The programme began with a Keynote address by Pierpaolo Antonello (Reader at Cambridge), entitled ‘Visible Books, Unreadable Books: Bruno Munariâ€s Peritextual Playgroundâ€, a talk dealing with one of Italyâ€s most important 20^th-century artists, pioneering what would later be called kinetic art. The talk looked at the readability of texts, and the book as a visible and material object, investigating the intersection between Munariâ€s work in the fine arts and his work as a writer and graphic designer, exploring ‘borders†between text and image and the peritextual inventions in the books he designed, wrote and illustrated. 

The afternoon sessions were dedicated to three hands-on workshops led first by Emanuela Patti and then by Pierpaolo Antonello which explored key texts in intermedial theory by theorists such as Irina Rajewsky and Ágnes Pethő.

We discussed terminological obstacles and methodological knots to try to come to a clearer understanding of the issues at stake. In the final session, Pierpaolo talked about the intermediality of Paolo Sorrentinoâ€s film La grande bellezza (2013), where we looked at how the film illustrates some of PethÅ‘â€s points. It was also clear that the relationship between the arts is not always one of collaboration, but of rivalry: a power struggle between competing media. 

On the second day, we kicked off with Emanuela Pattiâ€s workshop on forms of transposition across the arts in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, focusing on a particularly intriguing, and rarely discussed, short, Che cosa sono le nuvole (1967) which centres on puppet theatre.

This was followed by two creative workshops run by Clodagh Brook, in which our PhD researchers were encouraged to re-explore their own intermedial methodologies in the light of their reading and the discussions over the previous days. We used mock PhD vivas and group work centered on tackling key intermedial methodological challenges in their own work. In the second creative workshop, we led them through a collaborative writing exercise. 

All this took place in the delightful and relaxing surroundings of the Trinityâ€s Long Room Hub on the warmest and sunniest days to hit Ireland for 40 years. 

We are grateful to both the SIS and the AHRC for the funding which enabled us to provide the bursaries for the successful attendees. We are also grateful to the talented and engaged PhD researchers who attended, to Emanuela Patti (Royal Holloway) and Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge), who gave their time to organising such interesting workshops. We hope to run another summer school next year in London. 

L'articolo Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School, Trinity College Dublin, 29-30th June 2018/report sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Interdisciplinarity has been a driving agenda in Universities for some decades. We are encouraged to work in interdisciplinary ways, although these are most often only vaguely articulated. What does Interdisciplinarity mean for a small discipline like Italian, which has lost much of its disciplinary independence and identity through its absorption into Modern Language Departments or Schools? 

The study of a single country could include anything from the study of its literature and art, to the study of its car manufacturing, business practice and fashion industry. Italian Studies, however, is rooted in a philological model, dedicated primarily to the study of the literature of the peninsula. It is only in recent decades, especially with the belated arrival of Cultural Studies onto the agenda, that Italian Studies teaching has opened out. Some disciplines have been welcomed and quickly become canonical and mainstream (cinema, literature, history and politics primarily) while others remain marginal (linguistics, art history, music, new media, television and radio). In some Departments, literature – once the main raison dâ€Ãªtre of Italian Studies – is close to disappearing.   

What is evident is that our discipline is constructed, not natural. It is rather arbitrary and prone to changes in taste. Why has cinema become mainstream in Italian Studies teaching, while painting and sculpture have almost disappeared? Why has music been almost entirely absent throughout the lifetime of the discipline? Why do we work so little with the sciences, with Cognitive Psychology, with Education and Statistics? These questions expose a deeper ontological one: What is 21^st-century Italian Studies? What could it, or should it, include? What does it exclude? 

As the object of teaching in our field has expanded, this has led to uncertainty about to the disciplineâ€s identity. While contemporary Italian Studies appears to be founded on an increasingly expanded, if partial and shifting, notion of “Italian culture”, its boundaries are not clearly and definitely drawn. The teaching of Linguistics and Legal or Business Italian challenge the idea that contemporary Italian Studies is the study of “Italian Culture”. It suggests a very broad, open and ill-defined, “Study of Italy”. 

In other words, a rapid change in the discipline has led to its multidisciplinary, and fuzzy-edged expansion. This leads to two problems. The first is an unclear disciplinary identity, which is hard to articulate successfully and risks presenting a weak raison dâ€Ã©tre in an often hostile academic environment. The second is the widespread failure to negotiate interdisciplinarity along the way, thus missing a vital opportunity. Interdisciplinarity is not just the use of multiple disciplines, it is the connecting of those disciplines. It is the connection and integration of knowledge, methods, tools, concepts or theories that come from different disciplines. Most of what passes for interdisciplinarity actually fails to connect the disciplines it teaches. What this means in practice is that we leave it to our students to connect the disparate knowledge that they receive in our degrees. But, we rarely provide them with the tools to make there connections. The result is a broad, dynamic and interesting curriculum, but one in which students struggle to gain specialist skills and knowledge.

The question, then, is can the connection brought about by interdisciplinary practice help us strengthen the position of our increasingly fragmented, multidisciplinary Italian Studies? Can it enrich the kind of teaching we can provide for our students? 

I believe that our discipline uniquely positioned to answer these questions. In Italian, and indeed in Modern Languages more widely, integration and connectivity are in our DNA. We bring diverse cultures together; we have been doing multidisciplinary work, centred on a single country (or set of countries), for decades. What more could we do if we were to harness the interdisciplinary discourse of connectivity, so creating an interdisciplinary curriculum from the springboard of multidisciplinary one and providing a showcase to our universities? 

L'articolo Interdisciplinary Italian Teaching: The Challenge of Connection sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The idea of the digital age has to be fundamental to any meaningful discussion of contemporary interartistic and intermedial practice. However, it is not without its problems:

Should we only talk about artistic practices with a clear digital component? If we do, does this not risk overemphasising the technological aspect of interartistic practice at the expense of other factors? When did the digital age begin and how does it relate to postmodernism?

I follow David Forgacs who, in his article “Scenarios for the Digital Age” (2001), pinpointed the start of the 1990s as the beginning of media convergence in Italy. Forgacs talks about a triple convergence. The first, he says, is technological: text, sounds and images are digitally encoded. The second is economic: mergers and synergies begin to take place in the media economy. Finally, there is a revolution in consumption as audiences begin to receive media that were once distinct in the same place. These are, of course, transformations discussed at length by Henry Jenkins in his phenomenally successful book, Convergence Culture (2006).

The digital component is clearly key to any discussion of interartistic practice in contemporary Italy. In Italy, convergence is experienced not simply as a striking feature of mass contemporary culture, but is subject to experimentation by elite or semi-elite artists, such Wu Ming and Scrittura Industriale Collettiva. It is also being theorised both by artists and in the academies. So we have to talk about it as a phenomenon that cuts across many different sectors of society.

In the first phase of our Interdisciplinary Italy project, we spent quite some time in our workshops and panels thinking about how the digital is effecting change across the arts. We explored how traditional forms of media were being extended through narrative interaction, multimodality, and the remediation of genres across media. We talked too about the effects of this on authors, who are often drawn to co-writing, and on audiences who participate in the evolving reality through practices like fan-fiction.

However, I don’t believe that digital technology is the only factor to influence contemporary interartistic practice. I hope that in this project we will learn not just about the effect of digital technologies – however important that is – but will also analyze the way in which contemporary artists of all kinds and writers are exploring artistic mediums beyond their own to create hybrid works and new art forms. Only by doing this will we reach the right kind of balance, one that reflects how art is being created today.

The steady shift across the 20th and 21st centuries towards ever more evident transmedial and interartistic practices must be seen in terms of the embedding within Italian, and Western society more generally, of ideas of pluralisation, fragmentation, democratisation, loosening of hierarchies, experimentation, border crossing, and holistic viewpoints – all of which were all slowly emerging across the arc of the twentieth century. We can see it too as reflecting a certain pessimism about how suitable each of the individual arts are in expressing human feelings and ideas, a concern, which while longstanding, began to emerge particularly strongly under early 20^th century modernism. So, it is both an embracing of an idealistic, even utopian, vision of a holistic, non-hierarchical and democratic society, but also an acknowledgement of an impoverishment of any single artistic tool to reflect meaning.

CLODAGH BROOK (adapted, in part, from “Disciplines, inter-disciplines and multimediality”, in Marco Gargiulo, L’Italia e i media, 2014)

L'articolo Convergence in the Digital Age: Utopia or Dystopia? sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.