Utopian Views: Paolo Mantegazza's Techniques of the (Im)Possible

This article analyzes the depiction of the impossible in Paolo Mantegazza's L'anno 3000 (1897). Starting from the literary theory of possible worlds, it will be shown that the depiction of the impossible in Mantegazza's novel is associated with specific technologies that implicate different types of perception. The three forms of perception developed in the novel (transparent, panoptic, and psychoscopic) move from possible to highly impossible depictions regarding the scientific culture of fin de siècle Italy.