, broaden cobweb; an eyrie of murderers, spies, assassins, conspirators, and bloody monsters. After all, London is the city of Jack the Ripper and Mr Hyde, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and James Bond. Its Babel hugeness, the danger and mystery of its labyrinthine routes, its pubs shrouded in mist, the endless stream of people and vehicles in its streets are icons everybody can recognize, even before seeing/visiting it personally.
<11> We all know London is a metropolis of sharp contrasts, anonymous areas, poor streets and green parks, transgressive acts and multicultural encounters; a "world city", or better, "The Great World of London" that Henry Mayhew observed from his fire balloon in 1862 and that Mario Maffi still describes in his book entitled Londra. Mappe, storie, labirinti (2000) as real or imaginary stratifications of past and present, of literary and cultural suggestions and cross-references which exercise a singular magnetism on the walker. The many, numberless narrative/narrated Londons melt into the real one, almost engulfing, absorbing, phagocytizing it. The image of London -- portrayed, communicated and spread through the different media (literature, painting, cinema, television, music ...) -- transforms the city into a multifaceted symbol, the space of memory and imagination. To the point that there seems to be no more one (real) London but many (imagined/remembered) Londons: the product of our imagination, our (hi)story/imaginary, our dreams and/or nightmares, our inner space/landscape, our mind.
Endnotes
[1] See Giandomenico Amendola, La città postmoderna. Magie e paure della metropoli contemporanes, Bari, Laterza, 1997 (in particular pp. 115-6) and Marisa Galbiati "Proiezioni urbane. La realtà dell'immaginario" in Proiezioni urbane. La realtà dell'immaginario, a cura di Marisa Galbiati, Milano, Tranchida Editori, 1989 (in particular pp. 14-16). The city narrated/produced by the cinema creates a "secondary reality" which tends to prevail over the (primary /daily) "reality". [^]
[2] See Cristina Giorcelli "Introduction" to Città reali e immaginarie del continente americano (a cura di C. Giorcelli, Camilla Cattarulla, Anna Scacchi, Roma, Edizioni Associate Editrice Internazionale, 1998) and Gianni Puglisi - Paolo Proietti, Le città di carta (Palermo, Sellerio, 2002). [^]
[3] Compare Jean Baudrillard, Lo scambio simbolico e la morte (Milano, Feltrinelli, 1979) and Simulacri e impostura (Bologna, Cappelli, 1980) and Mario Perniola, La società dei simulacri (Bologna, Cappelli, 1980). [^]
[4] "Il confine tra realtà ed immagine si fa oggi labile - ammesso che esso abbia ancora valore. Città vissuta, città immaginata e città desiderata tendono a fondersi. Si va verso la scomparsa del confine tra realtà ed immaginazione e il prevalere della seconda sulla prima in nome di un maggiore realismo. La città definita reale tende ad assomigliare sempre più a quella immaginata" (Ammendola 1997: 38). [^]
[5] Gastone Bachelard talks about a power superior to nature which joins to the function of the real a seducing, charming, awakening function of the unreal (La poetica dello spazio, Bari, Edizioni Dedalo, 1975, pp. 24-25). [^]
[6] Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, Volume 1, Number 1, http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/. [^]
[7] In the short but intense London, written in 1888 and published in 1905 in the collection English Hours. [^]
[8] In his famous engravings -- Over London-By Rail (1872), Ludgate Hill (1872), London Bridge (1872), Docks (1872), Houndsditch (1872)- Gustave Doré showed everything the Victorian optimism wanted to hide: the noise, the uproar, the misery, the dirt, the crime, the despair, the vapour of a huge metropolis. [^]
[9] See also my essay "Writing and Reading the Urban (Hyper)text of London" published in the review Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche, X MMIII Dipartimento di Letterature e Civiltà Anglo-Germaniche della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell"Università degli Studi di Trieste. [^]
[10] Penelope Lively, City of the Mind, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 65-67. [^]
[11] See my essay "Writing and Reading the Urban (Hyper)Text of London", Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche, X MMIII Dipartimento di Letterature e Civiltà Anglo-Germaniche della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell"Università degli Studi di Trieste, 2004. [^]
[12] It's a mythical London, made unreal by the thick and brown fog of a winter dawn, half way between purgatory and hell, and yet a place of regeneration, rebirth; a London transformed into a symbol of desolation which: "What is the city over the mountains/Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air/Falling towers/Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London/Unreal" (vv. 371-376). [^]
[13] "I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/Shall I set mu lands in order?/ London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down/Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina/Quando fiam uti chelidon -- O swallow swallow/Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie/These fragments I have shored against my ruins/When the Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe/Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata./Shantih shantih shantih" (vv. 423-433). [^]
[14] Viginia Woolf, "Flying Over London", in The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays, London, The Hogarth Press, 1950, pp. 107-108. [^]
[15] "Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge, dingy immensity of London port, is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean, clear, social assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families, second-rate shops, inexplicable people who in a once fashionable phrase do not 'exist'. All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times, do suggest to this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some tumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines of the affected carcass and protudes such masses as ignoble, comfortable Croydon, as tragic, impoverished West Ham" H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, with an Introduction by C. M. Joad, London & Glasgow, Collins, 1962, pp. 97-8. [^]
[16] Ibid, 95. [^]
[17] Also Mario Maffi, in his Londra. Mappe, storie, labirinti (Milano, Rizzoli, 2000), affirms that the urban background of New Cut, Lambeth Walk and Vauxhall Road -- where Chaplin survived when he was a boy -- acts as a powerful subtext of the films realized in that period of his career. [^]
“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the
magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its
natural size.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/
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