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Project

Telling the I, telling the truth, telling in Italian hypermodernity. The interaction between writing on personal experience and essay in the first-person essay-novel Het ik vertellen, de waarheid vertellen, vertellen in de Italiaanse hypermoderniteit. De interactie tussen schrijven over persoonlijke ervaring en essayistisch schrijven in de essay-roman in de eerste persoon

My research is focused on hybrid forms of contemporary Italian narrative (see Palumbo Mosca 2014), and will more in particular address a set of discursive phenomena, consisting in the interaction between essayistic writing and different forms of autobiographical, biographical and diaristic writing that can be defined as typical of personal experience (Mazzoni 2011) and typical of the Self (Marchese 2014) with essaystic forms of writing Within the context of the novel, a genre notoriously able to incorporate different registers and genres, the use of these traditionally non fictional modes (Donnarumma 2014) produce within contemporary Italian narrative what I define as the first-person essay-novel.

The case-studies on which I have focused are Ermanno Rea’s Mistero napoletano (1995), Walter Siti’s Troppi paradisi (2006) and Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed’s Timira. Romanzo meticcio (2012). Each of these texts refers to an accurate phase of what Raffaele Donnarumma (2014) has defined hypermodernity in literature. A second reason behind the choice of these texts is that them share some characteristics, such as:

 

1) the authors’ inclination towards self-exploration through a writing style that adopts the canonical modes and labels of personal experience literature and its variations: diary and narrative diary in Rea, autobiography and autofiction in Siti, biography and biofiction in Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed;

 

2) an engagement with reality expressed in two ways. On one hand, thematical exploration of specific topics, informed by a “cartesian movement” (see Simonetti 2003) in search for new points of view and/or more clarity, also in connection to broader societal issues. On the other, the use of overtly essayistic or even journalistic features, such as transcribed conversations, documents or press articles, explicit or indirect references to other people’s works and personale theoretical statements, photographies, diplomatic cables and administrative reports;

 

3) the creation of a literary discourse combining fully literary features with extra-artistics semi-literary or non-literary features, and bringing together narrative dynamics and essayistic digressions and comments.

 

This research has been conceived within the critical category of the Hypermodern, a category based on the following conditions:

 

1) the existence in Italian fiction of a literary current marked by typically ‘postmodern’ features, such as: the breaking up of traditional novel structures, the success of midcult, civic and political disengagement, metaliterature, the abandonment of realism, the recombination as unique possibility for creation, the inability to comment on the historical time lived, culture as entertainment rather than information;

 

2) subsequently, the slow fading away of postmodern cultural logic and its literary features in the second half of the 1990s, together with the shift towards a type of narrative with attention for the contemporary, characters experiencing credible events and living between social and moral conflicts, a “return to the real”, writing conceived as interpretation of everyday life and inner reality, a balance between fiction and non fiction;

 

3) a different attitude held by hypermodernist authors towards historical, social and political realities which leads them to take a clear stand in opposition or in favour of determinated aspects of society.

 

Singularly, some of the traits identified as criteria for analysing Mistero napoletano, Troppi paradisi and Timira. Romanzo meticcio have had a part in literary forms such as the Encyclopaedic novel, the System novel and the postmodern pastiche. This observation could foster a comparison between the purposes and manners in which these traits have been used and are actually still used by authors.

Assuming the “cartesian movement” principle as a main guideline, a multidisciplinary approach to essayistic discourse in Mistero napoletano, Troppi paradisi and Timira. Romanzo meticcio has been developed. Based on elements from philosophy, the history of philosophy and the history of political thought, postcolonial studies, Black studies, femminism, transmediality, this approach has allowed to tackle the ethical, political or philosophical premises of these texts.

The main purposes of this research have been:

 

1) to enucleate and describe the peculiarities of the first-person essay-novel as a form combining essayistic writing and personal accounts;

2) to enucleate and describe how this literary form can be considered as proper to Italian Hypermodernity

3) to fill some voids in Italian critical theory about the existence of a narrative style active in contemporary Italian literature and about the authors who have been assumed as case-studies.

 

The results of this research would impact the fields of critical and literary theory and contemporary Italian studies. More specifically, my research can contribute to a better understanding of literary Hypermodernity in present-day Italian literature, and it will also yield sharper insights in the subgenre of the first-person essay-novel in its different stages of development and the way it develops discursive structures combining essayistic writing and more traditional forms of life writing (autobiography, biography and diary), as well as their variations (autofiction, biofiction, narrative diary).

My research is focused on hybrid forms of Italian narrative, in particular on the Ego-Essayistic Novel. This form results from the interaction between essayistic writing and the autobiographical, biographical or diaristic writings (Writings of «Personal Experience»; it is also represented by the developments of the novel-essay. Over the last few decades the novel-essay has experienced a new structural hybridisation with the forms of autobiography, biography, diary and «extra-artistic semi-literary narrations» such as investigative reports and thematic reportages. Using the novel genre’s ability to incorporate different discursive registers and genres, this agglutinating process – nowadays operative in the contemporary Italian narrative (see Palumbo Mosca 2014, Marchese 2018) – has produced what I define as the Ego-Essayistic Novel. The corpus of my research consists of narrative texts adopting a typically non fictional manners of writing and displaying an authorial ‘I’ which can look critically at both inner and outer realities. The case-studies on which I will focus are E. Rea’s Mistero napoletano (1995), W. Siti’s Troppi paradisi (2006) and Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed’s Timira. Romanzo meticcio (2012). This project has been conceived within the critical framework of the ipermoderno. Each of these texts represents the prototype of an accurate phase of Ipermoderno among fiction and not fiction. The main purposes of this research: to enucleate and describe the peculiarities of the Ego-Essayistic Novel as a form combining essayistic writing and personal accounts; to fill the void in Italian critical theory about the existence of a narrative style active in contemporary Italian literature.

Date:30 Sep 2020 →  20 Sep 2022
Keywords:Ipermoderno, Hypermodernity, Autobiography, Biography, Diary, Essay
Disciplines:Biography, Contemporary literature, Literatures in Italian, Modern literature, Narratology, Literary studies not elsewhere classified
Project type:PhD project