New Bodies-New World: Corporeal Narratives at the Turn of the Millenium

This "Habilitation" project proposes a semi-linguistic approach to the study of bodily narratives in popular culture at the turn of the millennium, both in texts and in filmic representations. The time frame of the analyses embraces the era between the 1950s (the technological revolution, e.g., in the Artificial Intelligence debate) until today. The cultural production in question stems for the most part from the United States-the source of the most important impulses for current corporeal narratives (given the computer-technologies developed, for instance, in Silicon Valley) - the German. speaking countries, and the Romance Cultures. The intensification of interest in the topic of the body in the humanities is due to the transformation of the modes of communication in the western world as a result of the media revolution of this century. "Information Highway," "Global Village," and "Media Society" are only a few examples of how we can describe this contemporary world as a function of enormous change and progress in the sciences (e.g., new reproductive technologies). These changes have led to new myths concerning the "Homo Novus", a new and advanced being, evolutionarily speaking, an amalgam of cyborg and android. The Homo Novus possesses a new flesh, new senses, and an extended "super- body." In the post-gendered cyber-world, He/She performs in the Internet or observes the incarnation of machines in His/Her own body. New bodily activities are also involved in the emergence of the Homo Novus: new sorts of body cults, performance art, and the phenomenon of cybersex are only some of the effects of "being digital". A new vocabulary is developing and being expressed in homepages, and graphical user interfaces. The notion of virtual reality is incorporated in the different windows of multi user domains, of which real life (rl) is only one possible way of being-in-the-world. This rich body of evidence of the corporeal narratives at the turn of the millennium has to be seen not only as a result of technological change and progress but also and at the same time as a stimulator for progress in such fields as computer technology and Artificial Intelligence. If we accept the notion that one does not have a body but rather is a body, the subject of the project is the body itself and the body as the potentiality of a certain world. New Bodies - New Worlds tries to trace back this new world by understanding its ontogenesis in the era of the revolution in mediatization and electronic information, and by approaching the artefacts of that world as a "generative parcours " demanding first and foremost a semi-linguistic analysis. The realization of the project will take place in the first year at Stanford University (Department of Comparative Literature/ French and Italian Studies), due to Stanford`s position at the forefront of current efforts in the United States to reflect on the relations between the sciences and the humanities. The next year will be spent at the Centre de Recherche sur l`Imaginaire at the Université de Grenoble and at the Istituto di Comunicazione of the Università degli Studi di Bologna. Each of these institutions has enthusiastically invited me to undertake this research with them.