| "Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible...The house is past." In Theodor Adorno's assessment of the modern condition, the image of homelessness stands in for the alienation of the modern, industrialized subject from the security and connectedness of an ideal, pre-industrial past. My dissertation is an attempt to measure one cultural reaction to this loss, by looking at Italian efforts to negotiate the challenges to feeling "at home" that arose during Italy's encounter with modernization over the first half of the twentieth century, a time in which daily life became increasingly Adorno's allusion to architecture in the statement above is particularly relevant to my concerns: if architecture makes material our ways of dwelling; if it reproduces the social network, and our place within it, on a concrete level, then it is in the architectural discourse produced in answer to modernization that attempts at the construction of modern subjects can be read. Within the category of architectural discourse, I include not only the writings, buildings and plans of architects and urban planners themselves, but the fictional narratives of the first half of the twentieth century which attempt to "live" in these built spaces. Through this interdisciplinary approach, I examine the dialogue between actual changes in the architectural object itself, and the way these changes were represented by the literary imagination.; I devote each of my four chapters to a major Italian city, examining each in its historical and architectural specificity before proceeding to an analysis of its representation in literature or film: Carolina Invernizio's turn of-the-century Turin, Massimo Bontempelli's modernizing Milan, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Roman borgate, and Anna Maria Ortese's post-World War II Naples are each spaces that renegotiate social boundaries, and each artist comes to terms with the changes s/he witnesses in ways that highlight the development of modern subjectivities, and how the disciplines of architecture and urban planning are complicit in this process. |
