Joseph Lamperez

The continued resonance of urban space is always a function of its ability to serve as an incubator for the cultivation of a mythology which issues from and yet is more than the sum of its geographical and historical parts. Urban mythology, like the geopolitical importance of the city itself, waxes and wanes, and some loom larger than others in the collective imagination of their beholders: Jerusalem rendered as the “naval of the world,” birthplace of the supreme occidental metanarrative and zone wherein collective ideologies may be enacted in a real-life confrontation with the quintessential “Other” begins to indicate just how powerful an urban mythology can be, how the urban space as a repository of cultural projections serves to instill and reinforce a sense of collective cultural identity far beyond the borders of the city itself. The urban myth of Venice, like that of New York, Jerusalem or Constantinople, is particularly rich. In my presentation I will focus on the development of the Venetian myth from the Napoleonic conquest to the present day, touching on work done by John Pemble and Tony Tanner but giving particular emphasis to what I see as Venice’s function as the “picture” to Europe’s “Dorian Gray” and using passages from James, Sarte and Byron in conjunction with Bhabha’s “The Home and the World” to demonstrate that Venice in the modern day has become a place of alterity, transgressive enchantment, and weakened polarities; in short, a colony of non-Western geoconceptual space in what was once the epicenter of the Occidental soul.

I graduated with a master’s in English literature from Loyola University Chicago in 2002 and decided to take some time away from academia. I worked in a Music Theater company aimed at fostering self-autonomy and respect in at-risk populations and also taught ESL for some years before moving to Istanbul, Turkey, where I taught freshman composition at Bahcesehir University and AP English literature at Hisar Vakfi Okullari, and traveled throughout the Middle East and East Africa. While abroad I also sang in a jazz duet and became involved in amateur photography. I’m currently in my first year in the University of Rochester’s English PhD program, where I intend to focus on the Romantic period and  am currently designing a course on the multitudinous permutations of Foucauldian heterotopic landscapes.