Appartenere ad altri luoghi fra letteratura e realtà. Nuove relazioni tra spazio e identità nella prosa italiana e romena degli ultimi decenni

Living the late modern times means more than ever inhabiting the city of mind where senses of space, of identity and of belonging are continually talked of, invented, imagined. A new, multiple and dynamic identity, aspiring to cross over and to explore new ways of manifestation is expecting to be rewritten and it seems that time has already come. Places acquire meaning as they house this multiplicity modeling themselves as spaces ready to be crossed, escaped from. It’s obvious that the recent literature delights no more in the euphoria of permanence in one place but in the adventure of dislocation, of the unceasing wandering which Walter Benjamin conceived as « temporary metaphor of being and of having to be of postmodern subjectivity », of the conviction that « we are made from the same stuff that places are made from, that’s why there is a strange correspondence and likeness between us and them. As we are the maps of ourselves and of the places around us so the places become maps of our bodies and of our senses » (Franco La Cecla). Traveling across other places, different from the birthplaces, it’s possible to reach that center of the world represented ontologically by home – as Mircea Eliade reminds us – where everything starts from the beginning and the divine gesture can be repeated without end. Contemporary writing about identity as traced by the Romanian and Italian works we analyzed implies a complex relationship with the Other an the Elsewhere. Identity is revealed to be not much an attribute or a quality of a subject as a relation between subject and the others, between subject and space. As we talk about a concept that looms in different aspects of reality, these relations become natural crossroads of fields, of different disciplines. So we based our analyze and reading of the mobile and multiple features that contemporary identity acquires on a critical approach which combines instruments belonging to thematology, imagology, Cultural Studies, sociology, psychology, and history of mentality. I dedicated the first two chapters of my work to Romanian prose written in the last decades and I took into consideration novels and short stories but also journals and correspondences written in Romania and abroad. All these works outline how Romanian national identity but also many Romanian individual identities have been creating themselves in dependence on a real and reachable space as on an imaginary space, longed for and rebuild in the native country...