Littérature. Mouvement. Générations. Veuillez relier les points

Auteurs

  • Stefania Consonni Università degli studi di Bergamo
  • Fabio Cleto Università degli studi di Bergamo

Mots-clés :

Generation, literature, conflict, integration, evolution

Résumé

This paper looks at a number of synchro-diachronic interconnections between the categories of ‘literature’ and ‘generations’. It may seem a questionable choice: while the time-specific category of ‘generation’ has a clear cognitive value in regard to specific historical products of material culture (e.g. clothes, toys, films, music, comics, technological devices, etc.), literature has in fact been constructed by modernity as a cornerstone of metahistorical, essential and universal knowledge. And yet, we claim there may be deeper – although neither intuitive nor transparent – reasons for reading literature through generations, as well as for reading generations through literature. We seek to connect the dots between the two notions by proposing a heuristic model of the literature/generation nexus that is articulated on three interrelated levels, i.e., production, consumption and representation. By looking at how the diachronic axis of literary evolution moves along (and becomes in various ways intertwined with) the synchronic axis of generational taxonomies, we will see how the three levels of our model find applicability across the whole literary spectrum. We will thus deal with dynamics of generational conflict, integration and evolution, with rituals of literary consumption and with patterns of degeneration, self-generation and regeneration, as well as with the various strategies of self-representation developed by different generations of authors, from modernists to writers nowadays in their thirties, forties and fifties.

Bibliographies de l'auteur

Stefania Consonni, Università degli studi di Bergamo

Stefania Consonni is an associate professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Bergamo. She has published books and articles on textual paradigms; narratology; metadiscourse; the semiotics of visual vs. verbal language; resemiotization and multimodality; history and theory of spatialization; history and theory of the novel; specialized communication in a discourse-analytical and culturalist perspective; semiotics, pragmatics and epistemology of traditional and new genres within academic, aesthetic, literary, scientific, entertainment and media discourse. A member of the CERLIS Research Centre and the Eye Tracking Lab team (both based in Bergamo), as well as of the CLAVIER-Corpus and Language Variation in English Research consortium, she is on the editorial board of JCaDS-Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies (University of Cardiff), the CERLIS Series and Ibérica (European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes).

Fabio Cleto, Università degli studi di Bergamo

Fabio Cleto is Full Professor of English Literature and Cultural History at the University of Bergamo. An authority on the theory and practice of camp, on which he published three books (ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, 1999; Per una definizione del discorso camp, 2006; PopCamp, 2008), his research interests include gender and sexuality, visual and transmedia culture, and the politics of representation. He has published books on nineteenth-century literary dissidence (Percorsi del dissenso nel secondo Ottocento britannico, 2001), on the mid-Sixties transatlantic economy of “pop secrecy” (Intrigo internazionale. Pop, chic, spie degli anni Sessanta, 2013), on the obscenity of the Noughties (Fuori scena. Gli ani Zero e l’economia dell’osceno, 2014) and on TV series (ed., Tempo di serie. La temporalità nella narrazione seriale, 2018). He has written for cinema, television, newspapers and the web; he has also edited academic book series and directed cultural festivals. In 2019, his work inspired the Camp: Notes on Fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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Publiée

2023-11-15

Comment citer

Consonni, S., & Cleto, F. (2023). Littérature. Mouvement. Générations. Veuillez relier les points. Elephant & Castle, (30), 50–63. Consulté à l’adresse https://elephantandcastle.unibg.it/index.php/eac/article/view/463