Alberto Castelli

Dadaist works, such as Duchamp’s ready mades, famously challenge the connection between art and the aesthetic by presenting objects of little or no aesthetic interest, such as urinals, snow shovels, and bicycles, as art. From impressionist paintings to unmade beds exhibited in galleries, this raises enduring questions: Are these objects art simply because an artist declares them so, or because they are placed in a gallery? Or is there something more fundamental that defines art? Why do some objects, installations, buildings, or essays qualify as art, while others do not? Tracing the evolution of the concept of art from the ancient Greek notion of tekhne, meaning art, craft, technique, or skill, this monograph explores the theoretical and technical dimensions that underpin artistic creation. It interrogates whether art must serve a function, whether it exists for its own sake, or whether it reflects life or even compels life to imitate art. At its core, this book examines the notion of beauty in Western thought, from its divine origins to its contemporary crisis. In an age of digital and virtual realities, has beauty lost its relevance? Do today’s artists still engage with beauty, or has it been displaced by other concerns? Organized around these pressing questions, this work offers a critical exploration of beauty’s place in the condition of contemporaneity.

This groundbreaking monograph offers readers a profound exploration of nineteenth-century literature. Rather than presenting these works as a mere succession of literary movements, the author weaves romanticism, realism, gothic, and decadence into a coherent tapestry united by a singular focus: the enigmatic nature of human decision-making. The text delves beyond plot mechanics to examine the psychological underpinnings of iconic characters like Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, and Raskolnikov. Through meticulous analysis, it addresses fundamental questions that continue to resonate: Why do people act against their own interests? Why do we harm those we love? What drives human desire, and how does it sometimes lead to destruction? This volume deliberately shifts focus from the traditional emphasis on societal dynamics and urban development to concentrate on the obsessions of the human soul. The text approaches each literary work as a monument containing secrets, offering readers a fresh interpretive framework that balances narrative events with their deeper significance. This will be essential reading for scholars of nineteenth-century literature, psychoanalytic criticism, and anyone fascinated by the dark complexities of human motivation that transcend historical context and continue to define the human condition.

In this book, Alberto Castelli, Giunia Gatta, Micaela Latini, and Francesco Raschi examine how four prominent intellectuals of the 20th century (Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, Raymond Aron, and Günther Anders) understood atomic warfare. With a chapter devoted to the philosophical ideas of each thinker and how they understood and interpreted war, the authors analyze the historic-political context in which these ideas emerged and what they proposed to avoid a nuclear disaster. Four Philosophers and the Bomb will be of interest to students and researchers of peace studies, international relations, political philosophy, and moral philosophy.

This groundbreaking volume challenges conventional scholarship by illuminating a critical blind spot in modernist studies: the persistent yet transformed presence of love. While academia has exhaustively examined modernism through lenses of nihilism, disillusionment, and existential silence, the romantic impulse threading through these seemingly barren landscapes remains largely unexamined. How do characters love within the fractured architecture of modernist narratives? What becomes of romance when filtered through consciousness shaped by catastrophe? This collection reveals the sophisticated love story hidden within modernism's formal innovations—a romance that neither escapes nor succumbs to the movement's characteristic darkness, but rather transforms alongside it. By excavating this neglected dimension, we discover that modernist love does not vanish but evolves—becoming as complex, ambiguous, and revolutionary as the literary movement itself. The volume offers a fresh critical perspective that recontextualizes canonical works and invites readers to witness how intimacy persists, even as it whispers from the margins of a universe presumed silent. For scholars and students seeking to understand modernism's full emotional landscape, this text provides the missing piece in our comprehension of one of literature's most influential movements.

The Ecstasy of Reproduction strives to describe contemporaneity. The subject is the first quarter of the 21st century which the author sees as a condition of historical crisis. Therefore, he analyzes its moral, sociological, and aesthetic expression. We do not need another book on postmodernity, but we need to know where we are along the postmodern turn. Because, of course, we are still in it. We are at least a century away from its ending. “The claim that postmodernism has not ended and that understanding this is a crucial component to understanding contemporary culture differentiates my claim from the vast majority of scholarship on the period, which demands that postmodernism has ended (whether in 1989 or 2001 or 2008, etc.). My reading of cultural objects presents some polemic allegations that are generative into thinking through the distinctions in making charge about whether postmodernism has or has not ended.” The author questions the possibility of creation, culture, the writer, and the artist. Ca va sans dire originality is a thing of the past. The one of the present age is not an exercise of plagiarism, it is simply that to create is to reproduce. Castelli writes this text with immense intellectual responsibility and feels that history is a vanishing process. If the artificiality of hyperreality is more real than reality, then it is difficult to believe that science is progress. Even more when a mass of anonymous consumers dances in unison before a hologram.

The Self on Trial is an inquiry into the self and its pathological behaviors. The author observes 20th-century fiction and studies it through a psychological reading. It is evident that the century has produced self-destructive characters whose behaviors and choices are an ultimate form of consummation – primitive, elementary, and inexplicable. Why cannot Prufrock ask the overwhelming question? What is the reason for Humbert’s sexual attraction to Lolita? Why do we destroy what we love the most? The author reveals, through literary representations, aberrations of the ego that come into existence when already existing psychological dispositions meet a specific social habitat. An important contribution, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, world literature, philosophy, psychology, poetry, and modern fiction. It will appeal to those who try to understand the nature of one’s inexplicability.

The Self on Trial is an inquiry into the self and its pathological behaviors. The author observes 20th-century fiction and studies it through a psychological reading. It is evident that the century has produced self-destructive characters whose behaviors and choices are an ultimate form of consummation – primitive, elementary, and inexplicable. Why cannot Prufrock ask the overwhelming question? What is the reason for Humbert’s sexual attraction to Lolita? Why do we destroy what we love the most? The author reveals, through literary representations, aberrations of the ego that come into existence when already existing psychological dispositions meet a specific social habitat. An important contribution, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, world literature, philosophy, psychology, poetry, and modern fiction. It will appeal to those who try to understand the nature of one’s inexplicability.

This book examines the relationship between literature and philosophy. It investigates seemingly incomprehensible behaviours from the perspective of philosophy and expounds on love by using Darwinism, Marxism, Existentialism, Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Barthes as tools of investigation. The author deconstructs 20 literary texts and presents a work of literary criticism in which literary theories are blended with philosophical theories on the self.An important contribution, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, philosophy, comparative literature, world literature, modern fiction, romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism.

This book examines the relationship between literature and philosophy. It investigates seemingly incomprehensible behaviours from the perspective of philosophy and expounds on love by using Darwinism, Marxism, Existentialism, Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Barthes as tools of investigation. The author deconstructs 20 literary texts and presents a work of literary criticism in which literary theories are blended with philosophical theories on the self.An important contribution, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, philosophy, comparative literature, world literature, modern fiction, romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism.

This book is moved by two main questions. Is Love a matter of beauty or mortality? In other words, is love an ethical ideal? Also, modernity understood as the age of mechanical reproduction, has shaped not simply our cities but our very same way of feeling. How has our conception of love changed, if it has, in the past two centuries? This book is to address these questions. It is not to trace the evolution of the idea of love in Western culture, from Plato to the present day. It aims to bring to the surface different shades of love lingering at the heart of Western culture to rehabilitate the myth of love to its original credibility. Our confused civilization has split love into sensual and moral aspects but to be aware of it is perhaps to defeat a dilemma that seems so unnatural. This book is about how we make sense of our lives through love and how nineteenth and twentieth-century literature records it.

In this book, Alberto Castelli, Giunia Gatta, Micaela Latini, and Francesco Raschi examine how four prominent intellectuals of the 20th century (Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, Raymond Aron, and Günther Anders) understood atomic warfare. With a chapter devoted to the philosophical ideas of each thinker and how they understood and interpreted war, the authors analyze the historic-political context in which these ideas emerged and what they proposed to avoid a nuclear disaster.Four Philosophers and the Bomb will be of interest to students and researchers of peace studies, international relations, political philosophy, and moral philosophy.

Romance in the Time of Modernism: A Literature of Silence reasserts the theme of love in an age of anguish. Modernism has been and still is studied and interpreted under multiple perspectives. However, there is a lacuna in the corpus of scholarship: the theme of love has been ignored. Being modernism iconoclastic and obscure in its premises, but also dark in its conclusion, how do modernist characters love? This book emphasizes the persistence of romance in an age of dissolution. In spite of the homologation process that the industrial revolution has started, modernist characters are still individuals of passion but it is a passion they are incapable of telling. Love is a romance that is blended with everything modernism is synonymous with: alienation, nihilism, fragmentation, the terror of those who live in a universe meant to be silent.

This book studies the various narrative shades of love in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. It examines writings by Isabel Allende, Roberto Arlt, García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The author provides a close textual reading of each novel and discusses how humans make sense of their lives through love. He shifts the focus of these writings from political violence and historical disillusionment to the illusion of love.An important contribution to Latin American literary criticism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, history, Latin American literature, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, comparative literature, and sociology.

This book studies the various narrative shades of love in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. It examines writings by Isabel Allende, Roberto Arlt, García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The author provides a close textual reading of each novel and discusses how humans make sense of their lives through love. He shifts the focus of these writings from political violence and historical disillusionment to the illusion of love.An important contribution to Latin American literary criticism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, history, Latin American literature, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, comparative literature, and sociology.

This book aims at explaining romantic love between straight adults through literary texts of the western canon from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Each chapter comes with a multidisciplinary approach in which protagonists are mutilated in their quest for loving as alternative to annihilation. The book emphasizes love as an obsession, thus as an exploration of the mind. From the passion-myth of Tristan and Isolde to the nihilist modernist representations, the western world has created a perverse concept of love. A love for nothingness, for death. Narcissistic and at times destructive, love is gained by overcoming obstacles. If without obstacles there is no love, then love becomes love for obstacles. Within this masochistic frame, love, falling in love, being loved always stand at the edge of pathology. At its core this book narrates a love story, more precisely a story of loves, the haunting evocation of a desire that by its very nature cannot be fulfilled. Inherent in the nature of love is a subtle dialectical activity between presence and absence, between creation and destruction, reality and void. Accordingly, the narrative raises questions that the past two centuries were incapable of answering. Does love only last the time of a kiss? Is its promise fatally destined to dissolve? What about violence? Physical, emotional, temporal. Is it an ineliminable part of love or its most extreme profanation? And what is the mystery that accompanies loves that know how to last without resigning themselves to the death of desire? It is to answer some of these questions that I wrote this text. Love is an unconscious process that dominates reason and destroys it when reason cannot be a mode of communication. Hence, the amorous romance is madness and this text is written as a loud reminder.

This book is moved by two main questions. Is Love a matter of beauty or mortality? In other words, is love an ethical ideal? Also, modernity understood as the age of mechanical reproduction, has shaped not simply our cities but our very same way of feeling. How has our conception of love changed, if it has, in the past two centuries? This book is to address these questions. It is not to trace the evolution of the idea of love in Western culture, from Plato to the present day. It aims to bring to the surface different shades of love lingering at the heart of Western culture to rehabilitate the myth of love to its original credibility. Our confused civilization has split love into sensual and moral aspects but to be aware of it is perhaps to defeat a dilemma that seems so unnatural. This book is about how we make sense of our lives through love and how nineteenth and twentieth-century literature records it.