The project originates from the awareness of a general change of the theoretic framework of literature, especially of narration, which has taken place in the last years. The trans-disciplinary dimension, in addition to the transnational dimension, is another determining factor that has caused a re-positioning of the specificity of literature within a wider cultural space, with which it interacts. For example, interesting intersections occurred on the borderline between narrative theory and the so-called "trauma studies" which explore the use of narration and rhetorical techniques to rework the cultural memory of catastrophic collective events, as well as the passage from a lived memory to a memory of the trauma itself "told" to second and third generations; or between narrative theory and (individual and collective) memory studies in second and third generations in a context of uprooting experiences (exiles, diasporas, migrations, wars) culminated in the late modernity (Zygmunt Bauman).
The project basically keeps into account as a starting point the vast horizon of contemporary narrative theories, such as the contextual, thematic and ideological narratologies; the trans-genre and trans-medial applications of narratology; the pragmatic and rhetorical approaches; the post-memory theory and the philosophical theories of narration. The main purpose of the project, however, is not to map the existing narratological horizon, which constitutes its premise, but to test those theories through the construction and the analysis of a transnational corpus of texts and authors, identifying the specificity of a set of Italian and European literary writings from the second half of the 19th Century to the late modernity, concerning the narrated "memory" and "post-memory" of traumatic collective experiences that have impacted the individual stories of authors.
The innovative character of the research consists first and foremost in its position within an international panorama of studies on literary texts published by first and second generation male/female authors vis-à-vis the tragic events that have marked 19th and 20th century European history (wars, exiles, migrations, genocides). Attention will be paid to the systematization and the comparison of the so-called post-memory literature in Italy with the European context, referring to its specificity in comparison to the generation which directly experienced such catastrophic collective events in its adulthood. The second generation (the "post-memory" generation) in Italy has not been studied in depth, with the exception of those researches carried out in an ambit strictly focused on Italian contemporary literature by Jewish authors (see the essays in the volume edited by R. Speelman, M. Jansen and S. Gaiga, Scrittori italiani di origine ebrea ieri e oggi: un approccio generazionale, Atti del convegno di Utrecht-Amsterdam, 5-7 Ottobre 2006, Italianistica Ultraiectina. Studies in Italian Language and Culture, Igitur, vol. 2, 2007). The comparison with similar cases present in other European nations is essential for an understanding of the phenomenon itself on both a literary and historical-cultural level.
This project may bring about an advancement of knowledge with respect to the state of the art, inasmuch as it can widen the scope of trauma studies in Italy from second/third generations' "remembered history" to "imagined history" (E. Ibsch, Memory, History, Imagination: How Time Affects the Perspective on Holocaust Literature, in AA.VV., Scrittori italiani di origine ebrea ieri e oggi: un approccio generazionale, Igitur 2007) with regard to the historical facts that are narrated, or better re-narrated through the direct/indirect narratives of previous generations rather than personal direct memory. This research field has had a remarkable development abroad, starting from the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who was among the earliest scholars who considered memory as the intersection of collective elements rooted in social institutions and practices rather than the experience of the single individual (hence the title of his 1950 essay La mémoire collective). Halbwachs maintains that the individual act of memory is only possible based on "cadres sociaux", and this has induced memory studies to focus not only on inner memory (as it happened in the psychological and cognitive ambit) but rather on the outer memory, that is, a memory codified in practices or objects, among which the artistic and literary ones. One cannot help acknowledging that these studies have opened a fruitful critical debate that has for example led to the researches of Aleida Assmann (see the already mentioned "Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses") on collective memory mediators and writing in particular, also analyzed in its relationships with images. The fundamental connection between literature and the visual arts (beginning with family pictures) has been studied by Marianne Hirsch, of Romanian descent, who entered the field of "memory studies" by intersecting the subset of trauma studies (in particular those dealing with the Shoah) and that of gender studies, and coining - also with respect to her experience as the daughter of Shoah survivors - the term "post-memory" itself, which first appeared in her 1992 article which was ultimately developed in her 2012 monograph (The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust).
Post-memory can be defined as the narrative reworking of the memory of experiences deriving from a collective trauma, transmitted to those who have not lived them, who usually belong to the so-called second generation, a term that can be applied to the heirs of the victims of the Shoah or other genocides like the Armenian one, but could be also used for the descendants of those who suffered the trauma of territorial displacement (exiles and migrations), ethnic and/or political persecutions, and the loss of relatives due to the consequences of conflicts on a local or world-wide scale. A fundamental aspect of this research consists in its being open limited to some meaningful samples to analogous cases present in the European ambit, which will be dealt with by some members of the research group (the non-Italian contexts that will be researched by the participants in this project being: Holland, Flanders, Cape Verde, Switzerland, Spain, England, France, Germany). The research paths that have been identified are analytically described in the following field, devoted to "Description of the activities and tasks of the participants".
The purpose is to circumscribe possible resemblances and differences on the plane of both narrative invention and authorial intention with respect to the historical facts they refer to.