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A book review of: Wai Chee Dimock, et. al., editors, American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler. Columbia UP, 2017.

Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad (1962) has received so far limited scholarly attention, and the studies on the play have mostly focused on the text's psychoanalytic overtones. The play features the relationship between its bizarre protagonist, Mme. Rosepettle, and her son Jonathan, who is completely subjected to her despotic and repressive will. The Oedipal complex foreshadowed in the play, however, does not exhaust the complex matter of the text, whose references to Cuba and South American countries strongly ask for a political reading.This article paper, consequently, reads the play as instancing the impossibility of an American national tragedy in the Cold War era. The play, in fact, assaults the US chauvinist and anti-communist ideology of the 1950s, and displays its consequences upon individuals and society. The post-war paranoia is acted out in the hidden corpse of Mr. Rosepettle, which Mme. Rosepettle preserves in her closet. The corpse, as a fetishistic object (for Mme. Rosepettle) and a source of fear and anxiety (for Jonathan), signals the impossibility, for the US of the time, to identify with tangible models and positive values (despite the materialistic ethos of the culture of the 1950s, as witness Mme. Rosepettle's obsessive need for fun and self-gratification). On the contrary, only death and loss, as overhanging threats and macabre horizon of collective expectation, paradoxically provide the nation with a unifying sense of identification. The Cold War, as a conflict that was never directly waged or fought, but nevertheless informed American identity, politics and culture, thus functions as the 'void center' of the play. By instancing the lack (or the loss) as a site of affirmative identification, this fantasmatic war is what turns the play into an impossible tragedy.

American comics are, still today, often regarded as undemanding books starring a few well-known superheroes wearing masks and costumes. This is only partially true: comics are not necessarily about superheroes, the latter being starred, in fact, only in a limited amount of the comics ever published and circulated in the US. The golden age of comics, which saw superhero comics gain immense popularity, reached its momentum in the 1930s, when Superman, Captain America and Wonder Woman were created in order to give a body and a face to traditional American values (like freedom and democracy), and, thus, to symbolically vilify the European dictatorships of the time. Before the 1930s, however, comic strips published in magazines and newspaper chiefly featured ordinary people (or sometimes animals), often portrayed in surreal and paradoxical contexts. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, superheroes were not the only protagonists of comic stories, horror and science fiction comics being, at the time, as much as popular as the stories about superheroes. The supremacy of superheroes in American comics was sanctioned during the Cold War. When the Comics Code Authority, established in order to prevent young people from reading those comics that would encourage bad behavior, imposed its ban upon a high number of publications, only superheroes were spared, since they clearly met at least one of the Authority's requirements: "in every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds" (Johnson 81). From the 1960s, the traditional superhero's features started to change: no longer an exclusively "positive" figure, the new superhero was "the psychologically torn hero-villain" (Witek 49). The late 1960s and (especially) the 1970s, saw the increasing popularity of independent and underground comics, which in few years secured their niche in the comics industry: stories of antiheroes, as well as parodies of the most celebrated comics heroes, gained an almost immediate following. The era of graphic novel (from the late 1970s on), finally, witnessed the birth of art comics, radically different, on the whole, from old superheroes magazines, and the growing importance of authorship over marketability.

Personalità tra le più interessanti e singolari del panorama teorico-critico contemporaneo, intellettuale e attivista politica, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak è una dei protagonisti di quel dibattito che da decenni intreccia studi postcoloniali, femminismo e studi sulla subalternità. La sua produzione si configura come uno sterminato macrotesto che mira a destabilizzare le costruzioni consolidate del sapere e del potere così come sono state trasmes- se dalla tradizione dell'occidente coloniale, in modo da fare emergere le faglie interne, le voci rimosse e silenziate, le contraddizioni e i punti più inaspettati di frattura e di crisi. Spivak si confronta con l'eredità della tradizione letteraria e filosofica dell'occidente, con le narrazioni convenzionali e spesso fuorvianti dell'India consegnate dalla storia e dalla storiografia europea e americana, e con la realtà in continuo divenire di un presente non più semplicemente globale, ma, inteso, in senso più lato, come planetario. Il lavoro di Iuliano è una mappatura di quell'opera faticosa e incessante di studiosa e critica letteraria, traduttrice, didatta e attivista politica, attraverso cui Gayatri Spivak traccia i contorni di una nuova figura di intellettuale militante, nel tentativo, arduo e ambizioso, di ridefinire il ruolo e lo spazio degli studi umanistici nel nuovo millennio.

Esiste una nuova possibilità di concepire e raffigurare il corpo nella cultura e nella società americana alla luce degli eventi politici dell'ultimo decennio? È questa la domanda a cui "Il corpo ritrovato" cerca di rispondere, attraverso la lettura di una serie composita di testi che segnano momenti cruciali della storia recente degli Stati Uniti. Partendo da immagini emblematiche che hanno racchiuso e riprodotto la corporeità, quali il cuore, il cadavere, la malattia, il corpo diventa lo specchio attraverso cui la società e la cultura americana si interrogano sui nessi profondi che legano specifiche dinamiche politiche e discorsive alla rappresentazione che ne viene data all'interno dell'immaginario collettivo. Un contro-canone eccentrico della letteratura degli Stati Uniti, che parte dai puritani e da Michael Wigglesworth e, passando per Hawthorne, arriva a JT LeRoy, Bret Eston Ellis, David Leavitt, Amitav Ghosh e Gayatri Spivak, è chiamato a rendere conto, attraverso le proprie articolazioni retoriche, delle modalità attraverso cui la corporeità è stata strumento privilegiato per produrre pratiche discorsive di natura religiosa, scientifica, medica e giuridica.