Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo
From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92)....
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credinunivpr:10.3366/para.2019.0289 2023-05-15T17:03:35+02:00 Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo Benvegnù, Damiano 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/para.2019.0289 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full-xml/10.3366/para.2019.0289 en eng Edinburgh University Press https://www.euppublishing.com/customer-services/librarians/text-and-data-mining-tdm Paragraph volume 42, issue 1, page 76-90 ISSN 0264-8334 1750-0176 Literature and Literary Theory Visual Arts and Performing Arts journal-article 2019 credinunivpr https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2019.0289 2022-04-09T03:58:10Z From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition. Article in Journal/Newspaper Killer Whale Orca Killer whale Edinburgh University Press (via Crossref) Paragraph 42 1 76 90 |
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Edinburgh University Press (via Crossref) |
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English |
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Literature and Literary Theory Visual Arts and Performing Arts |
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Literature and Literary Theory Visual Arts and Performing Arts Benvegnù, Damiano Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo |
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Literature and Literary Theory Visual Arts and Performing Arts |
description |
From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Benvegnù, Damiano |
author_facet |
Benvegnù, Damiano |
author_sort |
Benvegnù, Damiano |
title |
Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo |
title_short |
Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo |
title_full |
Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo |
title_fullStr |
Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo |
title_full_unstemmed |
Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo |
title_sort |
deadly mirrors: animal death in tommaso landolfi and stefano d'arrigo |
publisher |
Edinburgh University Press |
publishDate |
2019 |
url |
http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/para.2019.0289 https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full-xml/10.3366/para.2019.0289 |
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Killer Whale Orca Killer whale |
genre_facet |
Killer Whale Orca Killer whale |
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Paragraph volume 42, issue 1, page 76-90 ISSN 0264-8334 1750-0176 |
op_rights |
https://www.euppublishing.com/customer-services/librarians/text-and-data-mining-tdm |
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https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2019.0289 |
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42 |
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76 |
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