A Multifaceted View and the Transnational Present. Contemporary Literature and Intercultural Perspectives

Abstract

Facing the transformation of geographical, philosophical and imaginary territories, the present emerges as a fleeting and uncertain space hard to identify; women and men experience within it a flow of events, not always understandable, vigorously pursuing a link between different fractions of the whole, recognizing the rim that divides them from the bordering reality as an open boundary which is in the eye capable of seeing. The spaces of human action will be marked not by singularity and finite limits, but by multiplicity and an enlargement of edges and transitions, "'in-between spaces" of our “hybrid“ present without a home (Bhabha 2001; Laplantine, Nouss, 2006). The puzzling quality of the present cuts across the reflections of artists and philosophers in different societies of the past. While being aware of the differences and of the specific questions that each period raises for its writers, it is interesting to recognize the existence of a contemporary feeling that is common (at least in some respects) to all epochs. The incomplete and sometimes confusing coincidence between the quality of the present and the instruments of enquiry that science and technology provide to men and women of the present (especially virtual places in our time) assigns a different function to contemporaneity and attracts the interest of observers, especially of the younger generation, not captured by revolutionary or destructive values (depending on the point of view) of new technologies, but shaped and informed by them.