BOOKS BY VALERIA GIORDANO
In the material and symbolic space of the industrial metropolis, and in themultiplication of experiences and tools provided by progress, the modern subjectparadoxically discovers himself less able to communicate.Through a reading of the texts of narrators and observers of the time - Simmel, Benjamin, Kafka and Melville - the author focuses on one of the mostintense effects that socio-cultural change of modernity has had on people.
The words of modern narrators help bring to surface the contradictions and conflicts typical of the metropolis, transforming it into a sort of cultural instrument that reads the different languages, images and forms of life that it is defined by. The crisis of perception of space and time, the difficulty of using a language that is able to give meaning, the shattering of personal identity, all make it hard to accumulate experiences and transform them into stories to pass on. The only way to start a relationship with the other and with the world is, as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin state, the moment of choc, the moment lived and that cannot be transmitted. The urgency is to not become a prisoner of the nostalgia for the past, but to make the irreparable oppositions that affect the metropolis productive.