L00948 - LITERATURE AND ECOLOGY

As stated, the group's scientific, educational, and cultural activities focus on Italian works, both in standard Italian and in dialect, from the contemporary era up to the present day, along with their authors. It also examines the specific and unique characteristics of literature that emerged in this period, giving rise to literary modernity, as well as the specific forms of the new system of production, reception, and critical and editorial mediation.
Since literary modernity is a dialectic with the esteemed tradition and its dominant poetics, the group's research and teaching place particular emphasis on aspects of discontinuity, rupture, parodic revival, and contemporary rewriting in relation to the codes and canons of the past, on the hybridization of literary modes and forms, and on the establishment of a pluralistic "tradition of the new."
The group also oversees sociological investigations into the formation of a bourgeois and, later, a mass readership, the resulting renewal of the subject matter and language of literary works, and the profound transformations that the rise of the novel has brought about in the system of literary genres.
Furthermore, the group's specific interests include: the birth of children's literature, the development of female authorship, the success of popular fiction, and the cross-pollination between literary texts and other types of artistic creation. The group also deals with the interpretation of texts; the morphology of literary genres in the contemporary era; the literary processes of linguistic and cultural osmosis and assimilation, as well as instances of identity resistance in the context of globalization; the history of the cultural industry; literary journalism, magazines, and militant criticism; cultural mediations and new forms of critical and popular discourse; postmodernity and the "surrounding literature" of the third millennium, also examined in its inter- and plurimedial aspects; and the establishment of original practices for transmitting literary texts through new media.
In terms of methods and tools, the group's research and teaching activities make use of all the most up-to-date methodologies of literary criticism and textual analysis, literary theory, authorial philology, computational lexicography and digital humanities, intertextuality (not just literary), archives and correspondence, and audio-visual documents.
Finally, considering the space reserved for texts of literary modernity in secondary school curricula, the group promotes the study of the methods, techniques, and content of teaching contemporary Italian literature, with a particular focus on the ways of literary education in the context of a culture of the internet and images.
The group also explores the critical relationship between ecology and literature, examining how environmental concerns, the depiction of nature, and issues of sustainability are addressed in contemporary Italian works. These studies underscore the role of literature in raising ecological awareness and challenging anthropocentric perspectives.