Fiction's ethics

Cambridge Scholar Publishing

Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani, 2017

The debate on 21st century Italian realism that started nearly ten years ago with the publication of the issue of Allegoria entitled '"Ritorno alla realtà": narrativa e cinema alla fine del postmoderno' (2008), welcomes the publication of Loredana Di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio's Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema. The volume is a timely contribution to this lively and engaging discussion, and it is relevant for at least three reasons. Firstly, it offers the readers a theoretical introduction ('Contemporary Iterations of Realism: Italian Perspectives') to all the different shades of realism existing in contemporary Italian philosophy, literature, and cinema (from Ferraris' Manifesto del nuovo realismo, to Eco's notion of 'negative realism'; from Recalcati's discussion of the Lacanian Real, to Taviani's concept of 'allegorical realism'). Secondly, it provides in-depth investigations of some of the most prominent writers and filmmakers whose works have been associated, one way or another, with 21 st century realism. Finally, it gives non-Italian readers the opportunity to 'familiarize themselves with recent artistic and critical productions in Italy' (VIII). Encounters with the Real is divided in two parts. The first part, 'Literary Encounters with the Real', opens with Monica Jansen's essay 'The Uses of Affective Realism in Asbestos Narratives: Prunetti's Amianto and Valenti's La fabbrica del panico'. Drawing on Lauren Berlant's work on 'affective realism' and Marianne Hirsch's theory of 'postmemory', Jansen argues that the hybrid fictional works of Prunetti and Valenti, not only possess inherent, and topical, testimonial and documentarian qualities, but also foster 'a mediated prospective memory of protest and change' (23). In this sense, the works of Prunetti and Valenti (as well as other Italian writers who use similar narrative strategies) become exemplary of narratives that transform private events (factory workers' death) into universal stories of 'resistance against capitalism' (22). Monica Seger's article tackles another vital issue. 'Toxic Tales: On Representing Environmental Crisis in Puglia' focuses on the ecological catastrophe that in recent years has plagued the city of Taranto. Seger's objects of investigation, Adesso tienimi by Flavia Piccinni, and Quindici passi by Giuliano Foschini, are paradigmatic of 'the sort of post-millennial realist narrative' (30) that is not afraid of engaging with controversial questions, and provide readers with a deeper understanding of the complex interaction between human health, industrial development, and the environment. Raffaello Palumbo Mosca's chapter, 'New Realism or Return to Ethics? Paths of Italian Narrative from the 1990's to Today', tackles the debate on realism

Italian Culture

This volume explores the Italian contribution to the current global phenomenon of a “return to reality” by examining the country’s rich cultural production in literature and cinema. The focus is particularly on works from the period spanning the Nineties to the present day which offer alternatives to notions of reality as manufactured by the collusion between the neo-liberal state and the media. The book also discusses Italy’s relationship with its own cultural past by investigating how Italian authors deal with the return of the specter of Neorealism as it haunts the modern artistic imagination in this new epoch of crisis. Furthermore, the volume engages in dialogue with previous works of criticism on contemporary Italian realism, while going beyond them in devoting equal attention to cinema and literature. The resulting interactions will aid the reader in understanding how the critical arts respond to the triumph of hyperrealism in the current era of the virtual spectacle as they ...

Quaderni d'Italianistica, 2020

Journal of Romance Studies, 2001

Rewriting literary history After a century of almost total critical neglect, a recent revival of interest in Italy in the indigenous eighteenth-century novel breaks with a long-standing tradition which identifies the origins of the modern Italian novel with Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1825-7). For the Romantics, Manzoni's intention to educate his readership in the civic and religious values of the Risorgimento lent respectability to a genre that had been otherwise widely condemned, and his novel has since come to be seen as a cornerstone in the foundation of a national culture and language. In this review article I shall attempt to trace the ways in which recent developments in approaches to the novel and its readers have begun over the past quarter century to impact on the established history of the novel in Italy and are contributing to a rethinking of eighteenth-century narrative, of what makes a narrative a novel, and of the different reading practices it produces. But before turning to the question of critical reception, I shall begin with a brief outline of the development of the pre-nineteenth-century novel in Italy. Thanks to the recent work of critics such as Folco Portinari, Alberto Asor Rosa and Carlo Madrignani among others, we have been reminded of the existence of an autonomous seventeenth-and eighteenth-century narrative tradition which is the novel in all but name. What is curious about this history is that, from the point of view of authorship, the Italian novel appears to have had not one beginning but two. A rapid historical sketch conducted today would date the inception of the modern Italian novel as an autonomous genre in prose at about 1625. This is followed by a long period between roughly 1670 and 1740 during which Italian authors turned away from the novel but Italian readers continued to demand it. Seventeenth-century theorists, however, still had considerable difficulty in placing the romanzo [novel], as Attilio Motta's interesting study of the evolution of the word romanzo through dictionary and encyclopedia entries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows (Motta 1997: 65-78). He notes that the first edition of the authoritative (and conservative) Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca of 1612 offers the succinct definition Poema eroico [Heroic poem], later modified in 1691 with Sorta di [A kind of ] inserted in front of poema, so allocating it, as the entry notes, among the sottogeneri [subgenres] of poetic narration. To find a definition which takes into account recent developments in the genre at home as well as abroad, one has to wait until the fourth

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2015

CLC Web : Comparative Literature and Culture, 2024

In the realm of literature, the question of ethics in fiction has long been a topic of debate. As society continues to evolve, so too do the moral and ethical standards by which we judge the works of fiction. In contemporary realism, a genre that strives to depict the complexities of everyday life, the preservation of ethical values in storytelling is of paramount importance. This essay will explore the ways in which contemporary realist authors navigate the fine line between art and morality, seeking to maintain the integrity of their work while also upholding ethical principles. By analyzing various works of fiction within the realm of contemporary realism, we will delve into the complexities of this balancing act, ultimately seeking to understand how authors can effectively preserve ethics in their storytelling without sacrificing the essence of their art.

Justice is a recurrent theme in the writings of Gianrico Carofiglio, in particular the novels and the essays. In these works, great attention is paid to how justice is delivered through the Italian legal processes, how it is conceived by those who are entrusted with its administration and how it is perceived by citizens. Through the analysis of a sample corpus, comprising two essays and two of the novels of the Guido Guerrieri cycle, this contribution examines a range of strategies used by the author to configure his vision of justice. A preliminary overview appears to suggest a pronounced difference between novels and essays with regard to the author's own stance towards justice. Whilst the novels echo the nationally shared distrust for what is considered to be a system that is dysfunctional and that deserves to be critiqued and contested, the essays encourage readers to embrace a consensual, positive view of the principles of justice. The main contention in this contribution is that the apparently resigned portrayal of a flawed justice system found in the novels contains the same desire and points to the same social and ethical perspective as the essays. Through a reflection on the topoi that emerge in the texts, and through the analysis of their key themes and the observation of some of their linguistic features (including lexical frequency and distribution), this contribution brings to the fore the ideological, as well as stylistic coherence that exists between the two sets of texts.