Bertinoro, 6/13 September 2009

Shadows

Shadows of the Mind:
Imagination, Delusion, Ghosts

Our seminar explores the eerie affinity between imagination and insanity, two human practices which are generally assumed to be about perceiving things that do not exist. Mental images, like shadows and ghosts, are notoriously difficult to predict. Their feeble, impoverished shapes lack the vivacity and vitality of perceived objects, yet it is difficult for us to resist their peculiar fascination. Like the child, who turns on herself to make her shadow move around the room, we treat absences and optical illusions as mysterious objects, made up of an intangible, smoky substance. Like the quintessential madman, we often imagine ourselves in the invisible company of others: absent friends or loved ones, whose shadowy presence we contemplate with vivid apprehension. Perception and inward experience – vision and fantasia – are not always easily distinguished. As we shall see, imaginary ghosts can enter our public life, while the shadows of physical objects may prompt very personal fears, desires, and memories.

READING LIST

Part One

  • Georg Büchner, Woyzeck (1837), in Werke und Briefe. Münchner Ausgabe, ed. by Gerhard Schaub and Hans-Joachim Simm, München, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006; transl. by Victor Price, in Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena and Woyzeck, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971.
  • Daniel Paul Schreber, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (1903), Frankfurt Ullstein, 1973; transl. by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988.
  • Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia (1911) in Gesammelte Werke, Band VII, Frankfurt, Fischer Verlag, 1940, pp. 239-320; transl. by Andrew Webber, Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia, in The Schreber Case, London, Penguin, 2003.
  • Valdimir Nabokov, Despair (Otchayanie, 1932), London, Penguin, 1981.
  • Elsa Morante, Aracoeli, Turin, Einaudi, 1982, transl. by William Weaver, New York, Random House, 1984.

Part Two

  • Plato, The Republic, book seven, 514a-520a (“Allegory of the Cave”).
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
  • René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, first meditation.
  • John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book two, chapter 11.
Seminar in English
Florian Mussgnug
University College London
Florian Mussgnug teaches Italian Literature at University College London,
where he also convenes the MA in Comparative Literature. His publications
include articles on Primo Levi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Italian postmodernism
and literary theory, the volume Lutero e la riforma protestante (Giunti,
2003) and two forthcoming monographs on Giorgio Manganelli and Umberto
Eco. He is co-editor of Contemporanea and a member of the executive
committee of the British Comparative Literature Association and of the
Réseau Européen d'Etudes Littéraires Comparées. He is currently working on
a comparative study of twentieth-century European apocalypse fiction.

Tutor
Rossella Carbotti University of Bologna

Rossella Carbotti graduated in 2003 in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bologna. Her MA thesis focused on the work of the contemporary Irish writer Emma Donoghue. She is currently working on her dissertation on contemporary figurations of metamorphosis in queer literature and culture for a PhD Program in Literatures and Cultures of the English-Speaking Countries at the University of Bologna. She is jointly enrolled in a Doctorate Program in Italian Studies at University California – Berkeley. She has also been a member of the Synapsis Executive Committee since 2007. Her research interests include gender and queer studies, alter-temporalities and their relationship with the concept of space, fantastic literature, and graphic novels.