Fabrizia Abbate

The etymon στάσις goes back to the Greek word ἵστημι, which means “to stay”: this ancient Greek verb denotes presence, spatiality, permanence. In these pages, stasis is the perfect word to describe the unusual dimension built all around us by the advent of the Covid pandemic during the lockdown months in our nation. Our daily movements and activities were stopped, we were forced to stay at home as a form of social distancing, or there were those who had the obligation to remain enclosed in healthcare facilities. This paper will describe three hermeneutic figures for the stasis, using suggestions that literature, visual arts and philosophy have been offering for centuries: the night, the threshold and distance. They all converge to define the outlines of an ethics that should be reaffirmed in the present, as little pieces of a mosaic brought to light.

Literature has and always will be a “reflection” of human acts and behaviours. This movement of intentional self- reflection of human identities is the main element of narrative imagination. We would like to focus on a special peculiarity of this literary reflection, which is the transfer of Space and Time from reality to the literary world. The result of the transfer is that Space and Time become an autonomus narrative structure able to reveal something new about literary genres and especially about human nature and society. We will compare Michail Bachtin’s analysis on the “chronotope” with Pierre Bourdieu’s studies on the “literary field”