Per un'etica della letteratura: la cornice il doppio legame nell'opera di J. M. Coetzee

The elusive fiction of J. M. Coetzee is not a work in which you can read fixed ethical stances. I suggest testing the potentialities of a logic based on frames and double binds in Coetzee's novels. A double bind is a dilemma in communication which consists on tho conflicting messages, with the result that you can’t successfully respond to neither. Jacques Derrida highlighted the strategic value of a way of thinking based on the double bind (but on frames as well), which enables to escape binary thinking and so it opens an ethical space, where you can make a choice out of a set of fixed rules and take responsibility for it. In Coetzee’s fiction the author himself can be considered in a double bind, seeing that he is a white South African writer who feels that his “task” can’t be as simply as choosing to represent faithfully the violence and the racism of the apartheid or of choosing to give a voice to the oppressed. Good intentions alone do not ensure protection against entering unwittingly into complicity with the dominant discourse, and this is why is important to make the frame in which one is always situated clearly visible and explicit. The logic of the double bind becomes the way in which moral problem are staged in Coetzee’s fiction as well: the opportunity to give a voice to the oppressed through the same language which co-opted to serve the cause of oppression, a relation with the otherness never completed, or the representability of evil in literature, of the secret and of the paradoxical implications of confession and forgiveness.

Memorie traumatiche, fotografie e intermedialità nella narrativa contemporanea di lingua inglese

La fotografia viene utilizzata intermedialmente per la narrazione di contromemorie e memorie traumatiche ricorrendo a numerose modalità e strategie di inserzione e impiego diverse. Se l’intermedialità da un lato non è riconducibile ad una serie di pratiche convenzionali, ma dipende dal contesto narrativo, dall’altro essa detiene un’organicità che la allinea funzionalmente ai processi e alle indagini sulla rappresentabilità del trauma. Inoltre, per la versatilità della sua natura poliedrica, la pratica narrativa intermediale (nelle sue configurazioni più diverse) assume una valenza epistemologica e metodologica nei confronti degli studi sull’esternazione e rielaborazione del trauma. Questo studio si prefigge di mettere a confronto testi teorici e testi narrativi per metterne in rilievo il reciproco apporto.