L'occhio di Dedalo. Rappresentazione dello spazio e spaesamenti in letteratura contemporanea

In the following dissertation, we will reflect on space representation in the literary context. Starting with a corpus of contemporary texts, we will bring out some of the pivotal ideas of the study of space in the human sciences, keeping central a literary criticism approach. Since the reassertion of the spatial axiom (that occurred with the spatial turn) eroded the hegemonic power of time in literary and cultural analysis, multiple readings have flourished emphasizing the value of spatial coordinates. The following work fits into this scenario. Literary texts, as Edward Said has persuasively argued, can prove to be extremely useful tools for deriving ideas and conceptions of a given time. With this research project, space perception and representation will be examined focusing on one category of study: the experience of disorientation. This category will allow us to highlight what Bertrand Westphal called the multifocal property of space. In the texts we will comment on, we will see how a disorientation effect is produced and which qualities of space this specific form of experience will help us define. In the first chapter, titled Man and Space, we will reflect on space representation in the urban context. In this direction, we will comment on Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis (2003). To give the work an interdisciplinary scope, some of the most relevant reflections contained in Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York (1978) will also be considered. By recalling a number of Romantic and pre-modern texts, we will see from which formal tendencies the relation between person and space can be problematized by the literary device. In the second chapter, with the title Memory and image, the experience of disorientation will be analyzed from the perspective of memory. The writings by George Perec, in this regard, will help us compare the operation of writing with the idea of the exhaustibility of space. Finally, the theme of memory will find a more articulated compendium in the analysis of the works by W.G. Sebald. Presenting a series of reflections on the challenges and difficulties of the representative act, we will comment the case of a disorientation effect caused by the relationship between text and image in the works of the German writer. In the third chapter, Ruptures and Transitions, we will examine the declination of disorientation from the experience of migration. The novel Amerincah (2013), by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, will allow us to see how the text elaborates the different stages of an integration process, and to what extent the reformulation of the migrant's cultural identity can be challenging. Lastly, we will examine a practice of territorial reconfiguration theorized by anthropologist Ernesto De Martino in his well-known work on cultural apocalypses, The End of the World (1977), named riappaesamento, during which spatial identity codes are re-actualized after an experience of disorientation. We will analyze, in this direction, a case study on aboriginal tribes described by De Martino himself, as well as a Brazilian documentary named 7 Cortes de cabelo no Congo (2022). To close our discussion, we will lastly comment the annual ceremonial of the Black Indians movement of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, relying on an exhibition presented in Paris in the winter of 2022/2023 at the Musée du Quai Branly. All these perspectives regarding experiences of disorientation will allow us to think space as a mobile cultural and literary concept, constantly evolving, of which it is fundamental to grasp the emerging traits.