Antonio Castore

Antonio Castore studied at the University of Turin, Italy, where he earned a MA in Modern Literatures (2001) and a PhD in Comparative Literature (2006). He has lectured on Italian poetry and translation studies, with a special focus on the rendering of Shakespeare’s dramatic language. He is author of two monographs: Grottesco e riscrittura (2012), which explores the relation between the grotesque aesthetics and the concept of ‘rewriting’, intended in the broad sense of a textual, cultural and aesthetic reshaping of borders, inclusive of the borders of the body; and Il dialogo spezzato. Forme dell’incomprensione in letteratura [The Broken Dialogue] (2011), which is entirely devoted to the examination of the concept of ‘communicational error’ with respect to the works of Shakespeare, Levi, Kafka and Bachmann.

Prior to joining the ICI Berlin, was a research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington D.C.). While at the Folger, he carried out a new translation and critical edition of The Comedy of Errors (published in 2015) and Pericles. Prince of Tyre (2018). His research interests span a broad range of topics, from literary theory to the interconnections between literature and linguistics / philosophy / architecture. His has published articles in Italian, German and English on the rhetoric and philosophy of dialogue, language(s) and translation, the theory and representation of the city.

The aim of this project is to study the manifold relations between the concept of error and that of structure / construction in 20th-century literary discourse, and more pointedly in the oeuvre of Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. The topic of how modern texts have embodied the concept of incompleteness, error, and failure will be developed in the light of two different – and, to a certain extent, opposite – archetypal figurations of the lack of wholeness in architecture, namely the mythical narration of Babel (Zumthor) and the  20th-century discourse on ‘ruins’ (Simmel, Benjamin, Adorno).

The theoretical background thus devised represents the foundation of a close textual examination, which, by employing the tools of linguistic and philosophical analysis, specifically concentrates on those literary works in which the representation of unfinished/unfinishable architectures and/or building activity merges with an innovative reconsideration of language and space. In this sense, I privilege the examination of works raising major aesthetic and meta-literary issues connected to the central idea of the construction – and deconstruction – of the literary oeuvre and, more widely, of the work of art.