Memory and the Mezzogiorno (MeMo). A literary map from 1945 to the present. Memoria e Mezzogiorno (MeMo). Una mappa letteraria dal 1945 a oggi.

Progetto di Ricerca di Interesse Nazionale

PRIN 2022 PNRR

Principal Investigator: Bernardo De Luca (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II)

The MeMo project (Memoria e Mezzogiorno) aims to construct a literary map of Southern Italy, in a time span from 1945 to the present. Using the tools of geographical-literary investigation and the materialist and ecological approach (material eco-criticism), the project, with its prevailing historiographical framework, favours the analysis of symbolic places and texts linked to three thematic macro-areas: the effects of the Second World War; the phenomena of (de)industrialization; and migrations. The objects analyzed are therefore seen in the light of their relationship with the territory, with the geographical and social space, with the communities of reference, and by virtue of their symbolic potential as custodians of a memorial value and traces of the interaction between anthropic communities and environments.

Decisive will be the adoption of a cartography of literary experiences, enhanced by multimedia content and supported by the constant updating of a database containing the results of the research. In this way we intend to create a regest, as exhaustive as possible, of authors and texts in Italian literature from 1945 to the present day that have explicitly thematized and photographed the incidence of the three phenomena (war, de-industrialization, migration) in the context of Southern Italy. True collective traumas, the phenomena identified have transformed southern landscapes and the symbolic relationship between man and the environment. In addition, the selected thematic areas are part of the more complex Southern question, which since the 1970s has seen a gradual downsizing in intellectual debate in general, and literary debate in particular. However, thanks to the activity of some writers and intellectuals who, often solitarily, have contributed to keeping it alive, it will be possible to look at the evolution of the southern question itself from a literary perspective associated with the fields of geography and ecology. The literary map will be presented as a spatial representation of symbolic places for the collective memory through the filter of literature, in order to provide a historical cartography in which the literary and cultural imaginary is inextricably linked to the complexity of memorial processes and the powerful transformation that southern places and environments undergo after only a few decades. The project intends to valorize a literary and linguistic heritage closely connected with natural and anthropic space, which is still little investigated from an adequate critical perspective. The literary archives in the universities involved or in the libraries of the area, together with the surveyed repertoire, receive from the MeMo project and its multimedia windows (e.g. the website dedicated to the project, containing the bibliographical database of the research) the proper scientific and cultural recognition.

Unità di Ricerca

• Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II: Bernardo De Luca (Principal Investigator); Giovanni Maffei
• Università della Calabria: Marco Gatto (Responsabile d'Unità), Margherita Ganeri, Katia Massara