Terrorism and realism in contemporary Italian literature: the victim as a literary character and a cultural paradigm

Abstract

This thesis explores the idea of victimhood in Italian literary representations of terrorism, looking at its relationship with realism. More specifically, I focus on the period of Italian political terrorism in the 1970s, the so-called Years of Lead, through a corpus of novels and short stories written by authors who did not have direct experience of those events. By examining how these writers reworked the memory of 1970s terrorism in the 2000s, I look at the victim as a literary character and as a cultural paradigm for this generation. I argue that a fundamental narrative of impotence lies beneath the political commitment of these authors, and that their realism expresses a concern about the practical usefulness of their writing. The portrayal of victims is underdeveloped and ideologically polarized, and more similar to representation in political and media discourse than in literature. Moreover, a mythologization of leftist revolutionary violence informs many of the works. This thesis presents the first extensive and comparative analysis of the imagery of political terrorism of the 1970s in the work of a generation of writers who were born after those years. By exploring the relationship between generations and memory in the context of the crisis of the nation-state and the growth of a globalized environment, as well as the relationship between political commitment and literary imagination, this study may also offer some new insights on the question of ethics and intellectual engagement in contemporary Italian literature. This thesis is divided into three main parts. In Part I, I develop a close textual analysis of the representation of victims as literary characters: I show how this representation interacts with the political and social background of Italy in the 2000s, and how it casts light on the authors’ urge to demonstrate the authority and public importance of their role as writers and intellectuals. In Part II, I explore victimhood as a cultural paradigm of the so-called ‘transition’ generation, who saw the decline of the idea of the nation-state in a globalized world, namely the generation born between 1966 and 1980, entering their twenties between 1986 and 2000 and their thirties between 1996 and 2010. By reworking the memory of 1970s terrorism, these authors approached and tried to interpret the globalized present through political and historical paradigms typical of modern national narratives. In Part III, I discuss how their work relates to realism. In fact, the corpus of this thesis is part of the so-called ‘return to reality’ after postmodernism. With this formula, some critics identify an increasing interest, in contemporary Italian literature, in subjects taken from contemporary history and politics – such as the Years of Lead – and characterized by a mix of fictional and non-fictional features. By engaging with the critical debate on the ‘return to reality’ and the literary trends that this debate identifies, I argue that the ‘return to reality’ identifies a preoccupation with the political engagement of intellectuals in a moment of deep and significant social and political transformation. Analysis shows how this preoccupation reproduces the pragmatic narratives of violence in the representation of victimhood. Finally, I focus on two works that stand out for their original and unconventional depiction of victims. Showing how the authors make use of two radically different modes of representation, I highlight the political dimension of these works, and I argue that an attention to history and politics in literature does not necessarily imply the use of a realist mode of representation