Archetipi napoletani in veste postmoderna. Venti anni di narrativa su Napoli

Reference:

Giorgio, A., 2010. Archetipi napoletani in veste postmoderna. Venti anni di narrativa su Napoli. In: Fried, I., ed. Tradizione e modernità nella cultura italiana contemporanea. Italia e Europa. Budapest, Hungary: Eötvös Lorand University (ELTE) TFK, pp. 295-312.

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Abstract

The article contests the recent Italian literary debate on the exhaustion of postmodernism as a literary practice and the emergence of new realisms. My contention is that the participants in the debate refer to a narrow literary canon which ignores large areas of the Italian narrative production which have never relinquished a commitment to reality even while adopting postmodern narrative practices. Neapolitan narrative from the early 1990s to the present is an example. The article examines a sample of novels by Michele Serio, Giuseppe Montesano, Marosia Castaldi, Peppe Lanzetta, and Michele Ferrandino, emphasizing: their critical use of Neapolitan classical archetypes rooted in the city’s geophysical characteristics to expose stereotypes and redefine Neapolitan identity; their blend of postmodernist, modernist and realist modes; the ethical and aesthetic productivity of this hybridization of styles and their underlying ideologies; the presence of a renewed engagement with reality well before the appearance of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra. The article demonstrates against other recent assessments that: postmodern practices can still be fruitfully put to the service of critical representations of contemporary Italy; Saviano’s book is not a harbinger of a new committed writing, but a continuation and point of arrival of trends and processes going as far back as Ermanno Rea’s Mistero napoletano (1994); Naples is used by contemporary writers not only to engage with local problems but also as an allegory of contemporary Italy and of the global world.

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