Differently queer : temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Petrolio" and Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli"
- The de-constitution of the 'I' is at the centre of Manuele Gragnolati's essay 'Differently Queer: Temporality, Aesthetics, and Sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Petrolio" and Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli"'. The essay explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in the final novels of two twentieth-century Italian authors: Pasolini's "Petrolio" (1972–75) and Morante's "Aracoeli" (1982). Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, and suspended. The article argues that both novels thereby allow for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity. It shows how the aesthetics of Pasolini's and Morante's texts replicate the movement of queer subjectivity and dismantle the traditional structure of the novel but do so differently. The fractured and dilated movement of "Petrolio's" textuality corresponds to a post-Oedipal and fully formed subject who is haunted by his complicity with bourgeois power and wants to shatter and annihilate himself by replicating the paradoxical pleasure of non-domesticated sexuality. "Aracoeli", by contrast, has a 'formless form' ('forma senza forma') that corresponds to the position of never completing the process of subject formation by adapting to the symbolic order. The poetic operation of Morante's novel consists in staging an interior journey, backwards along the traces of memory and the body and at the same time forward towards embracing the partiality and fluidity of an inter-subjectivity that is always in the process of becoming.
Author: | Manuele Gragnolati |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-552587 |
URL: | https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-11/gragnolati_differently-queer.pdf |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-11_05 |
ISBN: | 978-3-85132-854-7 |
ISSN: | 2627-731X |
Parent Title (English): | De/constituting wholes : towards partiality without parts / edited by Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph F.E. Holzhey ; Cultural inquiry ; vol. 11 |
Publisher: | Turia + Kant |
Place of publication: | Wien |
Document Type: | Part of a Book |
Language: | English |
Year of Completion: | 2020 |
Year of first Publication: | 2017 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2020/07/28 |
Tag: | Aesthetics; Becoming (Philosophy); Intersubjectivity; Italian literature - 20th Century; Memory; Sexuality; Temporality |
GND Keyword: | Pasolini, Pier Paolo; Petrolio; Morante, Elsa; Aracoeli; Ästhetik; Sexualverhalten; Zeitlichkeit; Intersubjektivität; Werden; Gedächtnis |
Page Number: | 16 |
First Page: | 85 |
Last Page: | 99 |
HeBIS-PPN: | 467744211 |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |
8 Literatur / 85 Italienische, rumänische, rätoromanische Literaturen / 850 Italienische, rumänische, rätoromanische Literaturen | |
Sammlungen: | CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft |
CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / ICI Berlin | |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen |