Aviation: Topology, topography and perception of location in Daniele Del Giudice

Aviation is a recurrent topos in the novels of the Italian writer and critic Daniele Del Giudice. He ironically quotes and subverts the topological value of aviation in Italian literature, from the excessive individualism and self staging heroism of the fascist writers Gabriele D'Annunzio and Tommaso Marinetti around 1910 to the extreme passivity and boredom in the age of mass tourism in novels by e.g. Italo Calvino and Andrea De Carlo in the 1980'es. Del Giudice proposes aviationa as an activity which enables man to relate to, to perceive and represent place, space and territory in a specific cartographic practice. This article suggests that Del Giudice in this manner criticises the inherent notion in both modernist and postmodernist literature of the impossibility of representation, and that he, 'aviating', proposes an alternative notion of an affirmative literature, capable of coming to terms with reality. Thus the article, with reference to Michel de Certeau, focuses on the potential metaliterary and auto-referential qualities of "the new topologies", that is, the inherent reflections on upon the function of literary discourse.