| Abstrakt: |
Beginning from Jack London's Martin Eden (1909), a famous American Bildungsroman, this article invokes Bakhtin's chronotope to better understand a contemporary cinematic discourse predicated on the cultural maintenance of the post-Enlightenment masculine subject. Tracing the development of the Bildung genre-as-chronotope across key examples of post-war and contemporary Italian cinema – Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – I compare Pietro Marcello's (2019) adaptation of Martin Eden with Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God (2021). Where the latter's ending reimagines the conclusion of I Vitelloni, Martin Eden is the filmic equivalent of the modernist novel's deconstruction of the nineteenth-century realist novel's spatio-temporal and epistemological boundaries. And, where Sorrentino's alter-ego protagonist must leave Naples for Rome in order to succeed as a filmmaker, Marcello's intermedial evocation of Naples amplifies the book's paean to socialism while reproducing, in another modality, the failure of London's intended critique of individualism. Finally, in none of these films is the invisibly essential masculinity of the subject superseded by a post-humanist alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
