ABSTRACT

This article addresses Elsa Morante’s La Storia (1974) in light of recent developments in critical and feminist theory surrounding the material environment and the body. It analyses the dynamics of material encounters in the novel from several perspectives: it views Rome as a ‘misanthropic city’ (Thrift 2008) and its bodies, human and otherwise, as fragile; it considers the specificity of female materialities as articulated in the novel; it discusses how discourses of race are articulated spatially; and it explores how the body itself becomes a canvas for the traumas wrought by ‘History’, as presented in the text. Ultimately, this reading suggests that Morante’s positioning and privileging of the materiality of minor subjects, her ‘bringing up the bodies’, questions received modes of engaging with the past.

摘要

鉴于围绕物质环境和身体的批判和女权主义理论的最新发展，本文针对艾尔莎·莫兰特（Elsa Morante）的《拉斯托里亚（La Storia）》（1974年）进行了论述。它从多个角度分析了小说中物质相遇的动力：它认为罗马是一个“人类世界”（Thrift，2008年），而它的身体，无论是人类还是其他，都是脆弱的。它考虑了小说中表达的女性重要性的特殊性；它讨论了种族话语在空间上是如何表达的；并探讨了身体本身如何成为“历史”造成的创伤的画布，如本文所述。最终，这种解读表明，莫兰特（Morante）对未成年人主体的重要性的定位和特权，她的“抚养身体”（bringing the body），对接受过去的方式提出了质疑。