Projects

1. The literary form in the 20th Century

Form, structure, dispositif – the physiognomy of the literary work in a century where the foundations of art and morphologies of culture have been one of the primary objects of intellectual pursuit. The origin of the idea of form among Russian formalists, its main diversifications – mechanism, organism, and system, as suggested by Peter Steiner. The plural genesis of the idea of structure, from phenomenology to linguistics and anthropology. How these concepts have been translated into literary practice. The end of the primacy of structuralism and the rise of new paradigms developed since the second half of the 20th century, the new theoretical frameworks based on the notions of dispositif, folding, diagram, and assemblage.

 

2. Russian Formalism and the construction of Literary Theory

The story of the Formal Movement retraced through the analysis of documents and works written in Russian that have never been translated into Italian and other major Western languages. The main aim is to kickstart a new reflection on the historical significance and on the theoretical and methodological contribution by Formalism and to account for the divisions between the circles of Moskow (Mik) and Petrograd/Leningrad (Opojaz). Hitherto unpuplished texts are examined, translated into Italian, and presented, in particular by Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Kazansky, and Grigory Vinokur t.

3. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Philosophy of Literature

A philological reading of writings by Mikhail Bakhtin in pursuit of a global theoretical framework and cultural genealogies. The positioning of Bakhtin’s thought at the crossroads between ethics and aesthetics, linguistics, and literary criticism, philosophy and literature: with a focus on transdisciplinary approaches.

 

4. Giambattista Vico as a writer

A project on the relationship between the thought and works by Vico and the development of modern literature. An investigation aimed at outlining Vico’s idea of literature, analyzing his role as a reader and writer – with particular attention to poems and “minor” works – his understanding of the literary institution and how it relates to his intellectual activity. Minor works, the meaning of terms such as “letterato” and “letteratura”, the perception of an audience and the “horizon of expectation”, thoughts on contemporary literature are addressed in particular.

5. Rhetorics as form of knowledge and the limits of persuasive expressivity

Recognized as foundations of everyday human interactions, storytelling and metaphor provide today the theoretical framework for deconstructing the differentiation between literary and extra-literary facts. Cognitivist thought validates hints from non-conformist theorists from the 1970s who insisted on the continuity between types of everyday speech and literary genres, on the absence of specific traits that make the distinction between non-literary and literary texts possible, and on the foundation of such distinctions on historical, social, contextual, pragmatic, and constructivist factors.

In 1996, Mark Turner claimed that “the literary mind”, well before translating into the ability to write poems or novels, provides the conditions for knowing the outside world. By “projecting stories” we can, in fact, give shape and meaning to our existence: from the simplest experience to complex cultural constructions, the world can be seen as a big chain of “parables”, where the connection from a source story to a target story is no different from the way metaphor works. As shown by Lakoff and Johnson, as well as by Giambattista Vico three hundred years earlier, rhetoric is a form of knowledge.

However, there is a need to move beyond this approach. Once the results offered by cognitiv studies supported by neuroscientific research have been taken for granted, well-founded reasons for perplexity come to light when such approach must account for literary works in their irreducible singularity. In fact, the identification and collection of conceptual metaphors within a narrative, poetic, or dramatic text has very little heuristic value for literary analysis. Even if storytelling permeates all layers of our everyday existence, we need to understand how the aesthetic and cognitive potential is inscribed in some works and not in others. How can we keep the connection with “the embodied mind”, and avoid diluting the literary text into amorphous and diffused narrativity/metaphor?

 

6. Dino Buzzati as a reporter: crime and art chronicles

 

7. Carceral Narratives

The porous boundaries between nonfictional and fictional writings (Antonio Gramsci, Goliarda Sapienza, Breyten Breytenbach, Bobby Sands, Antoine Volodine). The perception of the imprisoned body; the experience of space and time induced by imprisonment; dream and imaginative life; communication among prisoners.

 

8. The work of Wu Ming Collective

The narrator’s obliquous gaze; the characterization of the imperfect heroines and heroes