Forgotten Man Indifferent Nation Contemporary National Storytelling and the Disoriented Citizen
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Mara Santi
Mara Santi is associate professor of Italian Literature at Ghent University where she was appointed in 2008 after having worked at Basel University (2002-2005) and at Zurich University (2005-2008). She graduated in Italian philology at the University of Pavia where she also wrote her PhD thesis on Gabriele d’Annunzio. She teaches BA courses on chivalric poetry of the sixteenth century and on contemporary Italian prose. She also teaches MA courses on short story collection theory. Her main research interests lie in modern and contemporary Italian narrative, narratology, philology, and literary theory. She is particularly interested in authors who have greatly influenced or shaped Italian culture over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, above all Gabriele d’Annunzio and Italo Svevo, not to mention Carlo Emilio Gadda. She is an active researcher on recent developments in contemporary Italian literature.
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.
About the author
Mara Santi is associate professor of Italian Literature at Ghent University where she was appointed in 2008 after having worked at Basel University (2002-2005) and at Zurich University (2005-2008). She graduated in Italian philology at the University of Pavia where she also wrote her PhD thesis on Gabriele d’Annunzio. She teaches BA courses on chivalric poetry of the sixteenth century and on contemporary Italian prose. She also teaches MA courses on short story collection theory. Her main research interests lie in modern and contemporary Italian narrative, narratology, philology, and literary theory. She is particularly interested in authors who have greatly influenced or shaped Italian culture over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, above all Gabriele d’Annunzio and Italo Svevo, not to mention Carlo Emilio Gadda. She is an active researcher on recent developments in contemporary Italian literature.
Note
Elvis Costello, “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” in National Ransom (Beverly Hills: Hear Music, 2010).
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Focus – Law & Literature over the Last Decades in Italy: an Introduction
- Administrative Law Without Public Interest?
- A “Narrative” of the Individual-Community Relationship through the “Lenses” of Criminal Law: Three Sketches of Mystification
- A New Italian Family Law?
- Resource, Enemy or Refugee? Depiction of the Foreigner and Models of Immigration Criminal Law
- Labour Between Law and Literature: Historical Similarities and Critical Propositions on the Present
- Walking Tours, Subjective Maps, and Spatial Justice: Urban and Non-Urban Spaces in Contemporary Italian Literature
- Forgotten Man Indifferent Nation Contemporary National Storytelling and the Disoriented Citizen
- What Are “Common Goods” (beni comuni)? Pictures from the Italian Debate
- Research
- A Revenger’s Tragedy
- Exemplarity, Singularity and Generality. Remarks made between Law and Literature
- Book Reviews
- Book Review
- Book Review
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Focus – Law & Literature over the Last Decades in Italy: an Introduction
- Administrative Law Without Public Interest?
- A “Narrative” of the Individual-Community Relationship through the “Lenses” of Criminal Law: Three Sketches of Mystification
- A New Italian Family Law?
- Resource, Enemy or Refugee? Depiction of the Foreigner and Models of Immigration Criminal Law
- Labour Between Law and Literature: Historical Similarities and Critical Propositions on the Present
- Walking Tours, Subjective Maps, and Spatial Justice: Urban and Non-Urban Spaces in Contemporary Italian Literature
- Forgotten Man Indifferent Nation Contemporary National Storytelling and the Disoriented Citizen
- What Are “Common Goods” (beni comuni)? Pictures from the Italian Debate
- Research
- A Revenger’s Tragedy
- Exemplarity, Singularity and Generality. Remarks made between Law and Literature
- Book Reviews
- Book Review
- Book Review
