Aracoeli (1982) was the last novel written by Elsa Morante (1912-85), one of the most significant Italian writers of the twentieth century. The journey, both geographical and memorial, of a homosexual son in search of his dead mother is a first-person narrative that has puzzled many critics for its darkness and despair. By combining scholars from different disciplines and cultural traditions, The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli, co-edited by Manuele Gragnolati and Sara Fortuna, re-evaluates the esthetical and theoretical complexity of Morante’s novel and argues that it engages with crucial philosophical and epistemological questions in an original and profound way. Contributors explore the manifold tensions staged by the novel in connection with contemporary philosophical discourse (from feminist/queer to political theory to psycho-analysis) and authors (such as Emilio Gadda, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pedro Almodovar).
The Power of Disturbance, which emerged from an ICI-Symposium, shows that by creating a ‘hallucinatory’ representation of the relationship between mother and child, Aracoeli questions the classical distinction between subject and object, and proposes an altogether new and subversive kind of writing.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction – Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati
Language and (Inter-)Subjectivity
2. Between Affection and Discipline: Exploring Linguistic Tensions from Dante to Aracoeli – Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati
3 Seeing and Telling: Anamorphosis, Relational Identity, and Other Perspectival Perplexities in Aracoeli – Rebecca West
4 Resisting Paranoia: Poesis and Politics in Aracoeli – Florian Mussgnug
Psychoanalysis
5 ‘The Lover of a Hybrid’: Memory and Fantasy in Aracoeli – Christoph F. E. Holzhey
6 Scene madri: Psychoanalytic Visions from Aracoeli to Volver – Vittorio Lingiard
7 Baubo — Another and Additional Name of Aracoeli: Morante’s Queer Feminism – Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Intermezzo
8 Staging the Passion of Aracoeli – Agnese Grieco
Elsa e gli altri
9 Aracoeli and Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore: Disturbed Sons, Disturbing Mothers – Giuseppe Stellardi
10 Politics and Sexuality in Pasolini’s Petrolio – Francesca Cadel
11 Between Italy and Spain: TheTragedy of History and the Salvific Power of Love in Elsa Morante and María Zambrano – Elisa Martínez Garrido
Religion
12 The Womb of Dreams: Cabbalistic Themes and Images in Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli – Sergio Parussa
13 Morante and Weil: The Aporiae of History and the End of the Fairy Tale – Claude Cazalé Bérard
14 Indian Traces: Aracoeli, Pasolini’s L’odore dell’India, and Moravia’s Un’idea dell’India – Mimma Congedo
