Mara Santi

Forgotten Man Indifferent Nation Contemporary National Storytelling and the Disoriented Citizen

Abstract This paper focuses on how Italian narratives of the 2000s address the individual as a citizen of the nation-state. More specifically, it focuses on those narratives where writers or directors display issues of national importance and by doing so they deliberately intervene in the citizen’s pursuit of social identity. The aim of the paper is to point out how this impacts on national storytelling and how literature and film highlight and even exacerbate the crisis between citizen and state in the global era.

Special focus : law & literature over the last decades in Italy : an Introduction

During the last decades, both law and literature have undergone dramatic change. Those changes have followed Italian cultural and societal evolution. In some cases literature and law have boosted the change, in some other cases they have reacted to it or merely acknowledged it. The contributions collected in this volume aim to shed a light on some of the crucial aspects of these developments from a comparative perspective. More specifically, we have composed a “puzzle,” a juxtaposition of perspectives where no contamination is allowed between the different methods and tools of the two research domains. Indeed, we have explicitly asked our contributors not to trespass the border that divides them from the sister discipline. In our puzzle the conjunction “and” divides law and literature as a boundary where jurists and literary scholars face each other. Although it may seem naïve, this is no ingenuous or less sophisticated choice since it allows us to tightly place side by side different analysis of a complex landscape that – just like the pieces of a puzzle – should not be confused. The eight essays that compose this monographic issue aim to tell eight different stories, from eight different regions of the two research domains. What they all share is the starting point. Indeed, each scholar has been asked to answer the same question: “How would you describe the main turning points of your research field’s last two decades?” In the end the reader of the essays gets a fragmentary and though uniform picture of the different disciplines as well as of contemporary Italian culture and society. What binds the autonomous analyses together is the focus that ultimately lies on each single individual. Both literature and law depict an unresolved tension between individuals and community, where community and its institutions eventually lose their historical central role. From this point of view, in the context of Italian law, the development of an alternative vision of the community’s general interest is a striking example. This

SELF-REFLECTIVE DEVICES IN PRIMA DI SPARIRE: METAFICTION, AUTOFICTION AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE PIVOTAL BOOK OF COVACICH'S CICLO DELLE STELLE

The aim of this paper is to describe Mauro Covacichs use of self-reflective devices, such as metafiction, autofiction, and autobiography in Prima di sparire, where the author focuses his analysis on the crisis of identity of the contemporary subject, and represents his own crisis on the one hand as a writer and on the other hand as an ordinary person. In this essay, a short introduction to Covacichs novelist production will contextualize the study of his narrative self-reflectiveness, which will be followed by the discussion of one passage of Prima di sparire, where both the fictional and the self-reflective paths of the authorial quest emerge. The final part of the essay will focus Covacichs theoretical considerations on autofiction in contemporary literature.