Tag: Contagion

The "memetic contagion" in the metropolitan folklore of Danilo Arona

Published on: Last updated on: Written by: Categorized into: Esotericism, folklore, Italian Literature, Characters

A multifaceted author whose interests range from film criticism to fiction to non-fiction dedicated to alternative realities, Danilo Arona has become the singer of a particular and very personal declination of horror and weird that has its roots in the Italian context. In his essay "Media Possession", Arona wonders if it is possible that certain media, especially audiovisual ones, are capable of provoking in predisposed subjects a temporary cancellation of conscience whose place is taken by "something else", in a nutshell what in other places, times and cultures would have been called possession.

Keep reading…

The plague and the simulacra of social control in Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura"

Published on: Last updated on: Written by: Categorized into: Philosophy, Italian Literature, Characters, History

In "De Rerum Natura", written during the republican era and rediscovered only in the fifteenth century, Lucretius stages the description of the Athens plague of 430 BC: the picture is deliberately bleak and bears the mythical features of the space-time indefiniteness that characterizes the crepuscular epochs. Once the subjects and the space-time horizons have definitively fallen, what remains is a gloomy picture of death with spectacular and macabre shapes, which the author nevertheless uses to convey an ethical criticism, making use of a solemnly rich lexicon of archaisms, capable of to probe unexplored places of the human soul and of the word itself.

Keep reading…