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This article aims at investigating two narratives about historical moments of sociopolitical, economic, and cultural crisis represented through literary descriptions of epidemics. I will focus on the subtext of the plague in one of the foundational texts of the Western canon, the Decameron, paying particular attention to the metaphor of contagion as a phenomenon allowing for the renegotiations of biopolitical borders in the Florentine society of the Trecento. Building on images of contamination as vehicles of contagion, I am interested in interrogating the roots and scope of the reconsideration of traditional norms and accustomed practices that Giovanni Bocaccio frames in biopolitical terms in the description of the 1348 plague in Florence. I will also take into consideration Philip Roth’s 2010 novel Nemesis, which is set against the background of the polio outbreak in Newark in 1944. Nemesis depicts a prophylactic measure identical to the country retreat that famously frames the main narrative in the Decameron, yet in Roth’s novel it represents a failed attempt to escape contagion. Another narrative trait that Nemesis shares with the Decameron is the context: a society on the verge of essential transformations in the political, cultural, and economic realm. Indeed, mercantile Florence of the Trecento was on the brink of a new era, the Early Modern period, likewise 1944 USA was involved in WWII, fighting for the geopolitical supremacy over a new world order (the Cold War) and shaping a new socio-economic model: neoliberalism.

Presentado en sesión de 27 de agosto de 1952

This paper looks at the way in which Holocaust narratives explore the entity of the family as space of memory repository and, more specifically, as time-space of trans-generational transmission of traumatic memories. It focuses on Michael Chabon’s novel Moonglow as main case study and, to some extent, Art Spiegelman’s MAUS as illustrative and visual model of these mechanisms. This analysis will dwell on families of Holocaust survivors as epitome of families having to deal and come to grips with a traumatic past; a bulky heritage that permeates the everyday life of all the members, not only of those who directly experienced the tragic event. How do traumatized individuals – often suffering from PTSD, “post-traumatic stress disorder,” provoked by their involvement (in several and differing forms) in the Holocaust – relate to their kin and, especially, to their offspring? In this context, to what extent are family dynamics affected, twisted, and eventually turned dysfunctional? In what terms is the present (as well as the future) of a household shaped by, negotiated in the light of its past? These subjects will be investigated against the background of the category of “postmemory” elaborated in the 1990s by Marianne Hirsch and systematized in her seminal The Generation of Postmemory, Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012).

This article addresses the theme of Mimetic Mourning – developed by Aleksander Etkind – against the background of the commemorative experience at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, proposing, hence, a re-contextualization of the concept not only of mimetic mourning, but also of "warped" memorialization.

This article deals with second-generation Holocaust literature, i.e. writings belonging to the generation born after the Holocaust and grown up in its aftermath. Specifically I dwell on two considerably different Jewish-American novels, which reflect two different natures of Holocaust inheritance and, hence, two distinct paths, featuring second-generation Holocaust literature: Thane Rosenbaum’s Second-Hand Smoke (1999) and Irene Dische’s Pious Secrets (1991). My understanding of these narratives is grounded in the cultural distinction between particularist and universalist second-generation Holocaust writers outlined by Alan Berger in Children of Job, American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997). The argument that I present interprets Rosenbaum’s novel as a particularist depiction of the Holocaust legacy, whereas Dische’s book is associated to a universalist perspective towards this event and its inheritance.