In the first two chapters of his 1925 book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (The Social Frameworks of Memory), the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) develops a sustained comparison between remembering and dreaming. Engaging in detail with large bodies of contemporary research in psychology, physiology, philosophy, and linguistics, he aims to combat what he calls the ‘surprising’ tendency of ‘psychological treatises that deal with memory’ to treat each of us as ‘an isolated being’ (1925/ 1994, vi) 1. In the (...) course of making a case that memory is deeply situated and social, Halbwachs offers a subtle and challenging treatment of dreams. (shrink)

In the 1950s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black and white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming assume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black and white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black and white was connected to this change in film technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can (...) change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of the experience of dreaming is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be. (shrink)

Dream is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive and emotional experiences occurring during sleep. Dream reports tend to be particularly abundant, with complex, emotional, and perceptually vivid experiences after awakenings from rapid eye movement sleep. This is why our current knowledge of the cerebral correlates of dreaming, mainly derives from studies of REM sleep. Neuroimaging results show that REM sleep is characterized by a specific pattern of regional brain activity. We demonstrate that this heterogeneous distribution of brain (...) activity during sleep explains many typical features in dreams. Reciprocally, specific dream characteristics suggest the activation of selective brain regions during sleep. Such an integration of neuroimaging data of human sleep, mental imagery, and the content of dreams is critical for current models of dreaming; it also provides neurobiological support for an implication of sleep and dreaming in some important functions such as emotional regulation. (shrink)

The thesis examines the self-definition of the end of the nineteenth century as ‘fin de siècle’ and as an epochal turning point. It investigates the circumstances that generated new time perceptions and representations in this timespan, with particular reference to late-nineteenth century Italy. The study provides an analysis of essays, treatises, literary works, conference presentations, speeches, and articles of the periodical press, which discussed and thematized the main features of the nineteenth century and of the early years of the twentieth (...) century. While analogous works were produced elsewhere in Europe and overseas, where they have been recognized as a genre, equivalent works that were composed in Italy have never been addressed as a corpus. The thesis responds to the need of such a scrutiny and it explores the Italian end-of-the-century economy of ‘discursive fields’ and conceptual ‘constellations’. The research has been inspired and informed by the approach suggested by the history of concepts, Koselleck’s studies, and Stephen Kern’s research. A comparative and an interdisciplinary perspective have been jointly adopted. The former has served to ascertain cross-currents in cultural discourses between Italy and other European countries, namely France, the UK, Germany, Sweden, alongside Russia and the US. The interdisciplinary perspective has proved necessary to reflect the cross-fertilization between forms of knowledge typical of the fin-de-siècle cultural production and has allowed the investigation of the disciplinary variety of the works herein examined addressing philosophy and literary criticism, history and politics, psychology, literature. (shrink)