Venice and the Novella: The Construction of Cultural Otherness in Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers
Modern and contemporary Anglophone fictional narratives set in Venice construct a space associated with the domains of the mysterious and the uncanny. Analysing the creation of literary Venice in light of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this contribution aims at illustrating a fascinating...
Αποθηκεύτηκε σε:
| Τόπος έκδοσης: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Κύριος συγγραφέας: | |
| Μορφή: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Γλώσσα: | Anglais |
| Έκδοση: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2023
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| Διαθέσιμο Online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Περίληψη: | Modern and contemporary Anglophone fictional narratives set in Venice construct a space associated with the domains of the mysterious and the uncanny. Analysing the creation of literary Venice in light of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this contribution aims at illustrating a fascinating instance of the literary construction of cultural otherness in two contemporary novellas: Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” (1971) and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981). This article contends that an age-long and multifaceted tradition that construes and represents Italy as an ethical and existential counter-universe to the British one finds its own peculiar modes of expression within short fiction set in Venice. This essay will shed light on a set of descriptive patterns specific to the literary construction of the lagoon city, their affiliation to colonialist and orientalist discourses, and their function as literary and discursive devices capable of generating narratives based on a spatial and temporal imagined margin. It will also demonstrate that by positing Venice in discontinuity with the postmodern condition inhabited by the British protagonists, and by making this a challenge and a threat to the symbolic order of the (British) self, these narratives reiterate a taxonomical geography of selfhood and otherness based on well-established, as well as largely unquestioned, literary and discursive conventions. |
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