Ricerc@Sapienza

In his posthumous Philosophical Observations, Wittgeinstein thus characterized the idea of borders in language: "To say 'This combination of words makes no sense' excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may shew where the property of one man ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary line that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for."
The idea of 'high modernism' as a single, monolithic phenomenon that resulted from postmodernist theories has been gradually replaced by a pluralized and expanded version of modernisms, testified by Peter Nichols's book, significantly titled Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995), and in Italy by the collection of essays edited by Giovanni Cianci, Modernismo / Modernismi (1991). Since the end of the Nineties, debates about postmodernism have gradually waned, while modernism studies have intensified and multiplied, so that an expanded notion of modernism has become necessary, as witnessed by the Modernism/Modernity journal, established in 1994 and identified with the new modernist studies, now the official publication of the Modernist Studies Association (starting in 1999), showcasing work increasingly open to non-Western dimensions of modernism (see also Modernist Cultures, which began in 2005). In recent years, the field of modernist studies has further opened up to diverse, alternative modernisms, strengthening the focus on international and interdisciplinary perspectives while situating literary modernism within diverse cultural, social, disciplinary, and institutional contexts, as testified by the 'new modernisms' that have emerged in different fields of studies.
It is by capitalizing on such critical perspectives that the research project chooses to re-focus on Anglophone modernism as a field of inquiry related to the specific skillset of the group, but which benefits from the open, interdisciplinary perspectives mentioned above. In this sense, the problem of 'style' will not be investigated as a singular, compact concept, and by no means is the Anglophone domain considered in terms of homogeneity. Nor are the 'borders' investigated in the projects to be taken as solid lines of demarcation but rather, as a permeable system. In fact, the challenge, and perhaps most innovative aspect of the project lies precisely in the research group's wish to interrogate and/or reposition spatial, temporal and genre boundaries, while at the same time retaining them as an epistemological category which should not be emptied of its significance. The envisaged steps to be taken to further the state of the art will thus include: a) Adopting a diversified approach to the English-language modernist phenomenon by fostering dialogue among contributions focused on individual case studies, grounded in analysis of the interplay of specific cultural issues and stylistic `fingerprints' - themselves subject to change and variation based on a number of social, historical, cultural and literary factors. b) Assigning value to, rather than eschewing, the localized 'Italian' point of view of the core research unit, not only by evaluating Anglophone modernism in terms of translation, but also by engaging with the way the ideas of borders and surroundings have been discussed in recent attempts to apply the label of 'modernism' to the Italian scene, an operation which has been controversial, but which is beginning to gain traction (see in particular the work of Mimmo Cangiano, who takes precisely the year 1922 as the end point, rather than the beginning, of his reading of the Italian phenomenon in La nascita del modernismo italiano. Filosofie della crisi, storia e letteratura (1903- 1922), 2018); c) Concentrating not only, or not merely, on the seminal texts published in the anniversary year to be celebrated, but rather on a variety of experiments in text type and genre which allow for fruitful exploration of the ever-changing boundaries between the literary and the non-literary. In this sense, we are more interested in celebrating the linguistic and cultural 'laboratories' and workshops that allowed the canonical texts to be born.