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Forum for Modern Language Studies Advance Access originally published online on September 2, 2008
Forum for Modern Language Studies 2008 44(4):460-479; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqn054
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.

This article appears in the following Forum for Modern Language Studies issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: The Fantastic: An Enduring Literary Mode [View the issue table of contents]

Aesthetic Discourse and the Paradox of Representation in Camillo Boito's "Un corpo"

Daniela La Penna

Department of Italian Studies
Whiteknights Campus
University of Reading
Reading
Berkshire RG6 6AA
United Kingdom

d.lapenna{at}reading.ac.uk

  Abstract

This article furnishes an alternative reading of Camillo Boito's "Un corpo" by highlighting the ways in which aesthetics, as much as science, contributes to activate the dynamics of sexual repression and the erasure of the female in the novella. By exploring hitherto neglected literary sources, and by drawing attention to some equally overlooked cultural contexts, the article delineates how these elements contribute to the articulation of the economy of desire which underpins Boito's novella. The article concludes with a discussion of the novella read as an implicit commentary on the limits of artistic mimesis and the challenges of multimedial reproduction in Italian fin-de-siècle literary discourse.

Key Words: Boito, Camillo • aesthetics • Arethusa • Pygmalion • sexuality • necrophilia • representation • mimesis • fetishisation


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