SERGIA ADAMO, Università di Trieste

The final scene of Kafka's The Trial is set in an in-between zone, an indefinite space that links "almost without transition" - in Kafka's words - what we can recognize as "the city" on the one hand and "the country" on the other.  Although we know that more than 50 % of human beings live today in urban spaces and that megacities are are becoming increasingly more crucial hotspots of the planet, the relationship between the city and the country, the urban and the rural, still deserves some investigation and reflection. Which representations and narratives have shed light on this relation? How can they help us to go beyond any binary opposition? In order to try to answer these questions, I will try to put forward a theoretical framework going from Raymond Williams's "The Country and the City" up to Rem Koolhaas recent "Countryside, the future".

Discussants / Lucia Quaquarelli, Adrien Frenay