A Castelli
Biographic Data
| ID | 36570 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Castelli |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Castelli |
| SIGNATURE | CASTELLI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hainan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0975-156X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Double Within: A Case of Madness or Unconscious Desire
The nineteenth century has treated the double as a literary motif to explain the unsettling nature of a self divided between good and evil. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are commonly read as tales of madness in which the double is the immoral Other corresponding to the satisfaction of irrational impulse. Instead, I read the double as a moment of self-recognition in terms of the…
The Bad Faith of the Nonexistent Knight: If Sartre Reads Calvino
Literary Incest: Moralism or Morality
Why is there an incest taboo? People avoid doing what conventions disapprove of their doing, and conventions are dictated by some sort of innate moral good, a moral inclination compatible with the referent kinship system. Essentially, incest avoidance is founded on deep psychological needs within domestic dynamics. However, far from being an anathema, incestuous behaviors in literary fiction become a natural inclination whose avoidance is to be t…
The Chinese ring of time
While Western thinking is a linear belief system set in motion by Christianity, Chinese reasoning conceives changes within a circular process that holds together repetition and transformation. Making sense of this is simply to recognize that depending on how we consider the nature of history, we will also partake in a different imprint on society as a whole. The transition from socialist to post-socialist China is also the drift from the stabilit…
The Collector and the End of Beauty
In the twenty-first century to answer the question “Is it art at all?” has become a matter of heteronomy. The work of art is subject to historical accidentalities that define aesthetic criteria. Meanwhile, beauty is no longer part of the definition of art. John Fowles’s novel The Collector engages the reader with the story of a kidnapping, a postmodern enterprise where reality and fiction overlap, making it impossible for the reader to distinguis…
The Nietzschean dimension of Chinese traditional Aesthetics
In ancient China, art has never been a substitute for the category of 'truth' in the sense of Western aestheticism, but a mimic for goodness and beauty. The image in traditional Chinese aesthetics never transcended the idea to the level of Western abstraction, and that is because the artistic expression bore a social synthesis, rather than metaphysical, between human beings, reality, and the world. However, the Ming Dynasty introduces a Dionysian…
The Strange Case of the You-Narrator: A Melancholic Postmodernity
As a result of using the “you-narrator,” the text becomes a verbal experience in which, loyal to the postmodern tradition, a book is written within the book, the writer becomes simultaneously narrator and reader, and the reader acts as producer, thus offering multiple possibilities of reading. Furthermore, by imposing a depth of feeling and insight into the human condition, the second-person point of view generates an overall melancholic atmosphe…
A Durkheimian Reading of Suicide in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Foscolo’s The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Emile Durkheim was the first scholar to treat suicide as a sociological phenomenon, collective rather than private, thus illustrating the failure of modern individualism. This paper demonstrates that the tragic endings of Goethe’s Werther and Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis anticipate Durkheim’s suicide classification: Goethe and Foscolo created heroes whose tragic action accords with the basic elements belonging to Durkheim’s typologies
The Beauty of Unfulfillment
The dialectic between transitory pleasure and permanent values, between the nature of life and the ideal, finds one of its representations in the experience of unfulfilled loves. Cyrano de Bergerac and Baudelaire’s poem A une passante have already received extensive scholarly attention but never as a theory of desire. Can a love still be real if it cannot be undertaken and experienced? The texts in analysis re-think the role of the object of love…
The myth of progress
This manuscript stages the West and China as civilizations rooted in contrasting myths. The Western leading paradigm is the Faustian Man whose ambition created modernity and the tragedy of progress. It is a tragedy already condemned by history but, being Faust’s construction site unfinished, it is a tragedy that everyone seems keen to re-enact. On the other hand, China conceived the concept of stability, rather than competition, the key for a dur…
From Transcendence to Kitsch: Have We Lost Faith
The role played by the artist and the nature of art are two of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy. Indeed, if we were to trace the history of aesthetics, it seems evident that the role of the artist and the effects of art have been called into question as history crosses over into another age. My concern in this study has to do with the function of art and the artist throughout Western history, which is not so much a…
When life imitates art
When Oscar Wilde defiantly observed that life is imitation of art, literary criticism had found another role to the complicated relationship between literature and reality. The issue is most central in Cesare Pavese and Sylvia Plath, for their lives seemed to re-enact what their fictional characters in, respectively, Among Women Only and The Bell Jar, had attempted. The conscious manipulation of novelistic material into physical and mental events…
Absurdism in the Representation of Chinese Avantgarde Art
The standard argument for absurd includes a discrepancy between expectations and reality and becomes an unavoidable perception if regarded sub specie aeternitatis. Admittedly, after the fundamental doubt has begun to seek ultimate justification, a human being’s rational impulse remains. Here the experience of Chinese Avantgarde art is analyzed from the standpoint of absurdism. This article aims to rephrase the avantgardist experimentation as an e…
The taste of contemporaneity: Is the west kitsch
As the twenty-first century begins, Benjamin’s aura as the quality of an authentic-art-object might be outdated, but the notion of kitsch remains essential in a post-Warholian world. The following discussion is an attempt to assess Western contemporaneity. By using a few examples, so to dissect problems into their smallest components, I suggest that the current popularity of kitsch inclinations and behaviours in Western societies are not a means …
The Body in Pain in Isabel Allende’s Tale of Love
Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of bad faith and Elaine Scarry's view of torture as "suspension of civilization" can be adapted to reveal the symbolic order behind Isabel Allende's narrative. Love is interwoven with the shadows of the revolution in Chile: the advances in technology, new socialist ideas, the spectre of communism, and above all the right-wing military coup. While men ignore the evidence, the brutality and corruption of the dictatorship b…
Buzzati and Nabokov: It is not about desire
Dino Buzzati's Un Amore has been largely defined as a consequence of the progressive development of the phenomenon of “lolitism,” and a few years before, Nabokov's Lolita had been accused of being an example of pedophilia. While both female characters are archetypes of “nymphet,” defiant, sexually promiscuous, capricious, and, above all, skilled in manipulation, the relationship progresses through a labyrinth of absence and deprivation. However, …
Camus, the absurd Meursault, and Alexandros Panagouolis
Un Uomo is a biography, with autobiographical elements, written by Oriana Fallaci in 1979 in which she retells her impossible love with Alexandros Panagoulis, hero and martyr of the resistance to the regime of the Greek colonels (1967‒1974). However, Alexandros Panagoulis is also an absurd character who chose rebellion to suicide, stretching life to the limit of death, thus reenacting the fate of Albert Camus’s most famous characters
Perspectives on Asia: Is China kitsch
Due to the introduction of the market economy, in the past four decades China has switched from being a “planned country” – planned economy, planned art – into a domestic version of cultural pluralism. Consumerism has refilled the vacuum left by the retreat of Maoist ideology. However, the overwhelming success of mass culture is sided by the progressive marginalization of the intellectuals or elite, featuring a culture that is kitsch in its ideol…
American and Chinese Literature. Behind the Mask of Postmodernism: A National Failure
Besides the well-known attributes of black humour, fantasy and dreams, fragmentation, metafictional elements, intertextuality, parody, radical irony, literature lavishes a violent attack on what, at different degrees, could be understood as a postmodern society. The aesthetic of social protest such as deviant sexuality, drug and alcohol addiction (America), and expressions of insanity, historical decadence (China) are to be read as the sense of t…
China: The quest for identity
The rhetoric material vs spiritual; West vs East in our historical present is more than ever a false problem, in a way that in a post-modern era where technology offers new definition of time and space, forcing human being to reconsider the role played in society, culture is a definition that shapes itself every day. As to say that the contraposition between civilization was a useful tool to describe a society until the past century, defining an …
May Fourth: Historical misunderstanding
While China is looking up at the Western scientific achievements, seeing in it the way through independence, the European intelligentsia to the pretentious positivist understanding of the world answered declaring the bankrupt of the Western civilization. It is true that the technological progress of the last century surpassed the achievements of three thousand years prior this period, but science brought catastrophes. Cities and souls in ruins ar…
From Transcendence to Kitsch: Have We Lost Faith
The role played by the artist and the nature of art are two of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy. Indeed, if we were to trace the history of aesthetics, it seems evident that the role of the artist and the effects of art have been called into question as history crosses over into another age. My concern in this study has to do with the function of art and the artist throughout Western history, which is not so much a…
When life imitates art
When Oscar Wilde defiantly observed that life is imitation of art, literary criticism had found another role to the complicated relationship between literature and reality. The issue is most central in Cesare Pavese and Sylvia Plath, for their lives seemed to re-enact what their fictional characters in, respectively, Among Women Only and The Bell Jar, had attempted. The conscious manipulation of novelistic material into physical and mental events…
China: The quest for identity
The rhetoric material vs spiritual; West vs East in our historical present is more than ever a false problem, in a way that in a post-modern era where technology offers new definition of time and space, forcing human being to reconsider the role played in society, culture is a definition that shapes itself every day. As to say that the contraposition between civilization was a useful tool to describe a society until the past century, defining an …
May Fourth: Historical misunderstanding
While China is looking up at the Western scientific achievements, seeing in it the way through independence, the European intelligentsia to the pretentious positivist understanding of the world answered declaring the bankrupt of the Western civilization. It is true that the technological progress of the last century surpassed the achievements of three thousand years prior this period, but science brought catastrophes. Cities and souls in ruins ar…
American and Chinese Literature. Behind the Mask of Postmodernism: A National Failure
Besides the well-known attributes of black humour, fantasy and dreams, fragmentation, metafictional elements, intertextuality, parody, radical irony, literature lavishes a violent attack on what, at different degrees, could be understood as a postmodern society. The aesthetic of social protest such as deviant sexuality, drug and alcohol addiction (America), and expressions of insanity, historical decadence (China) are to be read as the sense of t…
Perspectives on Asia: Is China kitsch
Due to the introduction of the market economy, in the past four decades China has switched from being a “planned country” – planned economy, planned art – into a domestic version of cultural pluralism. Consumerism has refilled the vacuum left by the retreat of Maoist ideology. However, the overwhelming success of mass culture is sided by the progressive marginalization of the intellectuals or elite, featuring a culture that is kitsch in its ideol…
Absurdism in the Representation of Chinese Avantgarde Art
The standard argument for absurd includes a discrepancy between expectations and reality and becomes an unavoidable perception if regarded sub specie aeternitatis. Admittedly, after the fundamental doubt has begun to seek ultimate justification, a human being’s rational impulse remains. Here the experience of Chinese Avantgarde art is analyzed from the standpoint of absurdism. This article aims to rephrase the avantgardist experimentation as an e…
The taste of contemporaneity: Is the west kitsch
As the twenty-first century begins, Benjamin’s aura as the quality of an authentic-art-object might be outdated, but the notion of kitsch remains essential in a post-Warholian world. The following discussion is an attempt to assess Western contemporaneity. By using a few examples, so to dissect problems into their smallest components, I suggest that the current popularity of kitsch inclinations and behaviours in Western societies are not a means …
The Body in Pain in Isabel Allende’s Tale of Love
Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of bad faith and Elaine Scarry's view of torture as "suspension of civilization" can be adapted to reveal the symbolic order behind Isabel Allende's narrative. Love is interwoven with the shadows of the revolution in Chile: the advances in technology, new socialist ideas, the spectre of communism, and above all the right-wing military coup. While men ignore the evidence, the brutality and corruption of the dictatorship b…
Buzzati and Nabokov: It is not about desire
Dino Buzzati's Un Amore has been largely defined as a consequence of the progressive development of the phenomenon of “lolitism,” and a few years before, Nabokov's Lolita had been accused of being an example of pedophilia. While both female characters are archetypes of “nymphet,” defiant, sexually promiscuous, capricious, and, above all, skilled in manipulation, the relationship progresses through a labyrinth of absence and deprivation. However, …
Camus, the absurd Meursault, and Alexandros Panagouolis
Un Uomo is a biography, with autobiographical elements, written by Oriana Fallaci in 1979 in which she retells her impossible love with Alexandros Panagoulis, hero and martyr of the resistance to the regime of the Greek colonels (1967‒1974). However, Alexandros Panagoulis is also an absurd character who chose rebellion to suicide, stretching life to the limit of death, thus reenacting the fate of Albert Camus’s most famous characters
The Strange Case of the You-Narrator: A Melancholic Postmodernity
As a result of using the “you-narrator,” the text becomes a verbal experience in which, loyal to the postmodern tradition, a book is written within the book, the writer becomes simultaneously narrator and reader, and the reader acts as producer, thus offering multiple possibilities of reading. Furthermore, by imposing a depth of feeling and insight into the human condition, the second-person point of view generates an overall melancholic atmosphe…
A Durkheimian Reading of Suicide in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Foscolo’s The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Emile Durkheim was the first scholar to treat suicide as a sociological phenomenon, collective rather than private, thus illustrating the failure of modern individualism. This paper demonstrates that the tragic endings of Goethe’s Werther and Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis anticipate Durkheim’s suicide classification: Goethe and Foscolo created heroes whose tragic action accords with the basic elements belonging to Durkheim’s typologies
The Beauty of Unfulfillment
The dialectic between transitory pleasure and permanent values, between the nature of life and the ideal, finds one of its representations in the experience of unfulfilled loves. Cyrano de Bergerac and Baudelaire’s poem A une passante have already received extensive scholarly attention but never as a theory of desire. Can a love still be real if it cannot be undertaken and experienced? The texts in analysis re-think the role of the object of love…
The myth of progress
This manuscript stages the West and China as civilizations rooted in contrasting myths. The Western leading paradigm is the Faustian Man whose ambition created modernity and the tragedy of progress. It is a tragedy already condemned by history but, being Faust’s construction site unfinished, it is a tragedy that everyone seems keen to re-enact. On the other hand, China conceived the concept of stability, rather than competition, the key for a dur…
From Transcendence to Kitsch: Have We Lost Faith
The role played by the artist and the nature of art are two of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy. Indeed, if we were to trace the history of aesthetics, it seems evident that the role of the artist and the effects of art have been called into question as history crosses over into another age. My concern in this study has to do with the function of art and the artist throughout Western history, which is not so much a…
When life imitates art
When Oscar Wilde defiantly observed that life is imitation of art, literary criticism had found another role to the complicated relationship between literature and reality. The issue is most central in Cesare Pavese and Sylvia Plath, for their lives seemed to re-enact what their fictional characters in, respectively, Among Women Only and The Bell Jar, had attempted. The conscious manipulation of novelistic material into physical and mental events…
Literary Incest: Moralism or Morality
Why is there an incest taboo? People avoid doing what conventions disapprove of their doing, and conventions are dictated by some sort of innate moral good, a moral inclination compatible with the referent kinship system. Essentially, incest avoidance is founded on deep psychological needs within domestic dynamics. However, far from being an anathema, incestuous behaviors in literary fiction become a natural inclination whose avoidance is to be t…
The Chinese ring of time
While Western thinking is a linear belief system set in motion by Christianity, Chinese reasoning conceives changes within a circular process that holds together repetition and transformation. Making sense of this is simply to recognize that depending on how we consider the nature of history, we will also partake in a different imprint on society as a whole. The transition from socialist to post-socialist China is also the drift from the stabilit…
The Collector and the End of Beauty
In the twenty-first century to answer the question “Is it art at all?” has become a matter of heteronomy. The work of art is subject to historical accidentalities that define aesthetic criteria. Meanwhile, beauty is no longer part of the definition of art. John Fowles’s novel The Collector engages the reader with the story of a kidnapping, a postmodern enterprise where reality and fiction overlap, making it impossible for the reader to distinguis…
The Nietzschean dimension of Chinese traditional Aesthetics
In ancient China, art has never been a substitute for the category of 'truth' in the sense of Western aestheticism, but a mimic for goodness and beauty. The image in traditional Chinese aesthetics never transcended the idea to the level of Western abstraction, and that is because the artistic expression bore a social synthesis, rather than metaphysical, between human beings, reality, and the world. However, the Ming Dynasty introduces a Dionysian…
The Bad Faith of the Nonexistent Knight: If Sartre Reads Calvino
The Double Within: A Case of Madness or Unconscious Desire
The nineteenth century has treated the double as a literary motif to explain the unsettling nature of a self divided between good and evil. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are commonly read as tales of madness in which the double is the immoral Other corresponding to the satisfaction of irrational impulse. Instead, I read the double as a moment of self-recognition in terms of the…
Aesthetics (15 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Literature (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · China (5 works)