The Decline and Resilience of Irony in Post-1989 Italian Literature.

My research focuses on the role of irony in post-1989 Italian literature. Since the 2000s, irony has
frequently been associated with postmodernism, intellectual detachment, and meaningless playfulness.
In a quite fierce debate, critics and writers have started to call for new forms of engagement and
sincerity, in order to open new spaces for artists' and intellectuals' intervention in the public sphere.
Irony has often been set aside, when not explicitly condemned as a dangerously two-faced or exhausted
tool, by authors such as David Foster Wallace and Wu Ming. On the other hand, the influence of the
Italian tradition of ironic writers in the 20th century (e.g. Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco)
on contemporary artists makes the current Italian context particularly complex and unique. Therefore,
my project analyses the use of irony by two Italian groups of writers active across this period (the Italian
pulp cannibali in the 1990s and the Wu Ming collective in the 2000s) and in one specific genre (the
autofiction production by Walter Siti, Tiziano Scarpa, and Michele Mari). It poses the question: is irony still
cutting edge? It aims to prove that irony, though theoretically dismissed, persists as a philosophical and
political attitude, rather than a mere figure of speech. It will demonstrate, in fact, that irony beyond the
postmodern is not just a tool for undermining sincerity or to amuse the reader, but rather can function for
writers as an incisive instrument to perform consistent and effective critique in the social sphere.