Renegotiating Europe's indentities. Trans-integrations, cross-roads and bordes in East-Central Europe.

Four universities will participate in the project: the University of Turin (project leader), of Perugia, of Eastern Piedmont and of Foggia. The project will focus on the complex question of European identity, starting from the border zones in Central and Eastern Europe. Literary and historical-political sciences will be intertwined in order to give particular attention to multiple, transcultural and mixed identities. The conceptual reference point of the research is the notion of “trans-integration”, which questions the idea of homogeneous forms of identity connected to territorial, linguistic, ethnic or religious borders. This concept makes it possible to perceive social spaces in new ways and therefore makes possible new conceptions of the European citizenship. This approach will be applied to single case studies going from the 18th to the 21st centuries. On the literary side, the project will move from the work of C. Magris, who has substantially contributed to the definition of the complex concept of “Mittel-Europe”. A part of the research will be devoted to the analysis of the rising nationalist sentiments during the 19th century in Central Europe. A key issue in the project will be the study on literary works linked to both the Nazi-Fascist and the Communist dictatorships. The issue of multiculturalism will be taken into consideration through the transcultural literature in German-speaking areas and the different ways of (self)representation in narrative forms (“Familienroman”, “Auto(r)fiction”, the picaresque novel) and theatre. It will also be discussed in the field of Serbian literature, investigating the connection between Jewish identity and language in two generations of writers in the 20th century. In the field of Polish literature and history, the research will focus on the partition period during which the country disappeared from the map of Europe, connected, on the one side, with the Silesian area and, on the other, with literary works concerning Jakub Szela. On the historical side, the research will consider the connections between many conceptions and projections of Central and Eastern European space developed by thinkers such as C. Frantz (1817-1891), J. M. Hoëne-Wroski (1776-1853), A. Mickiewicz (1798-1855), V. D. Medem (1879-1923), L. Zamenhof (1859-1917), H. v. Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) and S. Zweig (1881-1942). All their approaches share the idea of “fatherland” and identity which transcend national and ethnical borders. The impulse to collective reflection will be linked to the project results’ dissemination. The core of the project will consist of three actions, which will continue after the end of the project itself: the founding of an inter-university center (Forum), of an editorial series and of a multimedia and multilingual Atlas of Central-Eastern Europe.