«Comparatismi» è la rivista fondata dalla Consulta di Critica letteraria e Letterature comparate. Si propone come un luogo di ricerca e di dialogo tra le diverse posizioni teoriche, critiche e metodologiche, focalizzandosi in particolare sui generi letterari, la comparatistica, il linguaggio della poesia, l'ermeneutica, lo storytelling, la teoria della letteratura, la storia della critica, la semiotica del testo, la teoria e la storia della traduzione.
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Con le migliori intenzioni. Il nuovo puritanesimo al cinema
Woke ideology, an extreme version of political correctness, is characterized by some distinctive features: the identity paradigm, victim ideology, puritanism. Three elements that are found in the movement #metoo and in its French variant #balancetonporc, whose birth coincides precisely with the consolidation of the very definition of the term woke. Three stories linked to the world of cinema, and particularly to France, tell us the radicalization of a clash and the risk of a new totalitarianism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sandro Volpe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
From "Here" to Eternity. Space-time singularities between literature, graphic novel and cinema
By reconciling the narrator and the reader-spectator’s opposite desires to run to the end of the story and to pause in the middle, to conclude and repeat, a literary, graphic or audiovisual narrative is a manifestation of “the internal logic of the discourse of mortality” (P. Brooks). A “narrative is significant to the extent that it draws the traits of temporal experience” (P. Ricœur), elaborating a discourse capable to exorcise the great human fears and sufferings: the senselessness of time, the prison of time, the loss of time, the end of time. The essay tests Ricœur’s theorem by analyzing Here, a paradoxical graphic story published by Richard McGuire in 1989 (as a comic strip) and then in 2014 (as a graphic novel), adapted for the big screen by Robert Zemeckis in 2024.
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Sulla soglia del canone: strategie dell’autorialità e politiche della ricezione in Milan Kundera
This essay examines the authorial strategies employed by Milan Kundera to influence the reception and legitimation of his work between France and Czechoslovakia, within the broader context of the progressive globalization of the literary field. Focusing on the editorial and critical success of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the analysis highlights the tension between the construction of a supranational authorial image and the identity constraints imposed by both the publishing market and literary criticism, Western and Czech alike. Central to the discussion are the notions of authenticity, alterity, and canon, reconsidered in light of the transformations of migrant authorship and the mechanisms of selective inclusion enacted by the French publishing system. The case of Kundera thus emerges as a paradigm of liminal authorship, navigating between the need for aesthetic self-assertion and the symbolic pressures of external legitimating structures.
Copyright (c) 2025 Valentina Vignotto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Tornare a casa. La letteratura tra la nostalgia, i media digitali e il libro
Homesickness has been a foundational theme of Western literature, long before 17th‑century medicine coined the term nostalgia. Initially described as a clinical pathology, the concept has since evolved into a complex psychological experience in which the spatial dimension (home) intersects with the temporal dimension (origin). Recent neurocognitive studies highlight its beneficial and adaptive potential, and this reevaluation has sparked an explosion of interest in looking backward across social, economic, and cultural spheres. In this context, algorithms and media play a boosting role, both as vectors of nostalgic content and as nostalgic objects themselves. Moreover, beyond its thematic preoccupation, literature offers a distinctive form of media nostalgia in which the book – particularly in postdigital storytelling – emerges as the privileged medium for a literary nostalgia that copes with the trauma of a digitized present and the obsolescence of the printed medium.
Copyright (c) 2025 Paolo Sordi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Heidegger, Hölderlin e la poeticità del tempo
The article explores the dialogue between Heidegger and Hölderlin, showing how poetry becomes, for the German philosopher, the original site of temporal experience. In Hölderlin’s word, Heidegger recognizes a saying that transforms the interpreter, dissolving the distance between writer and thinker. Poetry, as authentic time, precedes all logic: it is the dwelling where language brings the world into being and thought rediscovers its “other beginning.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Giampiero Moretti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Da Shakespeare a Verdi, dalle traduzioni ai libretti
The article aims to explore the complex relationship between Verdi's librettos and Shakespeare's translations in nineteenth-century Italy, a field that remains largely unexplored, mainly due to the absence of a complete chronology of the editions in circulation on the peninsula in the nineteenth century. It is precisely the lack of an exhaustive catalogue that makes it difficult to trace translation choices and identify reference editions, textual variants and the preferences of librettists, who often preferred specific translators in relation to their linguistic and cultural characteristics. A case in point is the gestation of King Lear, a project never completed by Verdi, which reveals through the two versions of Antonio Somma's libretto how Shakespeare's translations influenced dramaturgical and compositional choices, and how the lack of a definitive version contributed to the failure of the attempt. By analysing the differences between the two versions of the libretto, it is possible to trace the translations used and assess how they shaped the text and the perception of the opera in Italy. The research therefore highlights the importance of a historical and philological reconstruction of the editions in order to better understand the relationship between translations and Verdi's poetics, highlighting how textual variations influenced the reception and development of Verdi's melodrama based on Shakespeare.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eduardo Grumelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
"Philosophy for Children e neuronarratologia": allenare il ragionamento abduttivo con il disegno sequenziale
After a long period of neglect within philosophical reflection, abduction began its rise in the late nineteenth century, thanks to Charles S. Peirce. Abduction has been reevaluated not only at the logical level, but also at the semiotic and interpretative levels, and in many other scientific fields. Furthermore, it has also been recognized as a fundamental cognitive process in everyday life. This paper presents and discusses the results of an experimental narratological study, part of the Philosophy for Children movement, which used sequential drawing to ‘train’ the ability to make abductive inferences. Along with abductive reasoning, some of the related skills such as causal inference, causal explanation and causal prediction were also stimulated.
Copyright (c) 2025 Valentina Conti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The theory of estrangement proposed by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky has found evidentiary support in Gestalt theory and partial opposition in the scientific community in recent years, especially in neurocognitivism. Psychologists and neuroscientists have highlighted not only how the right hemisphere of the human brain is specialized for processing the unknown before the left hemisphere intervenes to classify it, but also how novelty poses a potential danger where the hippocampus has no similar information stored. Thus, the brain’s fundamental function – predictive processing – can lead to prediction errors and disrupt the reward circuitry: even the so-called Stendhal syndrome must be reinterpreted today as a pernicious effect of the novum on the brain. This paper historicizes the concept of novelty starting from the early twentieth century and compares it to the current proliferation of serializations and adaptations, which act in the opposite way to Šklovskij’s defamiliarization, giving rise to repetition and the ever-the-same of mainstream aesthetics.
Copyright (c) 2025 Stefano Calabrese, Valentina Conti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Recent studies on magical thinking by English psychologist Eugene Subbotsky and a recent study conducted at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia demonstrate how Homo sapiens has inherited a cognitive bias whereby similar elements tend to be interpreted as the cause of one another, making isomorphism a genuine causal inducer. Rather than being a vestige of childhood or archaic times, neurocognitive studies provide compelling evidence that isomorphism helps us interpret reality according to classificatory systems that often do not diverge from scientific logic, and that counterfactuality in particular (whether fairy tales or science fiction) constitutes not only a testing ground for causal logic but also an activator of creativity.
L’autoritratto o del vedersi vedere. Forme e retoriche di un non-genere letterario
While the self-portrait is a historically codified genre in the visual arts, its status within literature proves far more elusive. The recognition of the literary self-portrait as a distinct genre - defined by its own specific features and distinguishable from other forms of self-writing - can be traced back to the theoretical framework proposed by the French critic Michel Beaujour (1980), who situates its genealogy as far back as the medieval specula. Building on his reflections, this paper examines the interplay between textual form, visual dimension, and the author’s quest for identity. The analysis will focus on four texts, grouped according to their chronological and thematic affinities: Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio and L’Âge d’homme by Michel Leiris, Autoritratto automatico by Umberto Fiori, and Autoportrait by Éduard Levé.
The Function of Literary Genre Theory in Comparative Literature Studies
Lo spazio dell’io. Tra frammentazione definitoria e tendenza al macro-genere
This contribution examines the issue of literary genre in the field of life narrative. After accounting for the definitional difficulties encountered by autobiography and autofiction, it considers the hypothesis of a macro-genre of the self modeled on Lejeune’s autobiographical space. This is done by reviewing some of its formulations and, subsequently, by arguing that it responds to the elusive textual nature of the self, which is simultaneously form, theme, and mode.
Plasticità deflagrate. "Alla cieca" di Claudio Magris
This paper aims to analyze Alla cieca (2005) by Claudio Magris as a work that radically and irreducibly questions the status of the novel form. Far from being a historical novel in the traditional sense, Alla cieca weaves together autobiography, epic, clinical report, myth, and essayistic writing into a palimpsestic and polyvocal structure. As a result, the narrative unfolds as a “novel-mixtape” and “novel-mashup,” in which heterogeneous fragments – from classical mythology to historical documents – are superimposed and rewritten, in the name of a conscious hybridization that destabilizes the boundaries of genres and produces a text that continually makes and unmakes itself. Through this fluidity, Claudio Magris destabilizes the very notion of genre as a fixed category, transforming it into a dynamic energy in constant tension between memory and invention. Alla cieca thus becomes the laboratory of a “protean novel,” where the dialogue among genres is an integral part of the representation of History and of the metaliterary reflection on writing.
"A good cry". I libri che fanno piangere
The essay explores a literary phenomenon born on the digital platform TikTok: books that make you cry. It is a large constellation of texts characterized by the narration of traumatic situations. The books that make us cry have achieved a certain gender stability, present characterizing indicators and now have a defined canon and their own classics, starting from A Little Life by H. Yanagihara. These texts adapt the sensation novel and at the same time incorporate the narrative logic of some segments of fanfiction. Ultimately, books that make us cry are not only a digital success but also one of the literary phenomena with which the Internet is building its literature and therefore the literature of the future.
"Black Lives Matter" e la risignificazione della narrazione afroamericana nell’era digitale
This study investigates the narratological re-signification of African American activism in digital communication through a qualitative and theoretical analysis of the Instagram page of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on the frameworks of Transmedial Narratology (Mittell, 2015) and Participatory Culture (Jenkins, 2006), the research explores how digital platforms enable the construction of new forms of political and social storytelling. The Instagram channel under analysis is interpreted as a transmedial text that merges visual, textual, and performative codes, where narrative strategies rooted in African American culture – such as call and response and repetition with a difference (Gates, 1988) – find renewed expressive space. The study does not rely on a quantitatively defined corpus, as it adopts a comparative and qualitative approach that treats the Instagram page as a “text” in the semiotic and cultural sense. In this light, the reflection offered here aims to provide a methodological and theoretical contribution for future research on Black aesthetics, digital activism, and social storytelling in contemporary media.
Effetto-Vertigo. Il ritratto come genere letterario in prospettiva "cross-temporal"
From a cross-temporal and inter-arts perspective, this proposal considers the role of genre theory, using the “portrait” as a case study. In Felski’s words, through comparative theory, texts can be seen not as “object-to-be-explained” but rather as “fellow actor and cocreator of relations, attitudes, and attachments” (Felski, 2011, p. 589). This research aims to demonstrate that the portrait case study adds valuable data to genre theory, as it is both referential – connected to a real referent, namely the art object – and figural, representing the “intimate” identity of a subject (Felski, 2016, p. 754). The proposal aims to explore the limits of genre classification from transnational and trans-temporal perspectives, considering the theoretical interaction between the verbal and the visual.
Altre voci dell’Oltremare: una lettura intersezionale dei romanzi coloniali di Mura e Pina Ballario
In the Italian context, the colonial novel has been the subject of limited critical investigation, and even more underexplored is the colonial literary production by women writers. Focusing on the case studies of Sambadù, amore negro by Mura and Fortuna sottovento by Pina Ballario, this article analyzes the Italian colonial novel through an intersectional methodology. This perspective aims, on the one hand, at examining how gender and racial identities are shaped precisely through the simultaneous intersection of gender and race, and on the other, at exploring the racial imaginary that the authors drew upon and often reproduced.
Archivi del futuro: la fantascienza letteraria tra Afrofuturismo e Africanfuturismo
Drawing on the concept of “double estrangement”, theorized by Joy Sanchez-Tayor to highlight the specificities of speculative fiction by writers of color, this article examines Afrodiasporic and African science fiction through a comparative analysis of the two subgenres of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. The aim is twofold: first, to demonstrate how these literary expressions rework the conventional tropes of science fiction through decolonial, feminist, and post-anthropocentric perspectives; second, to identity the conceptual and thematic specificities that set the two subgenres apart. Finally, the article turns to a comparative analysis of two case studies: The Deep (2019) by Rivers Solomon and the Binti trilogy (2015-2018) by Nnedi Okorafor, taken respectively as emblematic examples of Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist literature.
Il trauma nel tempo e nello spazio del romanzo: Perrin, Ernaux e Parrella
The article explores the theme of trauma through a comparative analysis of three novels: Cambiare l’acqua ai fiori by Valérie Perrin, L’evento by Annie Ernaux and Lo spazio bianco by Valeria Parrella. These novels represent female traumas that, starting from private experiences such as unwanted pregnancy, abortion, premature birth, the death project onto a public dimension, assuming the significance of historical and collective traumas. The analysis focuses on the relationship between time and space in the context of trauma, highlighting how trauma disrupts and shatters the individual’s identity, also reflecting in the narrative structures. Memory plays a crucial role in the process of fragmentation and alienation of the categories of time and space. The article also emphasizes how literary writing can represent and overcome trauma, allowing for a reconquest of the temporal dimension and a new self-awareness.
Poetry is Not a Luxury: Re-inventing Poetic Genre through Feminist Revision
This article explores the revolutionary role of women’s authorship in redefining poetry through feminist revisionism and experimental forms such as verbivocovisual poetry. Traditionally, the poetic canon has been shaped by patriarchal structures, with the poet cast in a ‘quasi-priestly role’ (Gilbert, Gubar, 1979). Women’s reclamation of poetic authority thus constitutes an act of resistance. By embracing unconventional forms – collage, visual poetry, and conceptual works – they simultaneously challenge genre constraints and assert their creative agency. Contemporary voices, including Marjorie Perloff and Susan Stanford Friedman, highlight how these redefinitions destabilise traditional hierarchies of authorship and genre. Italian verbivocovisual poets such as Lucia Marcucci, Ketty La Rocca, Giulia Niccolai, Mirella Bentivoglio, and Tomaso Binga have reshaped poetry through multimedia experimentation. By integrating linguistic, visual, and performative elements, they dismantle the exclusivity of the lyric tradition, transforming poetry into a multisensory and politically charged medium. Their works challenge rigid separations between word and image, poetry and visual art, written text and embodied expression, undermining the dominance of a singular, monologic voice. Through appropriation, fragmentation, and conceptual play (including references to mass media and advertising) they expose and resist patriarchal structures embedded in poetic and social discourse. Recognising these experimental works as poetry reconfigures the genre itself, contesting canonical elitism and affirming the plurality of women’s experiences. As Audre Lorde asserted, “poetry is not a luxury”; it is a necessity for survival and transformation, one that women actively reclaim and redefine.
La función crítica de los géneros dispersos
Since the mid-20th century, literary criticism has been developed not only in books and articles that declare this purpose but also through discursive genres that assume criticism without declaring it. The critical function is then established in discourses that, when dealing with other texts, maintain relationships with them that range from the desire for continuity to the vocation of judgment, passing through the attempt to reorder discursive systems. The proposal aims to address discursive variants identified as prologue, chronicle, private diary, and epistolary, when their objective is to continue, justify, or polemicize with a text, thus converting the discourse itself into a vehicle for establishing values and operational concepts, judging authors and works, revising the canon. This article focuses on the chronicle based on the contributions of María Moreno.
Restringere lo spazio/semiotizzare il pianeta. Per una "macro-teoria del genere" e verso una tassonomia della "spy story"
A macro-theory of the spy story highlights the genre’s characteristics: 1) involvement in the plots of the entire world, which, however, undergoes a narrowing according to content-related or chronotopic dynamics; 2) a hyper-coding of elements of reality; and a consequent 3) paranoia as a form of constant and widespread fear. It is in light of this that we can develop a taxonomy of the spy story and, ultimately, highlight the decisive role of Thomas Pynchon’s literature.
“Il massimo di diversità nel minimo spazio”. Per una "Weltliteratur" dei romanzieri nell’età contemporanea
This article examines the contribution made by several contemporary novelists to the debate on World Literature. In their critical essays, authors such as Milan Kundera, Carlos Fuentes, Alejo Carpentier and Adam Thirlwell have reaffirmed the transnational vocation of the novel under the guiding influence of Cervantes. By interpreting their hypotheses within the framework of a precise theoretical model and reconstructing the critical debate they have generated, the aim of the article is to demonstrate the strong relevance of the comparative approach to the study of a genre such as the novel. It will also show how novelists respond to the risk of a renewed nationalization of literary studies, identifying in their engagement with other media an opportunity to rethink the tools and aims that define the novel as a genre.
Approche générique de l’hétérolinguisme (Marinetti, Savinio, Malaparte)
This study aims to analyse the various functions that heterolingualism – that is the incursion of one or more foreign languages into a text – can assume in the works of three Franco-Italian plurilingual authors from the first half of the XXth century. The comparative approach adopted allows for the juxtaposition of different generic types under this device: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s mature memoir Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto, Alberto Savinio’s bilingual prosimetrum Hermaphrodito, and Curzio Malaparte’s novel La pelle. The text further explores the connections between heterolingualism and genre in Franco-Italian literature, situating them within contemporary theories of translingual genres.
Beyond Genres and Autorship: The Affective Archive and Migrant Writing in Dani Zelko’s Work
This article analyzes Reunión (2016-2020), a project by Argentine artist Dani Zelko, as a paradigmatic case for rethinking literary genre from a comparative, expanded, and transmedial perspective. Conceived as a poetic-political device, Reunión combines oral dictation, handwritten transcription, artisanal publishing, and collective reading, generating an affective archive between voice, body, and language. Focusing on the first two seasons of the project, the article interprets Reunión as a migrant and relational practice that subverts literary hierarchies and enacts textual hospitality. It explores the tension between lyric and testimony, the performativity of communal reading, and co-authorship as a critical gesture. In this way, genre emerges as a space of displacement, resonance, and collective invention.
Il saggio personale femminista antirazzista di Reni Eddo-Lodge e Nadeesha Uyangoda. Per una decostruzione degli spazi bianchi nel Regno Unito e in Italia
This article starts from the definition of the “personal essay” as the literary genre utilized by US feminist academics from the 1990s to claim their right not only to self-representation but also to the production of epistemologies and theory drawing from their own personal experiences. Black feminists and feminists of color have deployed this genre to denounce the history of racism in the United States and the legacy of such history in the present. In this article, I coin the definition “feminist antiracist personal essay” to identify a genre that, starting from the personal essay in the United States, has spread also in Europe, and is deployed by feminist intellectuals and activists to develop an intersectional perspective and denounce structural racism in contemporary societies and feminist movements. Through the case studies taken from the British and the Italian context, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2017) and Nadeesha Uyangoda’s L’unica persona nera nella stanza (2021), this article scrutinizes the contribution given to race studies by European Black feminists and feminists of color through the genre of the feminist antiracist personal essay.
Generi e modi nella narrativa contemporanea: ipotesi per un “modo ecologico”
Various studies have advanced the need to renew the theoretical vocabulary by replacing the concept of “genre” with that of “mode”, as a more suitable hermeneutic tool for investigating the fluidity and the imaginative and formal contaminations of contemporary fiction. The mode is particularly effective in the case of the environmental theme, whose hybridity makes it difficult to use a blurred category such as that of “ecological genre” or “cli-fi”. This work, after discussing the advantages of using the “mode” instead of the “genre”, aims to reflect on a possible “ecological mode” to integrate with those already proposed by Ceserani (1999) and Bertoni (2018), highlighting above all its typical figural movements. To do this, we will adapt what Frye (1957) wrote regarding narrative weight and the protagonist’s agency as distinctive criteria of modes. In the supposed ecological mode, the human character is situated in a scenario of asymmetric co-agency, within an inventive world characterized by the polarity between infinitely larger forces – such as atmospheric agents – and infinitely smaller forces – such as the vegetal and animal non-human. This hypothesis will be supported by the reading of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), a text that actuates a perspectival expansion aimed at recalibrating the human’s action space within a multiscalar environment.
Il genere come dispositivo di soggettivazione. I "Dramolette" di Robert Walser e la voce della fiaba
The essay explores the possibility of interpreting literary genres as devices of subjectivation in Robert Walser’s Dramolette, specifically in the fairy-tale dramas Cinderella and Snow White, in order to highlight how literary genre is not merely a regulatory structure but also a dynamic means of creating and deconstructing the plots and subjectivities of both authors and fictional characters. The essay demonstrates how Walser manipulates the genres of fairy tale, classical drama, and comedy, intertwining them to question the concept of subjectivation: characters emerge as dynamic subjects, capable of rejecting the imposition of predefined genres. The article references the theories of the dispositif by Foucault and Deleuze, cross-referencing them with Bagni’s views on genre, to interpret literary genre as a system of dynamic and transformative forces.
Attraversamenti di genere e risurrezioni del tragico: nuove considerazioni sul mito atridico in Virginia Woolf
Beginning with the reflections articulated in the dense essay On not Knowing Greek (1925), in which Virginia Woolf entrusts – primarily through the figure of Electra and her corporeality – her meditations on the tragic genre, the present article seeks to investigate the underlying reasons for Woolf’s progressive, and often implicit, engagement with the mythological material of the House of Atreus. The analysis will therefore consider how the foundational structure of Myth may be resemanticized through a process that foregrounds the role of literary genre, ultimately advancing an argument concerning the presence of a tragic modus within the novel Mrs Dalloway. In conclusion, the article will explore the ways in which Woolf’s proximity to Greek tragedies enables her prose to activate metaphors, motifs, and sensations drawn from a tragic background – one that is revitalized through a fundamental inquiry into the formal and aesthetic status of modernist novels.
I generi letterari al confronto con la convergenza mediale: tra transmedialità, piattaforme e fanfiction
This essay aims to critically and theoretically examine literary genres within contemporary contexts, assessing whether and to what extent these genres remain applicable to works that are expansive, collaborative, and transmedia in nature, emerging from convergent culture. Over time, literary genres have assumed various functions, ranging from merely classificatory to normative, depending on the context and historical period. Genres have increasingly become tools for comparing works, evaluating them, and situating them within a specific literary landscape. In many cases, they have served both as a means of organizing the cultural system and as a mode for experimentation and artistic transformation. With the advent of convergent media, genres have undoubtedly undergone further changes, both theoretically and in practical application, as narrative techniques have increasingly focused on expanding storytelling across different media, each contributing to the extension of the product in its own specific ways. This study aims to explore both the theoretical and practical dimensions of genres within new forms of cultural production, particularly through the analysis of transmedia works, literary production platforms and fanfiction.
Gender and genre: the empirical recognition of “conversational narrator” in women’s fiction
This article examines the interplay between gender and narrative form, with particular attention to the identification and function of the conversational narrator in women’s writing. Drawing on the experimental paradigm developed by Bortolussi and Dixon, this article reports the findings of two exploratory empirical studies designed to assess how selected narrative features influence the perception of a female conversational narrator. Employing a mixed between- and within-subjects experimental design, participants read literary excerpts manipulated along two principal dimensions: linguistic gender markers and narrative perspective. Measures included author recognition, narrative transportation, and message evaluation. The results contribute to a more precise understanding of the narrative strategies and compositional conventions associated with the macro-genre of women’s fiction.