This dissertation analyses the influence and impact of the discourse on Physiognomy on European theatrical culture at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The debate about the scientific nature of Physiognomy prompted by the work of Johann Caspar Lavater, is discussed in the theoretical and philosophical introduction. Starting from the concept that Physiognomy refers to particular signs on the face, which can be read and interpreted through a well-defined system, this dissertation looks for evidence of a knowledge and awareness of this pseudo-scientific theory among various authors of theatrical works. The methodology applied in the two analytical parts refers to the semiotics of theatre and the subdivision of its material into “performance text” and “dramatic text”. The first part discusses the influence of Physiognomy on theatrical performance. Theatre is seen as a public space and the actor stands at the centre of the performance. The acting manuals published between 1740 and 1840, offer a large amount of physiognomic and pathognomic elements, among them, the theory related to the passions and emotions comes to be of crucial importance in this analysis. In the second part, the influence of Physiognomy on the plays is analysed. This part is dedicated to a text analysis of a selected dramatic corpus of plays in French, English, Italian and German. The analyses begin by summarizing some newly developed genres, such as Melodrama, Comédie Larmoyante, Drame bourgeois, Rührstück, and Bürgerliches Trauerspiel. Physiognomy makes an appearance in many different guises: in the so-called “physiognomical portraits”, for instance, where we find animated discussions on the passions to be displayed, and also direct references to Johann Caspar Lavater and his science. The text analysis ends with a contextualization of the dramatic corpus seen within a wider artistic production of the time (portraits, caricatures, silhouettes).

Within the framework of third-wave feminist philosophy, this dissertation explores female subjectivity in twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cinematic representations of Sleeping Beauty in which the magic typical of the classical versions of the fairy tale has been substituted by science and technology. We reveal the complexities of female subjectivity in the different versions of the fairy tale and reject the universalistic notion of Sleeping Beauty as passive. While contextualizing Sleeping Beauty in the historical, oral, and literary traditions from which she derived, we first explore female subjectivity through a close reading of the tale’s classical versions, that is: Giambattista Basile’s “Sole, Luna e Talia” (1634), Charles Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant” (1697), and the Brothers Grimms’ “Dornröschen” (1812-1857). This study serves as the foundation for our subsequent investigation of Sleeping Beauty in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the middle of the twentieth century when a new “vogue” in fairy tale studies merged with the rising interest in the compatibility of science and the humanities, Sleeping Beauty has appeared at the crossroads of science and fiction in: Primo Levi’s “La bella addormentata nel frigo” (1966), Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979), Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska (1982), Pedro Almodóvar’s Hable con ella (2002), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Marco Bellocchio’s Bella Addormentata (2012). Each work, or hypertext as Gérard Genette calls a work deriving from a previous work, uniquely builds on the Sleeping Beauty topos in a scientific and technological framework. In analyzing Sleeping Beauty in her new context, we analyze the relationship between science, technology, and female subjectivity.

La fotografia viene utilizzata intermedialmente per la narrazione di contromemorie e memorie traumatiche ricorrendo a numerose modalità e strategie di inserzione e impiego diverse. Se l’intermedialità da un lato non è riconducibile ad una serie di pratiche convenzionali, ma dipende dal contesto narrativo, dall’altro essa detiene un’organicità che la allinea funzionalmente ai processi e alle indagini sulla rappresentabilità del trauma. Inoltre, per la versatilità della sua natura poliedrica, la pratica narrativa intermediale (nelle sue configurazioni più diverse) assume una valenza epistemologica e metodologica nei confronti degli studi sull’esternazione e rielaborazione del trauma. Questo studio si prefigge di mettere a confronto testi teorici e testi narrativi per metterne in rilievo il reciproco apporto. / Photography is used intermedially, recurring to different insertion modalities and strategies, to narrate countermemories and traumatic memories. Although intermediality is not ascribable to a series of convential practices, depending each of them on the narrative context, however it detains an organicity that guarantees the possibility to align it functionally to the processes and studies on the representability of trauma. Morever, because of the versatility of its poliedric nature, the narrative use of intermedial photographies (in their different declensions) retains an epistemological and methodological value for the studies on the externalization and processing of trauma. The aim of this study is to confront theoretical and narrative texts to analyze how they influence each other.

Questa tesi si prefigge di evidenziare, nell’ambito dei diversi quadri teorici e critici di riferimento, i nessi tematici che legano a doppio filo morte, memoria e narrazione nell’opera di Julian Barnes, nonché di verificare come tale opera sia attraversata dall’ossessione dell’autore per il pensiero della fine nelle sue molteplici forme, a partire dal disimpegnato Metroland sino ad arrivare al più recente The Noise of Time, il cui protagonista Šostakovič addirittura teorizza su come affrontare la paura della morte. Davanti alla “finestra che dà sul niente”, Barnes adotta un atteggiamento di risoluto distacco, anche quando si trova a parlare della scomparsa dell’amatissima moglie o quando affronta il pensiero della sua stessa dipartita. A ben vedere, però, questa imperturbabile razionalità – vera cifra dell’opera barnesiana – ne rappresenta anche il più grande limite: nell’affrontare le tematiche a lui care (la paura dell’annichilimento, la riflessione sul passato, il ruolo dell’arte per affrontare la vita e la morte, la fallibilità della memoria, la ricerca della verità, il restringimento dell’orizzonte delle possibilità che caratterizza la vecchiaia), lo scrittore tende privilegiare un freddo raziocinio e raramente supera il mero approccio filosofico-razionale prendendo contatto con la sfera delle emozioni. Lo stesso si può dire dei suoi personaggi. Il pit-gazing, la fissità dello sguardo vacuo, a capofitto nel buio del nulla di fronte al quale, pur riconoscendo la propria sconfitta, Barnes si ostina a insistere nella riflessione, tende a rivelarsi una scomoda zavorra per la sua poetica non meno che – possiamo azzardarci a supporre – per la sua stessa vita interiore. / This thesis purports to analyse, within the relevant theories and critical frameworks, the themes of death, memory and narration in Julian Barnes’s fiction and non-fiction. The author’s obsession with ‘the sense of the end’ in its various forms, evident since the times of Metroland (1980), informs also his latest novel, The Noise of Time (2016), whose protagonist, the Russian composer Šostakovič, theorises upon how to cope with the terror of death. Throughout his career, Barnes’s attitude towards the thought of annihilation is one of aloofness, even when he muses over his own death (as in Nothing to be Frightened of) or his beloved wife’s (as in Levels of Life). This cerebral attitude, though, seems to represent a limit: when dealing with the issues that most concern him (i.e. fear of death, the retrieval of the past, the role of art when coping with life and death, the fallibility of memory, the search for truth, the limitations of old age), Barnes resorts to rationality and philosophical reasoning, and seldom chooses to explore feelings and emotions. The same happens with his characters, from Geoffrey Braithwaite in Flaubert’s Parrot (behind whose search for the “real” Flaubertian parrot lies an attempt to understand his wife’s suicide) to Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending (who tries to grasp the sense of Adrian’s death and ends up re-defining his own life) and Jean Serjeant in Staring at the Sun (who looks at the prospect of death with serenity). Barnes’s engagement in pit-gazing leads him to realise there is no sense in an ending and proves to be dead weight for his writing as well as – we might imagine – for his inner life.

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