Writing the war, imaging the community. Littell, Cercas, Wu Ming.

One of the characteristic of the contemporary European literature is undoubtedly its tendency to obsessively return to the writing of particularly relevant historical events which are usually characterized by a violent dimension. The traces of the traumas of the past continue to affect the present, acting relentlessly on the socio-political sphere of our times. They also influence decisively certain cultural aspects linked, in particular, to the theme of the sedimentation and transmission of memory. In this cultural context, the protagonists of current literature are dedicating themselves with ever increasing attention to (re-)writing war, as a privileged narrative object in order to analyze – and eventually modify – the links that are inevitably established between the present and the past, the historical memory and the collective identity. Given these preliminary reflections, the thesis aims to study this crucial problem of current literary production, focusing, in particular, on the work of three authors, very representative of this phenomenon. The three case studies examined will be, therefore, Javier Cercas, Jonathan Littell and Wu Ming, three authors who, while exhibiting their own specific poetics, nevertheless share the same interest, the same critical gaze towards the wars of the past and their present legacy. Their works are animated by the same concern to question the ways and forms in which the memory has been handed down, questioning the violent history of a nation as a substratum for the formation of community identity.