formerly L-FIL-LET/11 Contemporary Italian Literature

It deals with Italian works, in both standard Italian and dialects, of the contemporary age up to the present day, and their authors, as well as with the distinctive and unprecedented features of literature that assert themselves in this age, giving rise to literary modernity, and the peculiar forms of the new system of production, reception, and critical and editorial mediation. Precisely because literary modernity is constituted in dialectic with the illustrious tradition and its dominant poetics, in the research and teaching activities within the field, special attention is paid to aspects of discontinuity, fracture, parodic revival, and rewriting aimed at recontextualizing the past, with respect to the codes and canons of the past; to hybridizations of literary modes and forms; and to the establishment of a plural tradition of the new. Also belonging to the field are sociologically oriented investigations into the formation of the bourgeois and then mass readership, the consequent renewal of the subject matter and language of works, and the profound transformations that the triumph of the novel brought about in the system of literary genres. Also among the specific interests of the field are: the birth of children's literature, the development of female authorship, the fortunes of consumer fiction, and the cross-pollinations between literary texts and other forms of artistic expression. The field also deals with the interpretation of texts; the morphology of literary genres in contemporary times; literary processes of linguistic and cultural osmosis and homogenization and episodes of identity resistance in the horizon of globalization; the history of the culture industry; literary journalism, magazines, and militant criticism; cultural mediations and new modes of critical and popular discourse; postmodernity and the "surrounding literature" of the third millennium, also examined in its inter- and multi-media implications; and the emergence of original practices of transmission of literary texts through new media. On the level of methods and tools, the field's research and teaching activities make use of all the most up-to-date methodologies of literary criticism and textual analysis, theory of literature, authorial philology, computational lexicography and digital humanities, intertextuality (including but not limited to literary ones), archives and correspondence, sound and audiovisual documents. Finally, in view of the space reserved for the texts of literary modernity in secondary school curricula, the field promotes in-depth study of the methods, techniques, and content of the didactics of contemporary Italian literature, with particular reference to the modes of literary education in a culture shaped by the web and visual media