The Italian publisher FrancoAngeli has just published a new volume by Dr Francesco Capello from the Department of Italian. The title of the book is Città specchio. Soggettivit à e spazio urbano in Palazzeschi, Govoni e Boine [Mirror Cities: Subjectivity and Urban Space in Palazzeschi, Govoni, and Boine].
Cityscapes represent a particularly fascinating standpoint for the study of modernity in Western literatures. Francesco’s book approaches three major authors in early twentieth-century Italian literature from an original perspective, showing how in their works the fantasies associated to urban representations are also connected with other key literary objects – including women, the divine, and poetry. The city, however, increasingly emerges as a mirror image not only of the ‘otherness’ evoked by these objects, but also of subjectivity itself understood as a multilayered constellation of relational forms.
Dr Capello points out how the ‘mirror cities’ of the authors Aldo Palazzeschi, Corrado Govoni and Giovanni Boine reveal their attempts to engage, through their own writing, with the trauma inherent in modernity as historical-cultural phenomenon as well as, psychologically, in coming into being as a subject.
The book is published in Italian. For more details, please see the publisher’s page here:
www.francoangeli.it/Ricerca/Scheda_Libro.aspx?ID=21478