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.
