L’Ennesimo Nuovo, Analisi e Proposte Per una Cultura del Futuro- UIS Research Centre

Italy has always been idealised at the forefront of cultural production. Idiosyncratic movements together marked different epochs, thus moulding an internationally renowned tradition that embraced all forms of art, radically spurred civilising innovation in many fields over time, and culturally built the hegemonic myth of Italian uniqueness. But Italy’s ability to effectively foster a culture which resists the current zeitgeist and, most importantly, offers pathways to a viable creation of the future leaves some doubts. The intentions of this research project lie in the assessment of the recent state of Italy’s cultural output. By employing a multimodal critical discourse analysis (CDA), an appraisal of recurring patterns of nostalgic content will be conducted in the broader national creative landscape, making use of instances from mainstream and social media, such as TV schedules, music charts and online videos among the others, so as to read a variety of contemporary popular media texts that, despite being touted as fresh products, refrain from creating the new and instead rely very often on a glorious-yet-outdated past. This approach will pave the way to the identification of the reasons behind and the effects of this displacing phenomenon at a sociocultural level and, subsequently, for the formulation of a set of political actions, vital to the enabling of a culture of the future.

PhD Supervisor: Simone Pellegrino