Journal article
Deathly Love: Tracing the Necro Logic of the Decadent Imagination in I.U. Tarchetti's Amore nell'arte
Italian culture, Vol.35(1), pp.21-33
03/01/2017
DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2016.1222652
Abstract
This paper examines three stories in Tarchetti's Amore nell'arte as case studies of the conjunction of art, love, and death, which plays a central role in the decadent imagination. In advancing the idea that art is superior to life, these texts couple the artistic ideal with a propensity toward necrophilic excess of love. Departing from the critical tendency to view such excess as evidence of an anticonventional stance, I explore how Tarchetti's writing points to complicity between unfettered ideals and worldly power structures. I rely on an ecocritical perspective to trace this complicity to a necro logic: a hollowed out, life-denying symbolic order that posits abstract, polarizing distinctions between self and other in order to enable limitless self-expansion at the expense of the other. The paper's central argument can be summed up as follows: the path to self-fulfillment emplotted in Tarchetti's stories shows deathly implications in the creative vitality of decadent literature by leading from idealistic love, through necrophilic amore nell'arte, to ultimate self-destruction. At the root of this outcome lies a tendency to devalue life processes and overvalue pure abstractions - a tendency ultimately consistent with the conventional ethos that the misfit Scapigliati and other decadent writers ostensibly rejected.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Deathly Love: Tracing the Necro Logic of the Decadent Imagination in I.U. Tarchetti's Amore nell'arte
- Creators
- Cinzia Sartini Blum - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Italian culture, Vol.35(1), pp.21-33
- Publisher
- Routledge
- DOI
- 10.1080/01614622.2016.1222652
- ISSN
- 0161-4622
- eISSN
- 1559-0909
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/01/2017
- Academic Unit
- International Programs; French and Italian
- Record Identifier
- 9984397921502771
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