italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies

Dear Colleagues,

please consider to submit a proposal for the International call for papers Per una verifica delle letterature del lavoro nel contemporaneo/ For an Investigation of the Contemporary Literature of Labour, organized by Aura. You can find further information at the following link: https://www.aurarivista.it/avvisi/cfp-letterature-del-lavoro/

Deadline for abstract submissions: September 30th, 2023

Thank you for your attention!

Best regards,



Imma Iaccarino


Cfp | Per una verifica delle letterature del lavoro nel contemporaneo | For an Investigation of the Contemporary Literature of Labour

In the third-millennium literature – both Italian and international – there emerges a renewed tendency for writings variously linked to the theme of work. The theme crosses the forms and genres of contemporary writing: from the novel to short fiction, to orthodox or unorthodox forms of poetry and lyric. This new literature of labour seems to organize itself morphologically in specific rhetorical, argumentative, and narrative structures which can be studied with methodologies that highlight their stylistic and narratological peculiarities and interpret their ideological implications in historical-sociological terms.
Critical interest in working-class literature or, in general, in narratives related to the theme of precarious labour, is accompanied by recent theoretical writings about the economic, social, and anthropological structures which regulate the biopolitical organization of late capitalism. In the contemporary age, precariousness appears the result of a crisis of the mechanisms governing the social contract, understood as a device for the exchange of interests between the subject and capital.
In the still current critical debate on new realism and the return to reality, contemporary literatures on the theme of precarious work seem to fill a symbolic void left open by the hegemonic narrative, characterized by a sweetened vision of precarious life as a life devoted to ‘flexibility’. In this regard, it is still interesting to study the evolution in the relationship between authorial subjectivity, the world and discursive production on the threshold of the disempowerment of the twentieth-century models of knowledge. The perspectives of authorial voices rearranged themselves on different paths: while still inspired by classical structures of thought, they render the apprehension for the lack of a strong ideological grid.

RESEARCH PATHS
The project of a monographic issue will examine these and other questions related to Italian and international literatures of labour, with case studies in a flexible range of periodization, and theoretical reflection on the multiple representations and narratives of work. Contemporary work literature is a theme that can be isolated at various levels of pervasiveness within the macro-semantic economy of texts. Intuitively, as a first factor in delimiting a corpus – of which a non-binding selection is proposed below – a series of sub-categories can be identified in terms of chronotopes or isotopes:
– the company chronotope;
– the chronotope of cultural and university work;
– what remains of the factory chronotope, typical of the last century;
– the urban and underground chronotope;
– the post-urban, ‘heterotopic’ and dystopian chronotope.
Possible lines of research could concern:
– the morphological specificities, to be analyzed with tools of formal, stylistic, rhetorical, narratological analysis, through which the theme of work is organized in contemporary forms;
– the statutes of factuality, referentiality, fictionality of contemporary narratives of work and the related implications in terms of relationships with the authorial person;
– the possible interactions with forms and genres, such as that of the inquiry, the interview, the reportage, the historical novel, the neo-picaresque, the dystopian novel and others;
– formal, thematic or ideological continuities or discontinuities with the tradition of the representation of work and industry in twentieth century literature;
– a problematization of the possible social functions, even with the attestation of empirical cases, of cultural products which claim to mediate a discourse on labour in the age of late capitalism.
PROPOSALS
«Aura» will evaluate two kinds of proposals:
– essays that with specific methodologies will interpret texts that are relevant for the topic (about 40,000 characters);
– brief descriptive profiles of texts that are pertinent to the topic (about 10,000 characters).
Proposals in Italian or English should include an abstract of 250 words, a preliminary bibliography and a brief biographical note. They should be sent before September 30, 2023 at the following email address: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>. Proposals will be evaluated by the journal’s committee according to originality and relevance. In case of acceptance, articles in Italian or English should be sent before April 30, 2024. They will be evaluated through a review process and, in case of acceptance, published in a monographic issue. Authors are requested to follow the submission guidelines<https://www.aurarivista.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Norme-editoriali.pdf>.
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