New Italian Epic
Encyclopedia
New Italian Epic is a definition suggested by the Italian author Wu Ming 1
to describe a body of literary works written in Italy by various authors starting in 1993, at the end of the ‘First Republic’. This body of works is described as being formed of novels and other literary texts, which share various stylistic characteristics, thematic constants, and an underlying allegorical nature. They are a particular kind of metahistorical fiction
, with peculiar features that derive from the Italian context..
Over the next few days the author proposed and discussed the expression in debates at other North American colleges, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, within the context of the programme of Comparative Media Studies directed by Henry Jenkins
.
From these interventions the author drew the essay New Italian Epic. Memorandum 1993-2008: narrative, oblique gaze, return to the future, written and published online in the spring of the same year. During the whole of 2008 the expression found a vast echo online, in conferences and conventions, in newspapers, in the specialist press and in radio broadcasts.. In Italy, too, Wu Ming 1 put forward the expression ‘New Italian Epic’ [NIE] in English.
In late 2008 Wu Ming put online a version of the memorandom marked ‘2.0’, or annotated and extended, with replies to some criticisms and closer examination of the more controversial points.
In January 2009 the series Stile Libero of the Einaudi publishing house published a further enriched and updated version of the memorandum (‘3.0’), entitled New Italian Epic. Literatures, oblique gazes, returns to the future.
The memorandum has also been described as a literary manifesto, by virtue of the fact that it contains a classification. According to the author and other participants in the debate , the term ‘manifesto’ is misleading, because this is a document in the form of a pamphlet that does not herald a movement of authors or prescribe anything, but describes a posteriori a dialogue between already existing books, delineating the characteristics of a series of works that go beyond post-modernism, ‘NIE is only one of the many, good and different things that are happening today in Italian literature’, as the preface to edition 2.0 puts it.
The seven characteristics identified by Wu Ming 1 are:
To this list, with version 2.0 of the memorandum and interventions by other writers and academics, were added thematic constants that may be found in NIE texts, for example the ‘death of the founder’: many books in the ‘nebula’ describe the consequences of the passing of a clan leader or founding father, a figure who represented a world that is now in crisis, or has actually constructed a world but has not prepared his descendents to manage the crisis it falls into. By coincidence, in various books this character was identified with the simple antonomasia ‘the old man’. According to Wu Ming 1, upon this mythologeme NIE constructs a great allegory of the current historical phase.
In the memorandum, the catalogue of NIE characteristics is followed by a reflection on allegory, which flows into an exhortation to imagine the future and the extinction of the human species with an approach that the author defines as ‘ecocentric’, and describes as a ‘systematic recourse’ to the rhetorical figure of the pathetic fallacy
, i.e. the attribution to inanimate objects and creatures without consciousness of thoughts and emotions equal to those of human beings.
, La Repubblica
, Liberazione
and Il Manifesto
) almost all the authors mentioned by Wu Ming 1 have taken a position on the subject.
In La Repubblica, Carlo Lucarelli has interpreted the memorandum as an invitation to Italian authors to take a greater interest in the dark sides of the country's national history, and has in turn exhorted them to move towards a ‘new frontier that is not only physical (new environments, new worlds to create and explore) and it is not only narrative (new plots, new adventures, different montage techniques, themes and extreme emotions), but also stylistic (new words, new constructions, new constructions) in [...] mutating novels..
Massimo Carlotto, in Il Manifesto, established a connection between crises in Italian crime writing and attempt to define a new narrative.
Valerio Evangelisti
, in a long article in L'Unità, described the various ways in which it is possible to achieve a poetic outcome that he has called ‘maximalist’. ‘Speaking through systems, historico-geographical frameworks, visions of entire societies, cosmic impulses. One can resort to forms of adventure narrative, as long as the outcome is achieved: making people think, in a realistic or metaphorical way, about the collective perception of an alienated everyday. This is what the authors of the New Italian Epic are trying to do [...]’.
Marcello Fois, presenting his own works in France, defined the New Italian Epic as the last development in a trend to recover populat literature, ignoring the diktats and prescriptions of the critics, a tendency begun in the nineties by certain authors (including those brought together in Group 13). According to Fois, the first phase consisted in ‘freeing oneself from the shame of making genre literature, without paying any attention to the critics; the second – more recent – phase concerns subject-matter. People have rid themselves of the shame of talking about the Italy of today. They have referred to the contemporary situation of our country through the historical novel.’
The author of noirs and historian of philosophy Girolamo De Michele has intervented several times, online and in the pages of Liberazione, with articles arguing parallels between noir poetics, the New Italian Epic, Neo-realism
and the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze
.
Intervening in Il Manifesto, Tommaso Pincio voiced his perplexity about the expression ‘unidentified narrative objects’, at the same time interpreting the NIE memorandum as the signal of a conquered centrality of the novel form in Italian cultural production, after a long period during which critics had viewed it with suspicion..
Later, interventions have been made in various forms and in various media by other writers, including Giuseppe Genna, Antonio Scurati, Vanni Santoni, Gregorio Magini and many more.
In a review of titles published in the computer edition of La Repubblica, the journalist Dario Olivero writes:
«First came Petrolio by Pasolini
. The first organic attempt to write a novel about [Italian] darkness: Mattei, ENI, Cefis, the strategy of tension
. Now we’ve gotten Saviano, with an impressive acceleration over the past few years. Lucarelli, Siti, De Cataldo, Evangelisti, Wu Ming. Many started out with noir, following the idea of Leonardo Sciascia
and the American thriller: using crime as a grid for reality. They have come much further, to the most important cultural current that Italy remembers since the days of Neo-realism
."»
Reviewing the book in the daily paper Il Riformista
, Luca Mastrantonio writes:
«‘a book which... traces an important vector of contemporary Italian literature. New Italian Epic is a curious cultural hybrid. More like a GMO than a product with denomination of origin
... it is an interesting cyberbook of literary theory [...] in this essay you can hear, palpitating, the need to draw mental maps between the books, pair up authors with greater or lesser amounts of judgement, create remarkable points to survey positions and routes in Italian publishing.[26]»
Amongst the detractors is the literary critic Carla Benedetti, columnist in the weekly L’Espresso and lecturer at Pisa University. In January 2009 the Wu Ming collective used a phrase by Benedetti reported in the daily newspaper Libero ("[Il New Italian Epic] is nonsense. It is nothing but self-propaganda") as an endorsement for the publication of New Italian Epic.
After New Italian Epic appeared in bookshops (January 2009), various polemical articles signed by critics appeared in the daily press.
In February–March 2009 Wu Ming 1 published online a two-point analysis of the ‘rhetorical strategies’ employed by detractors, entitled: "New Italian Epic: gut reactions".
In October 2008, at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies
of the University of London a round table was held on NIE, in which the writers Wu Ming 1, Vanni Santoni and Gregorio Magini of the group Scrittura Industriale Collettiva took part, along with researchers and academics from various countries (including Monica Jansen, lecturer at Antwerp University and author of the book The Debate on Postmodernism in Italy), who went on to form a research group into NIE. This group, called ‘PolifoNIE’, examined the subject in greater detail for the Biennial Conference of the Society for Italian Studies, at which it organised two sessions. In May 2010, IGRS published the minutes of the London conferences in the form of a monographic issue of the Journal of Romance Studies"Journal of Romance Studies" entitled "Overcoming Postmodernism", which was the first scholarly overview of the New Italian Epic.
A round table entitled ‘Le roman épique italien’ was also organised by the Université de Provence at Aix-en-Provence
and by the journal Cahiers d'Études Romanes.
The Memorandum on the New Italian Epic has also been included within academic studies in audio-visual and new media, with particular reference to the non-typology of ‘unidentified narrative objects’, applicable to the ‘hybrid’ products emerging from the world of garage media. In March 2009 the PhD programme Planetary Collegium M-Node, along with the School of Media Design and Multimedia Arts of the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti
in Milan organised the symposium ‘New Italian (Media) Epic’, with the presence of Wu Ming 1, Derrick De Kerckhove
, Pier Luigi Capucci, Francesco Monico
, and many others including film-makers, artists and media theorists. This symposium gave rise to a permanent laboratory .
In November 2009, scholars from many countries met in Warsaw, Poland, at the conference "Fiction, Faction and Reality in Italian Literature after 1990", organized by the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Warsaw. Several panels were devoted to the debate on the New Italian Epic.
In March 2010, a panel entitled "The New Italian Epic between Pulp and political intervention" was held at the 8th annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association, which took place at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wu Ming
Wu Ming is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna.In their pre-Wu Ming days, the group wrote the novel Q ....
to describe a body of literary works written in Italy by various authors starting in 1993, at the end of the ‘First Republic’. This body of works is described as being formed of novels and other literary texts, which share various stylistic characteristics, thematic constants, and an underlying allegorical nature. They are a particular kind of metahistorical fiction
Metahistorical romance
Metahistorical Romance is a term describing postmodern historical fiction, defined by Amy J. Elias in Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Elias defines metahistorical romance as a form of historical fiction continuing the legacy of historical romance inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott but...
, with peculiar features that derive from the Italian context..
Origin of the definition
The definition was made by Wu Ming 1 in March 2008, during the work on ‘Up Close & Personal’, a seminar on contemporary Italian literature held at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.Over the next few days the author proposed and discussed the expression in debates at other North American colleges, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, within the context of the programme of Comparative Media Studies directed by Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins III is an American media scholar and currently a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts...
.
From these interventions the author drew the essay New Italian Epic. Memorandum 1993-2008: narrative, oblique gaze, return to the future, written and published online in the spring of the same year. During the whole of 2008 the expression found a vast echo online, in conferences and conventions, in newspapers, in the specialist press and in radio broadcasts.. In Italy, too, Wu Ming 1 put forward the expression ‘New Italian Epic’ [NIE] in English.
In late 2008 Wu Ming put online a version of the memorandom marked ‘2.0’, or annotated and extended, with replies to some criticisms and closer examination of the more controversial points.
In January 2009 the series Stile Libero of the Einaudi publishing house published a further enriched and updated version of the memorandum (‘3.0’), entitled New Italian Epic. Literatures, oblique gazes, returns to the future.
The "memorandum"
The memorandum was intended as an ‘open suggestion of comparative reading, an album of notes to be borne in mind, remembered, used'" and suggests that attention should be paid to a group of works written in Italy over the past fifteen years (1993–2008), seeking unexpected similarities or, conversely, dissolving connections too often taken for grantedThe memorandum has also been described as a literary manifesto, by virtue of the fact that it contains a classification. According to the author and other participants in the debate , the term ‘manifesto’ is misleading, because this is a document in the form of a pamphlet that does not herald a movement of authors or prescribe anything, but describes a posteriori a dialogue between already existing books, delineating the characteristics of a series of works that go beyond post-modernism, ‘NIE is only one of the many, good and different things that are happening today in Italian literature’, as the preface to edition 2.0 puts it.
Characteristics
The characteristics of NIE listed in the memorandum are seven in number, preceded by some premisses seen as a conceptual framework. These premisses concern historical and geographical specificities: this part of the memorandum describes in broad brushstrokes the social and cultural context in which the works are born, and to which explicit or allegorical references are made.The seven characteristics identified by Wu Ming 1 are:
- Refusal of the detached and "coldly ironic tone" that predominates in the postmodern novel. This first characteristic is defined in the memorandum as a ‘conditio sine qua non’.
- ‘Oblique gaze’ or ‘unforeseeable point of view’. Experimentation with unusual and unexpected looks. A gaze that sometimes widens out vertiginously to span the non-human as an integral part of the narrative. Underlying these experiments, according to Wu Ming 1, is an ethical and political motivation.
- Narrative complexity united with a ‘pop’ attitude that often leads to popular success. Many of these novels, are, according to Wu Ming 1, structurally complex and complex in terms of their content, and yet they have become best-sellers. Some examples are QQ (novel)Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. The novel is set in Europe during the 16th century, and deals with Protestant reformation movements....
by Luther BlissettLuther Blissett (nom de plume)Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
, Romanzo criminale by Giancarlo de Cataldo, L’ottava vibrazione by Carlo LucarelliCarlo LucarelliCarlo Lucarelli is an Italian crime-writer, TV presenter, and magazine editor. He was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger in 2003 for the novel Almost Blue.-Biography:...
and especially GomorrahGomorrah (book)Gomorrah is a book by Roberto Saviano published in 2006.-The book:The book describes the clandestine particulars of the business of the Camorra, a powerful Neapolitan mafia-like organization...
by Roberto SavianoRoberto SavianoRoberto Saviano is an Italian writer and journalist.In his writings, articles, television programs, and books he employs prose and news-reporting style to narrate the story of the Camorra , exposing its territory and business connections.Since 2006, following the publication of his bestselling...
. - Narratives of alternative histories and ‘potential uchronias’. These narratives offer a different possible solution with regard to historical reality.
- Dissimulated linguistic experimentation aimed at subverting ‘from within’ the register of the prose.
- Unidentified narrative objects (UNO). Not only do many of the texts of the body under examination not fall within any predefined literary genre, they widen the confines of the literary to include textual elements that produce ‘disturbing’ effects. Among the books quoted in the memorandum, Asce di guerra by Wu Ming, Sappiano le mie parole di sangue by Babsi Jones and the aforementioned Gomorrah. After Gomorrahs international success, many reviewers cited such acronyms as NIE and UNO in an attempt at describing Saviano's book. Writing about Gomorrah on Hindustan TimesHindustan TimesHindustan Times is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded in 1924 with roots in the Indian independence movement of the period ....
, Indian author Indrajit Hazra observed that "unlike Truman CapoteTruman CapoteTruman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
's "fact+fiction=faction" and its obsessive hankering for details, the UNO slithers about like a beast, sometimes trodding [sic] the path of hard reportage, sometimes flipping over into personal mutterings, sometimes tripping on philosophical ruminations, sometimes diving into novelistic "voices" and sometimes gearing into social theory. And unlike Hunter S. ThompsonHunter S. ThompsonHunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...
's 'gonzo journalism', it's dead serious. The UNO's only purpose is to get us reacting violently on a subject using all the tricks known in the narrating trade." - Community and ‘transmedia’. The texts of NIE have the characteristic that they often acts as basic texts for the creation of spin-offs by fan communities. These spin-offs are often present online, and involve various media (films, telefilms, television series, comics, video games, musical compositions, websites).
To this list, with version 2.0 of the memorandum and interventions by other writers and academics, were added thematic constants that may be found in NIE texts, for example the ‘death of the founder’: many books in the ‘nebula’ describe the consequences of the passing of a clan leader or founding father, a figure who represented a world that is now in crisis, or has actually constructed a world but has not prepared his descendents to manage the crisis it falls into. By coincidence, in various books this character was identified with the simple antonomasia ‘the old man’. According to Wu Ming 1, upon this mythologeme NIE constructs a great allegory of the current historical phase.
In the memorandum, the catalogue of NIE characteristics is followed by a reflection on allegory, which flows into an exhortation to imagine the future and the extinction of the human species with an approach that the author defines as ‘ecocentric’, and describes as a ‘systematic recourse’ to the rhetorical figure of the pathetic fallacy
Pathetic fallacy
The pathetic fallacy, anthropomorphic fallacy or sentimental fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations. The pathetic fallacy is a special case of the fallacy of reification...
, i.e. the attribution to inanimate objects and creatures without consciousness of thoughts and emotions equal to those of human beings.
Contributions and interventions by other writers
The appearance of the memorandum has unleashed, from April 2008, a vast discussion amongst writers, as well as among writers and readers. Online or in the pages of some newspapers (such as L'UnitàL'Unità
l'Unità is an Italian left-wing newspaper, originally founded as official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party.-History:L'Unità was founded by Antonio Gramsci on 12 February 1924, as the newspaper of workers and peasants, the official newspaper of Italian Communist Party : it was printed in...
, La Repubblica
La Repubblica
la Repubblica is an Italian daily general-interest newspaper. Founded in 1976 in Rome by the journalist Eugenio Scalfari, as of 2008 is the second largest circulation newspaper, behind the Corriere della Sera.-Foundation:...
, Liberazione
Liberazione
Liberazione is Italian for liberation. It may refer to:* Liberation Day , April 25, the anniversary of the 1945 fall of Mussolini's Italian Social Republic; a public holiday in Italy....
and Il Manifesto
Il Manifesto
il manifesto is an Italian newspaper. While it calls itself communist, it is not connected to any political party. It was founded as a monthly review in 1969 by a collective of left-wing journalists engaged in the wave of critical thought and activity on the Italian left in that period. Prominent...
) almost all the authors mentioned by Wu Ming 1 have taken a position on the subject.
In La Repubblica, Carlo Lucarelli has interpreted the memorandum as an invitation to Italian authors to take a greater interest in the dark sides of the country's national history, and has in turn exhorted them to move towards a ‘new frontier that is not only physical (new environments, new worlds to create and explore) and it is not only narrative (new plots, new adventures, different montage techniques, themes and extreme emotions), but also stylistic (new words, new constructions, new constructions) in [...] mutating novels..
Massimo Carlotto, in Il Manifesto, established a connection between crises in Italian crime writing and attempt to define a new narrative.
Valerio Evangelisti
Valerio Evangelisti
Valerio Evangelisti is one of the most popular Italian writers of science fiction, fantasy, historical novels and horror. He is known mainly for his series of novels featuring the inquistor Nicolas Eymerich and for the Nostradamus trilogy, all bestsellers translated into many languages...
, in a long article in L'Unità, described the various ways in which it is possible to achieve a poetic outcome that he has called ‘maximalist’. ‘Speaking through systems, historico-geographical frameworks, visions of entire societies, cosmic impulses. One can resort to forms of adventure narrative, as long as the outcome is achieved: making people think, in a realistic or metaphorical way, about the collective perception of an alienated everyday. This is what the authors of the New Italian Epic are trying to do [...]’.
Marcello Fois, presenting his own works in France, defined the New Italian Epic as the last development in a trend to recover populat literature, ignoring the diktats and prescriptions of the critics, a tendency begun in the nineties by certain authors (including those brought together in Group 13). According to Fois, the first phase consisted in ‘freeing oneself from the shame of making genre literature, without paying any attention to the critics; the second – more recent – phase concerns subject-matter. People have rid themselves of the shame of talking about the Italy of today. They have referred to the contemporary situation of our country through the historical novel.’
The author of noirs and historian of philosophy Girolamo De Michele has intervented several times, online and in the pages of Liberazione, with articles arguing parallels between noir poetics, the New Italian Epic, Neo-realism
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
and the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
.
Intervening in Il Manifesto, Tommaso Pincio voiced his perplexity about the expression ‘unidentified narrative objects’, at the same time interpreting the NIE memorandum as the signal of a conquered centrality of the novel form in Italian cultural production, after a long period during which critics had viewed it with suspicion..
Later, interventions have been made in various forms and in various media by other writers, including Giuseppe Genna, Antonio Scurati, Vanni Santoni, Gregorio Magini and many more.
Critical replies and controversies
Historian and literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa writes on La Repubblica:In a review of titles published in the computer edition of La Repubblica, the journalist Dario Olivero writes:
«First came Petrolio by Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure...
. The first organic attempt to write a novel about [Italian] darkness: Mattei, ENI, Cefis, the strategy of tension
Strategy of tension
The strategy of tension is a theory that describes how to divide, manipulate, and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and false flag terrorist actions....
. Now we’ve gotten Saviano, with an impressive acceleration over the past few years. Lucarelli, Siti, De Cataldo, Evangelisti, Wu Ming. Many started out with noir, following the idea of Leonardo Sciascia
Leonardo Sciascia
Leonardo Sciascia was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Open Doors and Il giorno della civetta .- Biography :Sciascia was born in Racalmuto, Sicily...
and the American thriller: using crime as a grid for reality. They have come much further, to the most important cultural current that Italy remembers since the days of Neo-realism
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
."»
Reviewing the book in the daily paper Il Riformista
Il Riformista
Il Riformista is an Italian political and financial newspaper, based in Rome, Italy.- History :Launched on 23 October 2002, initially the newspaper was formed of about four pages with Orange as main colour used....
, Luca Mastrantonio writes:
«‘a book which... traces an important vector of contemporary Italian literature. New Italian Epic is a curious cultural hybrid. More like a GMO than a product with denomination of origin
Protected designation of origin
Protected Geographical Status is a legal framework defined in European Union law to protect the names of regional foods. Protected Designation of Origin , Protected Geographical Indication and Traditional Speciality Guaranteed are distinct regimes of geographical indications within the framework...
... it is an interesting cyberbook of literary theory [...] in this essay you can hear, palpitating, the need to draw mental maps between the books, pair up authors with greater or lesser amounts of judgement, create remarkable points to survey positions and routes in Italian publishing.[26]»
Amongst the detractors is the literary critic Carla Benedetti, columnist in the weekly L’Espresso and lecturer at Pisa University. In January 2009 the Wu Ming collective used a phrase by Benedetti reported in the daily newspaper Libero ("[Il New Italian Epic] is nonsense. It is nothing but self-propaganda") as an endorsement for the publication of New Italian Epic.
After New Italian Epic appeared in bookshops (January 2009), various polemical articles signed by critics appeared in the daily press.
In February–March 2009 Wu Ming 1 published online a two-point analysis of the ‘rhetorical strategies’ employed by detractors, entitled: "New Italian Epic: gut reactions".
The debate in the international academic world
The term ‘New Italian Epic’ and the body of works to which it refers were first discussed in March 2008 during ‘Up Close & Personal’, a seminar on contemporary Italian literature organised by McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in which Italianists from all over North America took part.In October 2008, at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies
School of Advanced Study
The School of Advanced Study, a postgraduate institution of the University of London, is the UK's national centre for the promotion and facilitation of research in the humanities and social sciences...
of the University of London a round table was held on NIE, in which the writers Wu Ming 1, Vanni Santoni and Gregorio Magini of the group Scrittura Industriale Collettiva took part, along with researchers and academics from various countries (including Monica Jansen, lecturer at Antwerp University and author of the book The Debate on Postmodernism in Italy), who went on to form a research group into NIE. This group, called ‘PolifoNIE’, examined the subject in greater detail for the Biennial Conference of the Society for Italian Studies, at which it organised two sessions. In May 2010, IGRS published the minutes of the London conferences in the form of a monographic issue of the Journal of Romance Studies"Journal of Romance Studies" entitled "Overcoming Postmodernism", which was the first scholarly overview of the New Italian Epic.
A round table entitled ‘Le roman épique italien’ was also organised by the Université de Provence at Aix-en-Provence
Aix-en-Provence
Aix , or Aix-en-Provence to distinguish it from other cities built over hot springs, is a city-commune in southern France, some north of Marseille. It is in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, in the département of Bouches-du-Rhône, of which it is a subprefecture. The population of Aix is...
and by the journal Cahiers d'Études Romanes.
The Memorandum on the New Italian Epic has also been included within academic studies in audio-visual and new media, with particular reference to the non-typology of ‘unidentified narrative objects’, applicable to the ‘hybrid’ products emerging from the world of garage media. In March 2009 the PhD programme Planetary Collegium M-Node, along with the School of Media Design and Multimedia Arts of the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti
Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano - NABA
The New Academy of Fine Arts of Milan, is a private academy that was founded in Milan in 1980 on the initiatives of Ausonio Zappa, Guido Ballo, and Tito Varisco. In 1981 it was officially recognised by the Italian Ministry of Public Education...
in Milan organised the symposium ‘New Italian (Media) Epic’, with the presence of Wu Ming 1, Derrick De Kerckhove
Derrick de Kerckhove
Derrick de Kerckhove is the author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, Canada...
, Pier Luigi Capucci, Francesco Monico
Francesco Monico
Francesco Monico is an artist, educator, broadcaster, and writer in Italy.-Previous activities:Monico worked for ten years as a director, screenwriter and program chief in Italian broadcast, sperimentale and interactive TV, is both a Technoetic researcher and artist...
, and many others including film-makers, artists and media theorists. This symposium gave rise to a permanent laboratory .
In November 2009, scholars from many countries met in Warsaw, Poland, at the conference "Fiction, Faction and Reality in Italian Literature after 1990", organized by the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Warsaw. Several panels were devoted to the debate on the New Italian Epic.
In March 2010, a panel entitled "The New Italian Epic between Pulp and political intervention" was held at the 8th annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association, which took place at the University of California, Berkeley.
External links
- Wu Ming 1, “We're Going to Have to Be the Parents”, intervention at IGRS, University of London, 2 October 2008.
- The memorandum on the New Italian Epic, edition "2.0", September 2008. Available in Italian and French.
- Archive of the Italian debate on the New Italian Epic, carmillaonline.com, 2008-09.
- AUDIO - Speeches at the conference "New Italian Epic: gli stati generali della narrazione", Cuneo, Italy, November 16, 2008.