In April 2008 Wu Ming 1 – on behalf of the whole collective – published the so-called “memorandum” on the New Italian Epic, which since then has been rippling the surface of Italian culture. The debate is still hot, attacks on our vision are constantly delivered by powerful senior critics and windbags, but we also opened several breaches: since 2008, no discussion of the current state of Italian literature has been possible without references – either positive or negative – to what we wrote. They just couldn’t ignore the “memorandum” (and the expanded version that was published as a book by Einaudi in 2009).

Not surprisingly, the first monography on the subject wasn’t published in Italy but in the UK. It is entitled Overcoming Postmodernism: The Debate on New Italian Epic, and it’s a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies (Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2010). We reproduce the Editor’s introduction and the Notes on Contributors.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Claudia Boscolo

Aims and origin
The contributors of this special issue of Journal of Romance Studies all offer a critical view of a single text. They all engage with different novels as primary material, but their analysis is based on Italian author Wu Ming 1’s essay New Italian Epic: Memorandum 1993-2008, the first version of which was published online in April 2008. Wu Ming is the name of a collective of Italian authors based in Bologna, formerly known as the Luther Blissett Project [1] The collective is currently formed by four members, known by a number from 1 to 5 (Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, Wu Ming 4 and Wu Ming 5 – Wu Ming 3 left the group in 2008). New Italian Epic is commonly known as the ‘Memorandum’ [2]. It describes and provides a taxonomy for a corpus of Italian contemporary novels by various authors – including Wu Ming. (more…)

While we’re warming up the engine of this blog (reasonably soon to come: a reflection on the affinities and differences between brother Roberto Saviano and us, with an analysis of Saviano’s international best-seller Gomorrah*), it makes sense to draw the attention to some interviews that we put in our website’s RSS feed, but may have been overlooked because the newsletter was rarely sent out and many Giap subscribers weren’t following our feed.

The first interview is the one we called “the monster”, because we “frankensteinised” several interviews appeared both on newspapers and the web in the wake of Manituana‘s release. It was put on the Manituana website but it is buried under tons of untranslated stuff, a situation that will dramatically improve in the next weeks.

The monster-interview was translated into English by our Italo-Australian friend Jason Di Rosso, who’s from Perth and lives in Sydney. There’s an oblique reference to him in our movie Radio Alice / Lavorare con lentezza, when the camera lingers on a postcard from Perth whose sender is one Rachel Di Rosso, a girl that one of the film’s characters claims to have shagged 27 times during the few days she spent in Bologna.

The second interview was published on Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1.  It is a peer-reviewed collaborative journal devoted to such topics as “popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived [...] fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them.” More info here. The interviewer is Veruska Sabucco, the interviewee is Wu Ming 1. Here it goes.

* Speaking of Gomorrah, some of you may not have seen this yet.

Picture: 1956. Italian teenagers disguised as Indians attacking a train. Allegedly happened in Emilia. The caption calls them ‘our homely redskins’ and says they went crazy by dint of reading western comics. Click on the image to enlarge it.