Homo Oeconomicus and the Limits of Storytelling: Italian Apocalyptic Fiction of the Long Downturn

Abstract

This paper focuses on three contemporary Italian novels that operate within the apocalyptic paradigm and voice a sense of collapsing reality that characterized Italy in the wake of the global financial crisis. Ruggero Cappuccio's Fuoco su Napoli (2010), Gianni Miraglia's Muori Milano muori! (2011), and Francesca Genti's La febbre (2011) represent worlds in which the disruption of daily life exposes the invisible conventions that make it possible. In shaping narratives in which their characters attempt to cope with the fact that their worlds are coming to a definitive end because of their relationship to profit, power, and spectacle, the authors articulate an underlying critique of the present socio-economic system and its ancillary effects. From this perspective, these novels highlight the ways in which the neoliberal economic system of the long downturn undermines the conditions that guarantee the future of social and biophysical life as we know it. I argue that the manipulation enacted by the authors in relation to established genre paradigms invites a rearrangement of values and of human relations with respect to homo oeconomicus, thus envisioning a new ethics as the pulsing core for activating a political shift and bringing about a new future.