Cristina Vezzaro, Old and New Roads to Literature

 

Our interest in looking at contemporary English-language literature should be twofold: on one hand, it is significant to acknowledge what the academia considers worth remembering and what will probably survive as present-day literature; on the other hand, one’s idea of today’s literary world would probably be incomplete if we did not salute the presence of new (and old) frames for literature. As a literary translator, a writer and a traveller, I have had a 181chance to get in touch with many different forms of literature in the past few years. As it is often the case in modern-day life, literature may nowadays find forms and ways that can be off the beaten path, and it is crucial to a deep understanding of contemporary poetics to consider them all, i.e. to stretch from the academia to the spoken word scene via the Internet production and all kinds of publications. To rephrase Maurizio Nannucci’s famous line about art: All literature has been contemporary.

 

Published on: Poetics of gesture, N. 19 New Series – Year X 2014