Modern Languages

Questo libro nasce dalla rielaborazione della tesi di laurea magistrale di Guido Bartolini sulla relazione tra letteratura classica e cultura moderna
all’inizio del 900. Il centro attorno a cui si sviluppa questo studio è
il concetto di classico, con i suoi plurimi significati, i suoi riusi e le
sue contraddizioni. Il mondo classico
occupa oggi giorno una posizione periferica all’interno del campo
degli studi letterari; tuttavia esso ha costituito per secoli il baricentro
della cultura Occidentale ed anche il XX secolo non ha mai smesso
di interrogarsi sul rapporto tra cultura antica e contemporaneità.

This PhD thesis analyses a selection of texts that are part of the Italian literature of the Axis War, written between 1945 and 1975, examining the relationship between literary representations and the Italian collective memory discourse of World War Two. This study builds on a number of theoretical frameworks, combining memory studies, historiography, thematic criticism, and narratology, which are used to explore the relations between literature and memory narratives about the past.
The analysis of the primary literature centres on those figures of repetition (topoi, themes, masterplots) that characterise the texts of the corpus and that have been taken as points of connection between literary representations and collective memory narratives. Through the study of the most recurrent tropes across the corpus, this thesis pinpoints the existence of dominant structures that affected the literary representation of the Axis War, which have strong links to the ways in which the Second World War and the Fascist past have been narrativised in postwar Italy.
The literature of the Axis War represents the Italians as innocent victims, it abstains from portraying them as perpetrators of violence, and develops textual strategies that avoid conveying to their readers any sense of guilt, with only a minority of texts resisting this overbearing representation. These aspects are analysed through a series of close readings, which, whilst forming the backbone of the thesis, intersect with the examination of several theoretical issues, such as collective memory, the literary concepts of themes, motifs, and masterplots, the idea of silence in war writings, and questions of individual and collective guilt.

After World War II the memory of the war campaigns fought by Fascist Italy in the Axis War tended to be marginalised in the Italian memory culture. Among these neglected war theatres the Eastern Front was the one that received more attention: not only did it constitute a matter of political disputes during the 1950s, but was also a frequent subject of literary depictions. Yet the representation of Italy's participation in the invasion of the Soviet Union developed by postwar Italian culture was particularly biased and uncritical. Affected by suffering and by the experience of defeat, the memory narratives about this war campaign conveyed to the Italians a series of self-absolving myths, which were structured around concepts drawn from Catholic culture. Numerous historical works published in the last decade have exposed the limits of this memory discourse and might have paved the way to a renovation of the Italian memory of the 'Russian campaign'.

In this paper I gave an overview of the main features of the literary representations of the Axis War European campaigns. A series of structuring motifs, recurrent topoi and dominant masterplots have shaped the cultural representations of this war and have moulded a series of narratives focusing on victimhood and on the avoidance of Italian responsibilities. Examples of this typified representation were given from a variegated corpus of texts, published between 1944 and 1974. The discussed texts included the works by renowned authors such as Rigoni Stern, Nuto Revelli and Marcello Venturi, successful novels, such as Bedeschi’s Centomila Gavette di Ghiaccio and Preti’s Giovinezza, Giovinezza, and the war narratives written by a series of less studied figures such as Renzo Biasion, Raul Lunardi, Persio Nesti and Ugo Pirro.

In this paper I argued that after the Second World War Antifascism has offered a convenient discursive strategy through which the issue of the national responsibility for the Fascist wars of aggression could be avoided. This is reflected in novels such as Giulio Preti’s Giovinezza giovinezza and Venturi’s Bandiera bianca di Cefalonia, and in Revelli’s memoire La guerra dei poveri, which all present a narrative progression that finds in the conversion of the protagonist to Antifascism a moment of redemption that diverts and pushes away the ideas of guilt and responsibility. The paper then discussed Pirro’s Le soldatesse and Terrosi’s La casa di Novach – both selected and published by Luciano Bianciardi for Feltrinelli in 1956 –which offered a different pathway. In these two novels the feeling of guilt for having participated in the Axis War is not dismissed, but constitutes a crucial factor in the protagonist’s evolution toward Antifascism. In this way these two novels offered to their readers a positive ethical perspective, showing that it was possible to embrace Antifascist values while keeping alive a sense of responsibility for having fought a war of aggression.

In this paper I explored the representation of the Allied occupation of Southern Italy put forward by texts that dealt with the Italian occupations of foreign territories in the Second World War. This study contributed to showing that, compared to other events of World War Two, the Allied occupation had a marginal role in the Italian memory: several texts, despite dwelling on the period of July–September 1943, do not acknowledge the Allied invasion, but focus instead on the dismissal of Mussolini and on the surrender of the 8th of September, which constituted the most important lieux de mémoire of the Second World War. Secondly, the paper showed that, when it is addressed, the Allied invasion is represented in a consistent manner: as the sign of Italy's inevitable defeat. This representation, developed by texts published in the 1950s and 1960s, shows an early circulation of the idea of defeat in relation to the Allied occupation also in texts not ideologically connected to neo-Fascism, in partial contrast with what has been argued by historians (Gallerano 1997, Baris 2015).

In this paper I explored the construction and transmission of the memory of the Axis War in the Italian culture of the postwar years. In this period the circulation of memory narratives about the Axis War was largely hampered. In fact, this war had only a marginal role in the Italian public memory of the Second World War and was mediated by cinematic vectors of memory in extremely limited and biased fashions. Richer and more various depictions can instead be found in the realm of literature. The paper examined three war novels written by Ugo Pirro, Mario Terrosi, and Raul Lunardi, in order to show how these texts, through the representation of the Italian use of violence and a thematisation of the protagonists' sense of guilt, helped readers to gain awareness of Italy's role as a repressive power. The depiction put forward by these three novels, however, contrasted with the one developed by the vast majority of texts of the Axis War literature. The latter presented the Italians as victims of war and adopted a series of topoi that conveyed the idea of Italy's innocence. This overbearing representation, continuously remediated across Italian society, hindered the formation of a responsible memory of the Axis War and contributed to evading Italy's responsibilities for Fascism.

In this paper I analysed the representations of World War I developed by the Italian literature of the Axis War, published in the first three decades after the end of World War II. In several of these texts, such as those written by Pirelli, Terrosi, Rigoni Stern, Bedeschi, and Preti, memories of World War I, mediated by the families and by the Fascist state, informed the expectations about the war that the protagonists of these stories had, contributing to shaping what George Mosse's called the 'Myth of the War Experience'. Notwithstanding the romantic appeal that some authors attributed to this conceptualisation of warfare, the literature of the Axis War criticised and contested this myth. As a result, the general condemnation of war that these literary texts put forward is also extended to the Great War. This prevailing representation is then compared to Giorgio Mario Bergamo's Addio a Recanati, a memoir that tried to separate the memory of World War I from that of World War II.

This postgraduate conference offered a platform for the discussion of the phenomena of war and conflict in Italian culture. Considered in their wide implications, war and conflict constituted two categories particularly fruitful for the exploration of the culture of an often divided and polarised country such as Italy. The conference had a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach in order to reflect the variety of research carried out by the postgraduate members of the SIS.

The IMLR Graduate Forum is a monthly meeting, taking place in Senate House, run by and for graduate students from the Colleges and Institutes in and around London, working on any cultural aspect of those parts of the world where Germanic or Romance languages are spoken. Forum members have the opportunity to present their research and discuss their work in an informal setting. As well as stimulating intellectual debate, the Forum is a great social occasion, giving students of the humanities, from their first year to the writing-up stage, the opportunity to meet and be inspired by each other’s work.

Several scholars have stressed that the Italian memory of the Fascist past has been structured around the avoidance of the ideas of​ guilt and responsibility. This is well reflected in the ways in which the Second World War has been remembered. The Italian memory narratives of this period put forward a series of self-absolving myths, which fostered the idea of Italy’s innocence; at the same time, they displaced guilt outside the perimeter of the national community, by channelling it towards the Germans.
In recent decades, though, narratives on the responsibility that the Italians bear for their past have started to circulate across society. Around the end of the twentieth century a much more widespread recognition of the national involvement in the Holocaust opened the way to historical investigations on the legacy of Italian colonialism and on the Italian war crimes carried out during World War II. In particular, the awareness of the misdeeds committed by the Italians during the colonial era has also circulated outside the narrow field of academia, informing the literary works of several writers and a series of exhibitions.
The circulation of memory narratives that give emphasis on the wrongdoings committed by the Italian people during the first half of the twentieth appears as an original and important trend in the Italian public discourse, which might affect other narratives about the national past. With the fasting approach of the 100 year anniversary of Fascism’s seizure of power, the time seems ripe, if not for a paradigmatic shift in the Italian memory of Fascism, for a more nuanced and complex way of narrating this time of Italian history.

In this talk I discussed four war legends concerning the Italian participation in the Axis War: the stories of the Soviet dispatch number 630, of Churchill's speech after the battle of El-Alamein, of the Sagapò army, and of Italiani brava gente.  The creation of these stories, and even more their circulation in postwar Italian society, found an explication in a common narrative mechanism that structured all of them, which cast light on the process of re-negotiation of the idea of Italian identity that took place after the collapse of Fascism.

Since the end of the Second World War the legacy of Fascism has constituted a key concern for Italian culture. Politicians, intellectuals, and historians have continuously reflected on what Fascism meant for Italian history and on what relationship democratic Italy should establish with its past as a totalitarian dictatorship. The centrality of this burdensome legacy has been well reflected in the cultural realm, where numerous products, of both high and popular culture, chose to deal with Fascism. In this paper,​ I aim to offer an overview of some of the main and most recurrent metaphors, tropes, and themes that were used for the representation of Fascism by Italian writers and filmmakers of the postwar decades. Spread across Italian society by cultural vectors of memory, these tropes highly influenced the Italian memory culture and contributed to shaping the way in which Fascism has been remembered. The study of the main representations of Fascism across Italian culture can help us to understand and better define the claim that many historians have recently made about Italy’s incapacity of dealing with its Fascist past.

The study of literature in relation to collective memories is a complex endeavour that necessitates of appropriate methodologies. In her seminal works on the relationships between memory and culture, Astrid Erll has stressed that since cultural products have only a ‘potential’ for memory making, scholars should focus on processes that actualise their function as media of cultural memory. These may include the examination of canonisation mechanisms, the investigation of literary afterlives, and, above all, the survey of the various forms of cultural reception through which readers and societies respond to literary products (Erll 2011). Similarly, Wulf Kansteiner has considered the study of the reception of the cultural production as one of the few viable ways to link cultural products to the memory narratives negotiated within a given community (Kansteiner 2002; Kansteiner and Fogu 2006).
In this paper, I would like to argue that there is another approach through which literary texts can be studied in connection to collective memories, which consists in investigating the various forms of repetition (e.g. topoi, motifs, themes, and masterplots) that characterise the given narrative works. By identifying and analysing these figures of repetition within a broad body of texts dealing with a specific subject, it becomes possible to develop an entirely textually-based approach through which both the texts’ memory-reflective function and their memory-productive capacity can be revealed.
The paper will initially discuss the theoretical bases supporting the development of such an approach, examining theories drawn from both Memory Studies and Thematic Criticism. Then, the last part of the paper will exemplify this approach by considering a series of case studies offered by the Italian literature of the Axis War published in the first three decades after the end of World War II.

Despite being marginalised in the public memory of the postwar decades, the Italian participation in the Axis War has often been the object of literary and cinematic mediations. The conspicuous corpus of literary and cinematic texts that portrayed the Italians as soldiers and occupiers during the Fascist wars of aggression was, however highly affected by the perspective of the postwar years, which saw the wars that had been planned by the Fascist dictatorship as something that belonged to the past, for which the Italians should not be deemed responsible. Drawing from the numerous cases studies that I discuss in the forthcoming monograph The Italian literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility, the paper will offer a survey of the most recurrent self-representations that the Italians developed in the literary texts portraying the country’s participation in the Fascist war of aggression. The paper will show that many of these depictions constituted both a self-absolving strategy that denied responsibility for the war and an attempt to redefine the national community after the collapse of Fascism.

The Mediated Memories of Responsibility seminars bring together scholars working on the cultural representation of the violent past of the twentieth century across a variety of media and cultures. The seminar series examines the contribution of cultural products to exposing the crimes of perpetrators and disseminating a sense of responsibility for the past in relation to events such as colonialism, wars, and dictatorships. Interdisciplinary in nature, the seminars will explore the construction of the idea of responsibility for past wrongdoings across textual and visual media while addressing ethical questions stemming from the study of past atrocities. Bringing together scholars working across the disciplines, the series aims to foster a cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches in Modern Languages, History, and Memory Studies.

This seminar has received generous support from the Humanities and Arts Research Institute (HARI) of Royal Holloway University of London, and University Council of Modern Languages (UCML)

In this talk, I outlined the research questions of my current IRC project: Adapting to a Difficult Heritage: The Memory and Responsibility for Fascism in Italian Literature and Cinema. To explain how this research project came into being, I discussed some of the main outcomes of my forthcoming monograph – The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (Palgrave Macmillan: 2021) — based on my PhD research. I showed that postwar Italian literature transmitted an extremely partial and biased depiction of the Italian participation in the 1940-1943 Fascist war of aggression, contributing to the formation of the self-absolving framework that has shaped the Italian memory of World War II. My study of the cultural memory of the Axis War points at the troubling relationship that Italian culture established with the Fascist past, which is the topic I will address in my new research project at UCC.