Bodies in Crisis: Technologization and the Limits of the Human in Modern Italy

329 pagesMy dissertation brings together three early-twentieth century Italian novels—Mafarka il futurista by F.T. Marinetti, Forse che sì forse che no by Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore by Luigi Pirandello—to examine the ways psychological distress manifests in bodies and minds engaged with modern technology. In these novels, a series of anxieties around sexual difference, the ability to give birth, and the relationship to oneself in the face of increasingly automated machines encourages dependence on technology as a way to prolong life and protect the fragile human body. I argue that, as technology becomes more invasive, the relationship of the subject to the self deteriorates. By changing the way humans interact with one another through time and space, modern technology alters the way the individual experiences life and holds the potential to fracture experience entirely, leaving the subject with only fragments of memories or sensations without a context. My research challenges traditional readings of Italian modernism and moves beyond preoccupations with the mind, psychic disturbances, and uncertainties of identity to interrogate how the body fits into these concerns and may even cause them. To do this, I employ a feminist reading practice of privileging embodied experience and women’s stories that often go ignored by traditional critics. Inspired by philosophers of sexual difference, my approach does not focus exclusively on the heroic modern subject but dissects what constitutes the heroic journey depicted in each text. I break down the hero’s journey into critical moments, habits, and actions that make this trajectory unique or modern. In every case, the role that the feminine and women play has been glossed over or ignored by leading scholarship. By studying the centrality of the body-mind connection to representations of the modern subject, I demonstrate that as technology and life become increasingly imbricated, the human subject stands to lose the ability to have a relationship to the self and to lived experience. This approach reveals that a physiological disruption between the mind and body—leading in the worst cases to psychological trauma—is a key component in the journey to become modern.2024-09-0