‘I have returned there here I have never been’: nostalgia and deindustrialization in contemporary Turinese literature

Abstract

This thesis investigates the role of nostalgia-based fictional literary works in reevaluating highly complex collective events of the recent past. Drawing on a wide range of contributions around the multiple meanings and uses of nostalgia in a variety of fields, my research shows how literary nostalgia is an effective way of reflecting on the socio-economic collective and personal consequences of the process of deindustrialization, and on the transition towards the service sector in most Western countries since the late 1970s. This assumption is tested by means of a close reading of six fictional accounts of people’s memory of industry in contemporary Turin (Italy). Each chapter in this thesis focuses on the representation of one aspect of the deindustrialization process in the selected corpus: 1) the changes in the urban landscape after the dismissal of factories and/or working-class residential areas; 2) the history of the workers’ movement and the rupture of workers-students unity in the late 1970s; 3) the changing relations between workers directly concerned with the industrial crisis and their children. Three types of nostalgia are identified: reflective nostalgia; nostalgia for the future and ‘Telemachian’ nostalgia. With my research, I aim to bring some insights from the scholarship on nostalgia into the debate surrounding the emergence of a new postindustrial literature in Italy.