Status Quaestionis

Introduction: Teoria/Theory

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This monographic section of Status Quaestionis aims to explore today's uses of theory in the context of literary studies. In particular, this collection of essays stems from the idea of verifying which theories from the twentieth-century period are still present in the dominant perspectives of current literary research, and to what extent. The sixteen contributions hosted in this issue range from Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Translation and Transnational Studies to contemporary narratology and lyric theory. In addition to the articles, the reader will also find inside five interviews, with which the editors have decided to propose in-depth studies on specific themes - Mediterranean Studies, Sociology of Literature, Translation Theory, Manipulation Theory, Lyric Theory - through a dialogue with scholars working abroad and, therefore, able to broaden the collective reflection.

Crisi e necessità della teoria

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The article presents the main weaknesses of contemporary literary theory and proposes a materialistic revival of the concept of theory. It identifies academicised French theory as the main obstacle to this revival, not without pointing out a number of anti-theoretical impulses active in the Anglo-Saxon and Italian scene.

Work, value, criticism. The metamorphosis of the silkworm

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The essay examines three key topics of Marxist literary theory (literature as labour, literature as value and the role of literary criticism) through a theoretical and historical survey of the dialectic idea of literary creation as labour. The first Section discusses mainly the works of Lukács, Jameson, and the Italian debate on the writer as labourer. The second section focuses on the work of Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and his commentaries on Marxist aesthetics. The struggle between art production and market is underlined by considering issues as the debate on postmodernism and Sánchez Vázquez’s call for a socialization of creation. The last section moves from Bolívar Echeverría’s criticism of capitalist modernity and his studies on use value and ethos to drive a critical perspective on literature considered as value.

Remembering and understanding the past. The value of literature for Memory Studies

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The article traces the emergence and evolution of the field of memory studies and its impact on the study of literature. It reconstructs the initial first and second waves of memory research, and it highlights key trends in its third and fourth phases. The article then examines the main theories of cultural memory studies and explores the role of literature in shaping collective memory dynamics. While the theoretical foundations of cultural memory studies prioritise intermedial and contextualist interpretations of culture, potentially downplaying the significance of literature, the article shows that recent works with a focus on the ethical dimensions of memory narratives have reaffirmed the crucial role of literature as a heuristic tool for understanding and reflecting on the past and present. As a result, despite the theoretical trajectory of the field, memory studies research interested in developing a complex ethical perspective on the past continues to affirm and preserve literature’s enduring value.

Literature and the Environmental Humanities: a theoretical framework

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Since the second half of the 20th century, a growing concern about the environment and climate change has been raised across different academic fields. As for literary studies, the debate about ecocriticism nourished the flourishing of new theories and ideas coming from the intersection of natural sciences and humanities. Despite the hegemony of Anglophone research, drawing from more multicultural contexts environmental studies seem nowadays to converge
more and more towards the interdisciplinary – and yet non unitary – field of the Environmental Humanities. This article intends to frame a comprehensive overview of the major con-temporary ecocritical theories from a comparative perspective, particularly focusing on the contribution that literature brings to the wider context of Environmental Humanities and in response to the epistemological and ontological challenges posed by the Anthropocene. In doing so, it particularly focuses on three main key concepts: nature, agency, and scales.

On What Side of Praxis? U.S. Ethnic Studies, The Global Horizon, and The Problem of Theory Through an Asian American Lens

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This essay historicizes U.S. ethnic studies, especially focusing on the Asian American component of the field. Besides illuminating dynamics that are shared by the whole spectrum of ethnic studies, an Asian American “lens” offers an opportunity for “zooming in” and reflecting on some meaningful, productive “tensions” that, in turn, highlight the broader relevance and potential of an “ethnic” perspective. I shall argue that the oscillation between the local and global dimensions of the Asian American field; the historically pivotal role of literary studies and literary teaching for Asian America; and a long history of entwinement between academic institutionalization, theoretical elaboration, and political, socially transformative energies, constitute recurrences in Asian American studies that, once historicized, can prove their importance for us today beyond strict field compartimentalizations. Specifically, I suggest that this history can offer food for thought for recent Comparative literature approaches that wish to deploy a world perspective; and that it can constitute an interesting case study for reflecting on theory as inextricably linked with praxis as well as on the relationship between academic institutions and their “outsides” – a reflection that we especially need nowadays.

Way Beyond the Radio. Looking at the remediation processes in the podcast S-Town through the lenses of Gérard Genette’s theories

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Placing itself within a broader debate on the role of literary theory and its tools in media studies, this article applies Gérard Genette’s notions of transtextuality and paratextuality to the study of podcasts’ remediation processes. After providing a theoretical framework on the textual nature of the podcast, which justifies the application of the Genettian theories to this medium, this work proceeds with analyzing the ground-breaking podcast S-Town’s remediation of the radio, the novel, and, of its predecessor, Serial. Re-thinking the remediation processes in terms of transtexual and paratextual relationships not only helps identify which aspects of the different media are remediated but also highlights the narrative function these remediations often perform. The analysis thus reveals that in S Town, remediation processes are used to create a metanarrative discourse about the distinctive mediacharacteristics of the podcast. Finally, the article questions how the relationship between the tools of literary theory and theory itself manifests within this analysis.

Frankenstein is about ChatGPT: Thinking and the Future of Literary Study in the Age of Generative AI

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This paper is a speculative inquiry into how generative Artificial Intelligence may affect our thinking abilities and what the role of the humanities and literary study will be in the process. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s Socratic notion of thinking as an internal dialogue as well as on various philosophical, psychological, and sociological perspectives on solitude and contempo- rary social character, I show how GenAIs such as ChatGPT present a dual challenge: the potential erosion of human cognitive autonomy and the need for a renewed focus on fostering critical thinking. To illustrate this challenge, I offer a fresh rereading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as a warning against thoughtlessness in the age of scientific progress by drawing a parallel between Victor Frankenstein’s lack of solitude and friendship and our own contemporary attitudes towards technology, self, and others. I then ask where thinking can occur in contemporary society, where overstimulation, distraction, and a lack of solitude are widespread. Finally, I call for a renewed emphasis on thinking as a distinct human ability and underscore the importance of literature in preserving spaces for genuine thought and engagement with self and others.

World literature(s). Traduzioni e storia letteraria nazionale

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If world literature is primarily constituted through translations, it cannot be conceived as a unitary repertoire but rather as a plurality of repertoires: indeed, through the act of translation, diverse national cultures produce an equal number of world literatures. Drawing upon recent advancements in comparative literature and translation studies, this essay explores the possibility of rewriting literary history—beginning with the case of Italian literature—by structurally incorporating translated literature.

Palinsesti/Paratesti: le teorie transmediali della contemporaneità

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The aim of this essay is to investigate the new theories of transmediality in relation to contemporary paratexts, keeping in mind and questioning on the one hand the studies on Genette’s palimpsests and paratexts and on the other the theoretical contribution by Mittell, which defines the three main paratextual typologies of transmediality. From a theoretical. point of view, I will take into account the transmedia storytelling, as characterized by Jenkins and by Sepinwall. In fact, over time, television series, with their acquired complexity, have managed to become the culturally hegemonic form of storytelling, proving to be able to tell very long stories, allowing the characters to evolve over a particularly long period of time. In the current state of media evolution, television seems able to open a greater number of possibilities than other media to those who want to build complex narratives. This essay will discuss modern transmedia theories from a theoretical point of view in relation to the analysis of different types of paratext in relation to television series, in order to verify the ability of transmedia theories to conceptualize the expansions of storytelling.

Reshaping Translation and Theories of Translation in the Digital Age

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This article analyses the reshaping of the practice of translation and of translation theories in the digital age. Focusing on the role of the “cultural turn” and of the “technological turn” of Translation Studies, and of the paradigm shift of the digital age, which value difference and variablity and challenge the concept of the original, the article will investigate the new readings and perceptions of translation as a product, as well as the reshaping of future theories of translation offered by this new paradigm.

Note per una teoria della metalessi

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The essay aims to bring to the attention of the Italian context the most recent theoretical acquisitions on metalepsis. First, starting from the definition, an attempt was made to circumscribe the field by specifying what metalepsis is not. Then, in light of some of the main. contributions on the subject, an original interpretative map was proposed. The last paragraph is dedicated to ongoing research and possible future lines of investigation. The final bibliography aspires to be exhaustive and fruitful for further in-depth studies.

Tre ‘noi’ innaturali

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The essay investigates we-narrative, a narrative form which revolves around a first-person plural narrator. More specifically, it focuses on unnatural we-narratives, i.e., narratives in which the we-narrator is a non-human collective. In order to do this, it analyzes three narrative texts published in Italy between 2015 and 2020 that in different ways challenge naturalness. After reasoning on how these texts can be naturalized, i.e., rationally explained, the final section will comment on the posture of the three we-narrators.

Effetti di profondità e illusioni olografiche. Letteratura, teoria e borderline dopo il sospetto

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This paper observes a transformation in the hermeneutic approach to literature, which today seems based on the refusal of the ambiguity of literary texts and of the very mediations used by twentieth-century literary theories to resolve such ambiguity. The new approach is defined “holographic” because the information is seen as fully available on the text’s surface, while the classic “school of suspect” as well as the classical allegorical hermeneutics, postulated a verticality of interpretation. To confirm such a hypothesis, I look at the contemporary narrative production and at the main contemporary literary theories (philology, cognitivist studies, identity studies). In the conclusions I propose to link such a holographic approach to hermeneutics, in particular for its refusal of ambiguity, to recent mass psychology hypotheses about a borderline condition of contemporary Western society.

Narrative Form and Negotiation in Cultural Narratology

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This article offers an overview of discussions within cultural narratology. One of the basi assumptions of this strand of contemporary narratology is that form is closely bound up with ideology, since it guides – without determining completely – narrative’s engagement with ideas and issues circulating in society. Building on Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s notion of narrative negotiation, I show how some of the basic forms of narrative (its temporal-causal organization, spatiality, and mediation through voice and focalization) carry important ideological ramifications. I exemplify this discussion by referring to a broad range of contemporary narratives (fictional and nonfictional) dealing with two defining crises of the present: migration and climate change.

Per una mappa ‘quantistica’ delle teorie della lirica (2000-2023)

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In the last twenty years, especially the USA and Germany, the theory of the lyric has progressively grown to be a prolific field of study, inspired by the urge of overcoming the perceived lack of an exhaustive definition of the “lyric”, as well as by the necessity of departing from the closely formalistic critical debates. The lyric has therefore received renewed attention from multiple outlooks: from post-classical narratology to (neuro)cognitive perspectives, from stylistics to affect studies, among others. While this renewed scholarly engagement has resulted in a plethora of critical contributions, these approaches have frequently clashed with each other, especially with regards to issues of genre delimitations, fictionality and performativity, thus depicting a fragmented but profoundly interrelated critical space. In this paper, I will offer a comprehensive survey of the most relevant theories of the lyric appeared in the last two decades outside of the Italian critical debate, while metaphorically drawing together the theory of the lyric and quantum theory, on the grounds of similar features of uncertainty, interdependence, and hermeneutic emphasis.

Lyric Indifference and the Genre of the Person

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This paper reads Jackqueline Frost’s Young Americans and Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother as cases of indifference to and within lyric norms. This indifference is understood as amoment of relief from the identitarian specificity of apostrophic conventions. In Frost’s poetics, indifference is figured as a refusal of the assumption of personhood as the basis of politics. The limits and ironies of this poetics are traced in Vuong’s lyric sequences, where every body’s specificity, and every poem’s singularity, offer a way out from what Virginia Jackson has described as “the genre of the person”, with which the overdetermination of lyric reading has reified difference.

Mediterranean Studies. Intervista a Roberto Dainotto

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Intervista a Jérôme Meizoz

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Intervista a Barbara Cassin

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Intervista a Theo Hermans

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La lirica in teoria: intervista a Jonathan Culler

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Teoria/Theory. Perspectives on Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature

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Questa sezione monografica di Status Quaestionis si propone di esplorare gli usi odierni della teoria nel contesto degli studi letterari. In particolare, questa raccolta di saggi nasce dall’idea di verificare quali teorie della stagione novecentesca siano ancora presenti nelle prospettive dominanti dell’attuale ricerca letteraria, e in quale misura. I sedici contributi ospitati in questo numero spaziano tra la Critical Theory, i Cultural Studies, i Media Studies, i Translation e i Transnational Studies e la narratologia e la teoria lirica contemporanee. Oltre agli articoli, il lettore troverà all’interno cinque interviste, con cui i curatori e le curatrici hanno deciso di proporre approfondimenti su temi specifici – Mediterranean Studies, sociologia della letteratura, teoria della traduzione, Manipulation Theory, Lyric Theory – attraverso un dialogo con studiose e studiosi operanti all’estero e, quindi, in grado di ampliare la riflessione collettiva.

Stefano Villani, Making Italy Anglican. Why the Book of Common Prayer Was Translated into Italian, New York, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. xiv, 292, £74.00

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Arturo Mazzarella, La Shoah oggi. Nel conflitto delle immagini, Milano, Bompiani, 2022, 301 pp., € 13,00.

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Stefano Ercolino e Massimo Fusillo, Empatia negativa. Il punto di vista del male, Milano, Bompiani, 2022, 408 pp., € 14,00

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Arturo Cattaneo e Gianluca Fumagalli, Shakespeare in Hollywood, Torino, Einaudi, 2024, 308 pp., € 28,50.

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Simone Carati, Il mondo là fuori. Narrazione, esperienza, scrittura, Milano, Ledizioni, 2023, 210 pp., € 28,00.

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Aspetti e frontiere del racconto biografico

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The present essay attempts to demonstrate how and why 19th century forms and 20th century variants of biofiction mark an important paradigm shift in the recent history of the literary field. They prove that in the narrative genres of contemporary age life is not perceived as the object of an integral representation but is rather treated as the subject of a recognition, that of a reality as fragmentary as the manners of an art founded on the temporal imbalance between βίος and fiction. The essay aims to clarify aspects and frontiers of biofiction dating back to European modernity: the fictional matrix that is implied in the dynamic between narrativization and reconstruction; the illusory rigour of completeness; the constant fragmentariness; the alternation between topics of uniqueness and discourse of infamy; the atmospheric definition of the untimely – with the purpose of providing, through a combined exercise of theoretical morphology and diachronic genealogy, the fundamental coordinates for the metahistorical interpretation of modern biofiction.

L’imprevedibile virtù dell’ambiguità. Il caso Fargo nel panorama della serialità televisiva di ultima generazione

2024-06-20T14:30:13+00:00

This study is divided into two sections, a first one of a more theoretical nature in which an attempt is made to introduce the concept of television seriality and to cast it within a theory of media that looks at the mechanisms of production and consumption, but above all at the possibilities of writing as a creative space in which complexity and originality are produced; in the second part, on the other hand, the series Fargo is analyzed as a model of a complex seriality, based on writing that repudiates the stereotype, and indeed tries to make it its punctum, overthrowing it insofar as it systematically sets out to disregard the viewer's expectations.

Love & Law: The Aura of Prison Writing in Mexico, from the 1800s to the Present

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Prison writing has largely been excluded from the literary canon of the Spanish-speaking world, even though it encompasses key names that extend as far back as Cervantes in Spain and Lizardi in Mexico: two of the pioneers of what is now called the “novel”. Building on seminal analyses of Latin American literature by Roberto González Echevarría, Ángel Rama and Doris Sommer, this article addresses the following questions: What is the power of prison writing? How might we interpret its status as a genre, both in historical and contemporary terms? And what do contemporary forms of prison writing share with much older examples? To answer these questions, we analyze prison narratives from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including well-known novels by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and José Revueltas, and narratives by emerging writers from Susuki Lee, Águila del Mar, and Amatista Lee to Julio Grotten. Through an “auratic quality” that, we argue, derives from their ability to develop powerful counter-truths through the experience of confinement, these narratives reveal and resist the subjugation of the subject by the state as the latter intervenes violently in politics and private life. Our contention is that the power of prison writing lies in its ability to turn legal, state-sponsored discourse on its head through the production of alternative stories narrated from within prison and from below; and that these are simultaneously founded on legal discourse and its affective underside; on law and love.

Brexit, the Border and the Unification of Ireland. A Corpus-assisted Analysis of Irish Newspapers

2024-06-20T14:58:16+00:00

This is an analysis of the discourses on Brexit in Irish newspapers. In order to explore such discourses, I built a corpus of newspaper articles on Brexit published in both the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland, in different time spans, namely the period of the June 2016 referendum, the EU/Britain deal of 2020, and the announcement of the Windsor Framework in 2023. My corpus-assisted study aims to critically analyse how issues related to the consequences of Brexit were articulated in newspapers, in order to tease out differences in the language regarding the matter at hand at topical moments. This article primarily addresses key words and phrases related to partition within the corpus (e.g. border poll, hard border, united Ireland), as well as their collocational behaviour. The study investigates key changes in the discourse on both the Irish border and Irish unification during the 2016-2023 period, and considers how possible changes in terminology (e.g. shared island, new Ireland) can be evidence of a new type of discourse about unification that is slowly surfacing.

Come il ragno a Nazca: per un’archetipologia junghiana dell’aracnide in Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi e Primo Levi

2024-06-20T15:40:45+00:00

The following article explores the archetypal poignancy of the spider in twentieth-century Italian literature by analyzing the stories of Tommaso Landolfi, Primo Levi and Dino Buzzati. Despite their distinct poetics, they simultaneously used various kinds of animal figures sostructurally throughout their careers, that it makes sense to investigate the actual bestiaries derived from their productions. The weight that magical and primitive culture, as well as their individual psychology, had in this phenomenon will be investigated and culturally motivated, through a study that aims to probe our collective imagination, somewhere between the definition given by psychoanalyst Jung and the reconstruction of folk beliefs given by anthropologists such as De Martino. Not by chance, we propose the spider as emblematic to our mythical-ritual system of inquiry, as well as one of the most significant archetypal animal images in literature, magic, phobia, and folklore.

L’Intelligenza Artificiale per l’apprendimento dell’italiano L2/LS. Risultati preliminari di una sperimentazione

2024-06-20T15:52:02+00:00

The paper presents the preliminary results of an experimentation conducted by a research group at the University for Foreigners of Perugia as part of a project on the use of Artificial Intelligence-based technologies in an online course of Italian language and culture, with a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) approach, aimed at a sample of Chinese university students. The Artificial Intelligence system, specially created by the research team, is trained on a corpus based on the "Italian Language Profile," with the aim of facilitating the learning of Italian as a second or foreign language. The dialogue systems developed, which are being tested and validated, allow interactive and personalized opportunities for language practice, immediate feedback and immersive conversational scenarios. Positive student feedback on the use of Artificial Intelligence for learning Italian as a foreign language, particularly for the development of written receptive and productive skills, is collected in the paper. The experimentation is part of a larger research project that aims to explore the potential of Artificial Intelligence in online language learning environments and its effects in terms of motivation, participation, interest and educational success.

Contributi sullo stile e sul realismo magico latino-americano in Die Vermessung der Welt di Daniel Kehlmann

2024-06-20T22:53:01+00:00

The paper outlines some essential features of Daniel Kehlmann’s production, focusing on his most famous work, the novel Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2005). Specifically, the focus is placed on the author’s ability to achieve both wide public and critical acclaim on an international scale, thus also arousing scholarly interest in his production. Moving on from the study of the reception of the work, the essay then highlights the most important characteristics of the text, such as the skilful mixture of irony and melancholy, and its playing with stereotypes about Germans, while also tracing the sources underlying the book, starting from the connections to classical antiquity, to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, highlighting also contemporary inspirations, in particular Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Special attention is given to the work’s references to Latin American literature and its magic realism, showing the text’s connection to authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar, and to the spirituality of the protagonists, related to this potentially fantastic dimension.

I “muri di lava”: architetture e tecniche repressive ne L’arte della gioia

2024-06-20T22:59:41+00:00

This article is focused on the repressive architectures and techniques adopted by Power in Goliarda Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia in order to reveal the social content of her poetics. The interpretation of the novel has been influenced by Michel Foucault’s and Erving Goffman’s theories about institutions and their forms of oppression. But I want to emphasize how Sapienza’s heroine Modesta has been represented: she is a fleeing subject who can even escape from subjugation by power, thanks to her anarchic soul, free to take a stand against every form of violence.

I classici in partibus infidelium. Carena traduttore tra felicità e peccato

2024-06-20T23:06:37+00:00

Carlo Carena was the translator of Einaudi classical texts for decades. Despite his assertion that the translated work matters more than the translator, his choice of authors to translate (mainly Plutarch and Augustine) outlines the development of a very personal trajectory. In fact, ancient authors are read in the light of a restless Christianity, nourished by the reading of Augustine, Montaigne, and Pascal. This essay investigates the first half of Carena’s production as a translator (1956-1992), highlighting the cultural project that ambitiously integrates the ancient world and the modern world in the name of profound ethical and spiritual values. Through the translation of ancient biographies, the translator also speaks of himself and his worldview.

L’apocalisse dell’identità bianca: una lettura decoloniale di July’s People di Nadine Gordimer

2024-06-20T23:14:42+00:00

This article aims to provide a decolonial reading of Nadine Gordimer’s apocalyptic novel July’s People (1981). Through the analysis of the collapse of the concept of whiteness at a spatial, identity, and linguistic level, this article demonstrates that Gordimer challenges mainstream futuristic apocalyptic narratives, which tend to celebrate white characters as saviours of the world, while casting Indigenous characters either in the background without a voice or as “a threat demanding to be contained”. By focusing on an imaginary period of interregnum, Gordimer also foregrounds new pathways for the white subject who must prepare to embrace the uncertain future of the black indigenous new political order.