PhD Dissertation “Intergenerational Dialogue in British and Italian Postcolonial Novels of Migration”  

The project asks how the notion of dialogue between generations features in contemporary British and Italian fiction, particularly as it serves to link colonial past to a European present of immigration. By looking at a number of British and Italian novels published over the last thirty years, I seek to determine if and how intertextual connections can be detected between a number of fictional texts which make use of intergenerational dialogue either as a literary trope, a stylistic device, or a narrative strategy. The aim of my investigation is twofold. Firstly, to probe whether such a thing as a dialogical aesthetics is theorizable at all in European literatures of migration. Secondly, to gauge if and how literary texts may help recast both recent – and less recent – philosophical debates on the role of dialogue in liberal politics (e.g. Charles Taylor’s ‘politics of recognition’ and Ivan Illich’s concept of ‘conviviality’).

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christoph Houswitschka