Since my doctoral years, my research has been focussed on the
idea of literature as system (Guillén, Fowler, Moretti). Both my
interest in literary genres and in the process of literary
canonization can be regarded as rooted in this idea.
1. Contemporary novels in a transcultural perspective. The label
of postmodernism no longer suffices to explain our present, for at
least two reasons. First of all, our present is made up of
exchanges between cultures on a global level, while postmodernism
is circumscribed to a set of countries (notably 'Western' and
'English-speaking' countries). Several studies have explored the
link betweeen postmodernist and postcolonial novels, which have
often been authored by migrant writers. Yet, we cannot circumscribe
our research to this dialectics, which is by now 'canonical'. Also
in response to 9/11 we have to reassess the cultural frontier that
divides the West from the East in the collective imagination,
exploring the East in its various Eurocentric acceptions. Moreover,
in the course of the last few decades, within the so-called
'Western' world culture has gone through a deep process of
reshaping, also due to the development of new ways to relate to the
past, notably to the Holocaust. In the attempt to understand the
implications of this event, the traditional categories of
historical discourses have been superseded by new trandisciplinary
concepts, such as memory, oblivion and trauma. The cultural
discourses pivoting on the Holocaust have been an important
starting point to redefine the concept of postmodern relativism and
to trigger a comeback to notions of ethics and responsibility,
which have been declined by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in the
singular rather than in the plural, since in his eyes after the
Holocaust ethics had to be re-founded on a different basis, which
is individual rather than collective. The target of my research is
to study contemporary novels – those that have been published in
the last twenty-five years – from a transcultural perspective, also
keeping in mind the importance 9/11 has in the collective
imagination, which is seen by some cultural and social analysts see
as marking the end of postmodernism. More generally, 9/11 has
brought to our attention the problem of the relationship between
East and West, which is closely linked to the nature of the state
of Israel, and ultimately to the Holocaust itself, which has in
turn been seen by Lyotard as the foundation of postmodernism. A
comparative critical attitude is necessary to understand our
present, going beyond the analytical tools that developed within
the discourses of postmodernism. It is my contention that these
discourses, which crystallised mainly around a set of cultural
works that were produced in Europe and the US in the seventies and
eighties, are unable to account for the complexity of today's
global cultural landscape.
2. Mapping some current trends in the field of criminology. As
we know, forensic sciences have recently witnessed extraordinary
developments - suffice it to think of the utilisation of DNA as an
instrument of identification. Criminology, however, is going
through a deep process of remodelling, due to the development of
disciplines such as 'Cultural Criminology', which interprets crime
and its control as cultural constructs. This approach enables
'cultural criminologists' to utilise the theoretical framework that
has been developed in the field of 'cultural studies', but also
theoretical tools belonging to the spheres of sociology and
ethnography, to explore phenomena that had previously been
overlooked, such as criminal subcultures, with their aspects of
ritual and transgressive fascination, or the construction of crime
and its control in the media.
3. Crime as illness. I intend to study the transition, in the
course of the modern age, from the conception of crime as sin to
that of crime as illness. To this end, I will explore the corpus of
nineteenth-century crime fiction, focussing on those texts where
the investigative agent is a physician. This corpus includes
collections of stories such as Samuel Warren's Passages from the
Diary of a Late Physician (which appeared in Blackwood's
between 1830 and 1837, and were collected in a volume the following
year), A.C. Doyle's Under the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies
of Medical Life (1894) as well as L.T. Meade and Clifford
Halifax's Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (published in
the Strand in 1893-94 and in book form in 1895; then
followed by a second series). The aim of this critical itinerary is
to relate the advent of the professional detective not only to the
creation of police forces, but also to the evolution of forensic
sciences. Victorian society was characterised by a new paradigm of
disciplinary knowledge, as Foucault termed it,
whereby knowledge (which should always be regarded as a correlative
of power) was not only structured according to a set of
increasingly well-defined disciplines, but also aimed to
‘normalise' the individual. In the course of the nineteenth
century, professionals such as physicians and lawyers acquired a
virtually ‘heroic' status, since they were endowed with a specific
apparatus of knowledge that enabled them to solve mysteries of
various nature, fighting illness, crime and immorality in order to
reinstate order. These figures soon inspired writers to create
fictional professional case studies featuring a serial hero - a
literary output that significantly contributed to the development
of crime fiction.
4. The development of Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Starting from a number of recent studies that have have explored
the relationship between places, cultural memory and national
identity, I will reassess the development of the English literary
canon between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries through the
study of Poets' Corner and more in general of Westminster Abbey,
the shrine of the English and British national identities. The
burial or monumentalisation of poets, but also of actors and
actresses, since the early modern age, will be analysed in the
light of a wider network of cultural exchanges, in order to explore
the aesthetic and ideological implications of this phenomenon. The
south transept of the Abbey asserted its role as the temple of
English poetic fame starting from the second half of the sixteenth
century, when a monument to Chaucer, the father of English
literature, was erected. In the following centuries the
memorialisation of great artists in this site of memory responded
to changes in taste, strategies of power and also accidental
circumstances. Shakespeare's fate is a case in point, for only in
1741 was a monument to the Bard erected in the Abbey. This and
other cases will be studied by means of written and visual
documents that will enable me to compare the memorial power of
poetry and sculpture, which were both involved in this imposing
process of monumentalisation. Particular attention will be devoted
to the issue of gender, for Poets' Corner reflected the prejudices
that marginalised the woman as artist in the canonical and cultural
edifice of Europe, although actresses were actually memorialised
and/or buried here at a time when in France they were not even
allowed to rest in sacred ground.
5. The Grand Tour and the European identity. This research will
delve into the relationship between aesthetic and ideology in the
Grand Tour, in relation to Jacobitism, religious controversies, the
shifting geopolitical order and the changing forms of government in
European countries. It will explore the construction of the
symbolical borders that oppose the south to the north and the
occident to the orient, exploring the discourses of both
orientalism and 'meridionism', as Manfred Pfister termed the
Northern gaze towards an exoticised South. It will moreover
consider the relation between cultural memory and the perception of
landscape (analysing the function of the classics as mediators of
Southern 'alterity' in the eyes of Northern travellers) as well as
the relation between the material aspects of the journey and the
cultural representation of travelling. The reverse Grand Tour that
brought Italian travellers to northern European countries such as
Great Britain will also been taken into account.
