Davide Gnoato
(Universität Wien)
18 March 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online
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In the second post-war period, a discussion developed in Italy, initially within Italian German studies and gradually spreading to other disciplines, about so-called “Central European” culture. Early examples of this are not just the works of Ladislao Mittner and Claudio Magris but in particular the literary reception by the Milanese publishing house Adelphi (est. 1962), which made much “Mitteleuropean” literature, as they called it, accessible to a wide audience. Using Adelphi’s “Mitteleuropean” book catalogue and the theoretical discourse of that time, I would like to take a closer look at the mediation and resemantisation of “Mitteleuropa” in Italy as a category of imagination. I draw on the Habsburg myth (Magris), the selection-philosophy of “singular books” (“libri unici”, Bazlen), the concepts of places of memory (Nora) and the memory of Central Europe (Csáky) to explain the establishment of a world projection as a publishing subject and, based on Adelphi’s catalogue classification, ‘Central European literature’ as a branch on its own. I would also like to consider the mythical potential of “Mitteleuropa” as a lost or submerged (“versunken”) world, as well as the international resonance of this discourse before (with Kundera and Miłosz, among others) and after 1990. I also make use of the blurbs of various editions of Adelphi to sketch a “Central European mood” which, according to my hypothesis, should not only appeal to a new “wild” (cft. Wagenbach) readership, but also have shaped a lasting idea of an imaginary Central European geography in Italy.
Davide Gnoato is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. He is a recipient of the Marietta Blau Scholarship of the OeAD (Austria) and a former Junior Fellow at the ifk, Vienna (2023–2025). He has been recently a special research student at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice and the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on literary transfer and reception, Central Europe, modernity, decadence, dandyism, and pop culture in music and literature, with a particular interest in Japanese music and reception of Western pop phenomena. He is currently completing his dissertation, “The Adelphi Phenomenon: The Philosophy of the Singular Book and the Reception of ‘Mitteleuropa’ Literature in Italy”.