Abstract
In Italy, where the reflection about forms of subjectivity has been particularly lively thanks to the legacy of autonomist and post-communist thought, several young writers have taken the challenge of reconstructing the subject of postmodern society through narrative forms. As case in point, I examine the work of Giuseppe Genna (b.1969), and his novels In The Name of Ishmael (2003), Dies Irae (2006) and Italia De Profundis (2008). In these works, the technological, political and cultural exteriorities determining the functioning of contemporary subjectivities are fully integrated and deployed – lexically, stylistically and narratively. However, I argue that the novel's ability to frame the desperation of the present within a reconstruction of past history and future resolution provides an essential mean for maintaining a space for freedom and imagination.
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Notes
Starting in the 1950s, this critique will be made explicit, for instance, in the novelistic practice of the French New Novelists, and in particular in the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor: however, it is arguable that the Sense of these novels is the illusory nature of human time and understanding when faced with immense complexity of the real. The novel's structure, however, clearly mimics the traditional ‘apprenticeships’ of the modern novel, although what is learned is precisely the inadequacy of human learning.
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Mecchia, G. The Novel Form in Italian Postmodernity: Genna's Day of Judgment. Subjectivity 5, 95–110 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.27