7 May 2020
Conference languages: Italian and English
Keynote Speaker: Christine Berberich (University of Portsmouth)
This conference aims to reflect on the relation between literature and society, starting from a conception of narrative genres intended as a site of elaboration of the real in its complexity and as a site of political resistance, as fostering the circulation of ideas and participation in the public sphere. This does not necessarily imply an adherence to realism, as shown by the ideological import of fantasy, the fantastic and other ‘de-realising’ forms.
The evolution of genres throughout the centuries has been marked by a constant questioning of their own premises, also through unceasing negotiations with other expressive codes and with changes in media, society and politics. This process appears to have intensified and increased in our present, when we are witnessing a growing hybridisation and refunctionalisation of literary genres, including mass genres, the conventions and techniques of which are used to convey ever-new contents, opening to a prism of unprecedented relations between narrative and socio-political categories.