La modernità letteraria. Rivista a cura della MOD, Società italiana per lo studio della modernità letteraria. 0003. 2010

Today it is up to Italian culture and literary education to redefine our modernity, in its hard-won maturity and worn-out traditionalism, its dependency on foreign countries and with its own unmistakable characteristics. The 19th and 20th centuries in Italy continue to await a balanced and all-encompassing focus that can illuminate its diverse aspects without losing sight of their harmonious cohesion. On closer examination, it is impossible to ignore the tools offered by the social sciences to research, and to integrate them with traditional resources of philological and rhetorical knowledge. It goes without saying that analyzing modernity juxta propria principia does not in the least challenge the great legacy of early Italian literature; nor does it imply a disavowal of our lasting debt to Greco-Latin classicism. But perhaps the best aspect of modernity is that it has room for everyone. The lay nature of the idea of literature, implicit in its genetic code, leads to an unbiased liberalization of models and professionally formalized literary modules without however restricting itself to the attitudes and habitual tastes of the purely literary. In literariness without dogmas it is up to the various groups of readers to select their favourite texts according to each specific literary interest. Also, it must be kept in mind that the most fertile innovations can also arise from the lowest levels to the highest. Naturally, the task remains to literary scholars of bringing order to the disorganized, chaotic flux of advanced ideas proposed by writers to readers. And it is for this reason that MOD, the Italian Society for the Study of Literary Modernity, now offers a journal that will gather studies concerning a domain that is reflected in its very name.