The Watchtower

What follows is the founding declaration of the WCN.

The novel has safely passed through the many different waves which have been plowing the Twentieth Century. Thanks to its ability to rethink and renew itself, the novel has always found answers to the questions that any historical period has addressed to it, thus obtaining a steady success at all the social layers, from the highbrow academy to the «common» public.

If we glance at the literary facts from a longue durée perspective, the formal continuities of the last one-hundred-fifty years are clearly noticeable. Such continuity has been put on the test-bench by the insurgence of post-structuralist theorists who advocated poetics based on the primacy of inter-textuality and self-referentiality, as well as by those who espoused the "end of history" discourse. In spite of this, however, during the last few years the supporters of longue durée scored points: the years between the First Gulf War and September, 11th 2001, have seen neomodern poetics slowly making their way in the literary field. Such poetics are devoted to the exploration of the relationship between the subject and the external reality in order to testify to the trust in the power of the mimetic act as moment of demystification and knowledge. Obviously, the evolution of the contemporary novel bears the weight of uneasynesses, uncertainties and suspicions typical of our time – a time where on one hand the «spread fictitious» dominates our relations with the imaginary, while on the other hand, new forms of historical narratives are developing. One should also pay attention to the increasing role of documents within the novel, as well as to those subgenres between fiction and non-fiction unfolding in the contemporary literary landscape. This can't be surprising, if we think about the vitality of the novel itself, its capability to create new forms (being a privileged watchtower to observe the world), especially if we compare such possibilities to those of other genres as, for instance, theatre or poetry.

If we look at the literary criticism and theory, it is possible to find here too, after a deconstructive moment, a new, and reconstructive kind of critique. Hence the literary criticism, a field which has been stripped of its power by the cultural industry (with the complicity of certain very critics), must now undertake the description and the understanding of this complex set of shifts.

We, as PhD students of Trento University, decided to give birth to this Watchtower for the Contemporary Novel, hoping that this will be a chance to create a space where is possible to examine the most important novels of the last years, without the fear of making judgments of value, in a militant and historicist perspective (following the traces of the best Italian critique). We thus would like to delineate a portrait of contemporary novel with the aim to offer an overview of its different incarnations, to track its routes, in order to identify centres and peripheries. The geographic metaphor is carefully thought. The Watchtower will try to analyse the production of all the geographic areas without discriminations or exclusions.

With our initiative we want to strongly affirm what we think is the very essence of the academic institutions, that is, being a place of research, with a wide open sight on the reality we live in.