This study tackles the representation of automata in Romanticism, with a specific focus on the concepts of uncanny and ambivalence. The reflection includes the themes of the mirror, the ideal image of the self (Ideal Ich), and the female figure, from a perspective that takes into consideration traces of the Pygmalion and Promethean myths in the Romantic imagery. The first paragraph traces an overview of the forms of the automaton over time, starting from the classical age; it is followed by a brief framing of the dominant historical and philosophical categories in Romanticism, the identification of the Fantastic as a literary mode and the comparative analysis of two case studies: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816) and August Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1886). The comparison aims at highlighting constants and variants in the meanings embodied by the automaton in two works covering a time span that goes from the ascent

of Romanticism with Hoffmann to its later expression with Villiers.

Within a short period of time, two authors belonging to the realism tradition published two novels focused on living with the artificial creature: Ian McEwan with Machines like Me and People like You, 2019, and Kazuo Ishiguro with Klara and The Sun, 2021.With these works, the authors tackle a range of ethical and existential issues that recur in the debate between philosophy, computer science, and bioengineering. Both writers come from a literary background that reveals interests in science and its related ethical implications, but not strictly framed in the science fiction genre. In depicting intelligent machines, McEwan and Ishiguro, through introspective writing characterized by the forms of realism, explore the complexities of the human condition, emotions and the intersubjective sphere. This essay sets out to compare the two novels through an analysis of the two opposing perspectives presented: the human’s viewpoint on the artificial creature, and the artificial creature's viewpoint on the human. The aim therefore is to analyse through the method of close reading the ways in which the theme of the artificial creature is discussed in literature and their implications.

The purpose of this study is to tackle some of the issues that revolve around the representation of Artificial Intelligence and that concern the impact of technology on the existential sphere and the human condition. Within this framework, I will focus on Spike Jonze’s film Her, in particular through a close reading of its dialogues. The aim is also to highlight the presence of threads tracing a continuity with the issues raised by Alan Turing in the famous article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” published in the journal Mind in 1950. If the question at the heart of Turing’s study is ‘Can Machines Think?’ – later turned into ‘Can Machines Lie?’ in Asimov and Dick’s variant – in Spike Jonze’s film the point at issue becomes ‘Can Machines Feel?’.

This essay is conceived as an introduction to Travel and Trespassing,a volume dedicated to the themes of travel, the border and, trespassing -the act that transcends it. Trespassing is understood as both an intellectual and physical practice for affirming of freedom. The first paragraph of the essay, Ambivalences and Shadow Lines, defines the concepts of journey, frontier and border through a comparative perspective. It also sets out to explore the wider tensions and dissonances that run through this semantic field. Through a subsequent commentary on a passage from Cormac McCarthy's novel The Crossing, there is the opportunity to reflect on recurring themes, such as wandering, encountering the other, and hospitality. The second section, The Frontiers of Travel, engages with a sociological perspective on the multiplication of borders –which gives more emphasis on them as devices that materialise through the media and the imagery they nurture -and the consequences they have on people. The last part of the essay, entitled Crossing the Boundary between Media, Genres and Disciplines, introduces the volume with a brief survey of travel literature and the constellations of knowledge and languages that concern it. In conclusion, the essays that make up the volume are summarized, as well as the thematic and interdisciplinary relations that exist between the sections of the volume and of the journal are highlighted.

This essay aims at investigating how the imagery related to some of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Ficciones” and Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass” re-appears in different ways and with different meanings in the TV series Westworld (Dir. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, HBO, 2016-2020). For its use of intertextuality and metanarrative, this audio-visual work could be considered as a sophisticated example of what has been defined complex TV (Mittell 2017). This study tackles the themes of the labyrinth and of the dream, which in this work are pieces of a narrative mosaic built around the artificial creature and its rebellion against the creators. From Carroll's proto-surrealism and nonsense, passing through Borges; oneiric metaphysics, these themes migrate into the genre of science fiction. The goal of this essay is also to highlight how these themes, re-actualized by a dystopia that has its roots in the technological and scientific evolution of the present, become an integrated part of an allegory on the exploitation’s dynamics of the contemporary society and on the relations of power in the age of of late capitalism.

This essay introduces the volume Marcel Proust and Signification, published by the journal E|C on the occasion of the centenary of Proust’s death. The first section, “Proust rediscovered”, interrogates the duration of the Recherche in time beyond this anniversary, with a view to rethinking Proust's work within a semiotic framework. The second section, “The Truth of Signs”, proposes a theoretical itinerary through some particularly relevant readings of an essential theme of the Recherche: the relationship between signs and vision. Through comparison of theories from different disciplinary fields, this section focuses on the search for truth in Proust's work. The final section, “Theories, Reworkings, Mythologies”, presents the three main thematic axes of the volume, illuminating the interartistic and intermedial dimension of the reception of Proust's work.

Although the distinction between migrant and tourist is artificial — linked to statistical, juridical and economic definitions used to delimit the travel and hospitality sector — these words are associated with conflicting and often opposite images, stereotypes and emotions. On the one hand, migrants or refugees are usually perceived as dead weights, carriers of anguish and danger, to be rejected as a social problem. On the other hand, tourists or travelers are depicted as opportunities, special guests to be accommodated in comfortable places, as bearers of a positive economic value. Aiming at going beyond a mere critique of kinetophobia (fear of movement) and of the different forms it takes, the essay invites to question the “residentialist” foundations of the nation-state and to develop a new understanding of the interaction between mobility and belonging. By exploring the symbolic meanings and political implications that the migrant / tourist categories carry with them, the essay maps the emergence of a world where freedom of movement is the main factor of social stratification. Finally, the essay introduces the reflections presented in this volume, highlighting how the different and complementary disciplinary perspectives of the essays collected not only call into question the conceptual categories that define the practice of traveling and the experience of diversity, but they contribute to developing new perspectives on mobility understood as a total social phenomenon.

Key figures within the Bloomsbury Group, the sisterly relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell is also an ongoing and uninterrupted dialogue on the relationship between life and art. This essay aims to outline the points of convergence in the sisters' aesthetic vision and artistic practice. The rejection of imitation, the crisis of figurative painting, the break with nineteenth-century realism, and the search for a new expressive language are among the crucial issues discussed. At the core of this analysis is the intricate connection between the concept of impersonality, which permeates their works, and the pursuit of capturing emotion and life through both word and image.

The pun we indulged in taking up the title of Benjamin's famous essay is useful to describe the effects of a highly disputed technological revolution, one the human community feels imminent. The cultural and anthropological consequences of the possibility of reproducing the artistic artefact made by a human being through technique were no less relevant than those that occur when the object of reproduction is the human itself. The present essay proposes a reflection on some science fiction stories in which anthropomorphic robots are described that are able to act and think in ways that require the emergence of consciousness and the unconscious, all that is more human and mysterious at the same time. We address such a vast and complex topic through the analysis of the dialogue between the human being and the machine, between evidential paradigm and psychoanalytic session. This study analyses some works belonging to literature, cinema and television that have declined these themes with different nuances: the interrogation aimed at determining the machine malfunction or deception in Liar! (1971) and Mirror Image (1972) by Isaac Asimov; the sessions carried out to establish the human or machinic nature of the investigated subject in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick and in the film Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott; the dialogues between programmers and androids of the TV series Westworld (2016–) by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Particularly relevant for the purposes of this study is Westworld, which stages the manifestation of the unconscious in the artificial intelligence. An oxymoron that unites the unconscious and its opposite, the artifice, to tell the artificial unconscious is a true representation of the impossible.

While not aiming at an exhaustive definition of the relationship between the literary and the TV fields, this article proposes a reflection on the transformations of the novel through different times and media. The investigation is based on the comparison of two 19th-century novels - a popular one, Les Mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue, and a realist one, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - and two contemporary TV series which gained worldwide success - Lost, by J.J. Abrams, D. Lindelof, J. Lieber, C. Cuse; and Mad Men, AMT, by Matthew Weiner. Through a symptomatic reading of the endings of single episodes and of the series finales, interpreted as clues to more overarching stylistic traits, the article focuses on issues related to long-lasting narrations, and on the textual forms which characterize both the traditional novel and the TV series. In spite of their being an “expanded text” and an “infinite entertainment”, the attention paid to the endings and finales of TV series by showrunners, critics and audiences alike bears witness to the centrality of such a narrative element in the composition and reception of audio-visual works.

In this article I intend to analyse Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillants (2006) and Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest (2014) in their dealing with the traumatic events of the Twentieth Century through literary writing and in their conveying meaning in terms of remembrance and historical awareness of collective traumas. In particular, I tackle the relationship between historical consciousness and the return of the tragic, as a way to identify in the representation of the inner rupture of the self the connection between the psychoanalytic dimension and the tragic dimension, and between private and political unconscious.

The goal of this paper is to compare the different approaches to serialising which characterize the 19th century novel and the modern quality TV drama. Through a symptomatic critic of the episode endings, which are read here as a clue of other stylistic features, the focus of this study is on the common themes and textual forms which charachterize literature and televisual serial narrative.

In particular, I’ll consider some of these serials as an evolution of the classic realistic novel, and of his sub-genre Bildungsroman, considering some long lasting themes, such as the return of the repressed past in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-1861) and Matthew Weiner’s TV serial Mad Men (AMT, 2007-2015). In this perspective, the narration of the modern TV serial is read as a “mediamorphosis” (R. Fidler) of the classic novel, and as a possible answer to the so-called death of novel.

This study aims to enquire the account of the French Revolution through the form of the novel and the building of characters, both invented or historically existed and reconstructed through the lens of the fiction. Starting from Victor Hugo’s nineteen century novel Quatre-vingt-treize (1874), the goal is to intertwine the analysis of the historiographical perspective inherent to the storytelling with the construction of different characters, core instrument of the ”melodramatic imagination” (P. Brooks). In this direction, the goal is also to reflect on the figuralization of moral conflicts which characterize the age of French Revolution and of the Jacobin ideology during the Terror.

With Remo Ceserani, Clotilde Bertoni, Daniele Giglioli, Guido Mazzoni, Florian Mussgnug. University of Bologna, Department of History, Cultures, Civilisation, Aula Magna, 18 December 2015.

In 1964, in Apocalittici e integrati, Umberto Eco stated that if the mistake of the apologists of mass culture was to believe that the multiplication of the industrial products was good in and of itself, on the contrary, the mistake of the apocalyptic-aristocratic disdainer of mass culture was to think that mass culture was radically poor, because of its very nature of “industrial reality”, as if culture could be produced outside the industrial conditioning. In a perspective that considers the historical evolution of the media, i.e. containing and forming the expression of the imagination, the goal is to reflect here on an analogy–one already observed and discussed in literature–between the narrative forms of the nineteenth century’s novel and contemporary TV series. Without trying to entirely define the relationship between the different forms of the literary and the audiovisual, in my essay I will tackle the transformations of the popular novel across different moments and media, using Eugene Sue's novel Les Mystères de Paris and the TV serial Lost (J.J. Abrams, D. Lindelof, J. Lieber, C. Cuse) as case studies.

Le Temps retrouvé is a movie of the Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz, who transposed the latest volume of La Recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.

Since much of the negative judgments on Ruiz's work started from the assertion of the untranslatability of Recherche's poetry in a cinematographic work, this study aims to understand the relationship that film text establishes with literary text.

This work focalizes on the third part of Victor Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize: "En Vendée", in particular on the sixth volume, ("C'est après la victoire qu'a lieu le combat") and on the seventh (“Féodalité et révolution”). The aim is to cross the historiographical perspective inscribed in the novel with the analysis of how Hugo, through the characters construction, expresses the moral conflict that marked the years of the French Revolution and then characterized the Jacobin ideology during the Reign of Terror.

This article reconsiders the narrative construnction of the historical novel in the light of recent critical debates. Bearing in mind the overarching theme of the hybridization of the historiographic and literary genres, the article examines in detail Wu Ming 4’s solo novel, Stella del mattino (2008). In this work, the rewriting of real, once existing historical characters follows a thread of verisimilitude against the backdrop of meticulously reconstructed historical scenarios. By focusing on the use of history, allegory and myth in the novel, the aim of this study is to examine the narration of the overcoming of Trauma of the First World War through the therapeutic value of writing. In so doing, emphasis is given to passages in which the reader is able to grasp, between the scattered fragments of history, moments of the utopian impetus, thanks to the narration of communal moments of being and everyday life practices.

Reconsidering the narrative construction of the European novel in light of recent critical perspectives, this article explores the hybridization of historiographic and novelistic genres through an analysis of Wu Ming’s Manituana (2007) and Wu Ming 4’s solo novel Stella del mattino (2008). In both works, the rewriting of historical figures—crafted with careful attention to plausibility—is interwoven with meticulously reconstructed historical settings. The aim of this study is to reflect on the convergence of these two novels, both in terms of intent and narrative techniques, with contemporary historiography. The analysis focuses on passages that reveal, within the interstices of history, the renewal of the utopian impulse through the narration of shared moments of being and everyday practices.