Progetto finanziato dal Fondo Nazionale Svizzero per la ricerca scientifica
inizio previsto: 1. marzo 2025
The «Arcipelago Ceresa» project is designed to employ the most innovative capabilities of the digital edition technology for the purpose of making available, recontextualize and give new value to the literary heritage of the Swiss-Italian writer Alice Ceresa (1923–2001), whose multifaceted works and experimental prose remains, despite her celebrity, largely unexplored. Polyglot and transnational, actively engaged in advocating for women’s rights, a forerunner in discussions of queer and gender issues, and courageously experimental, her remarkable contributions were expressed in a peculiar publishing strategy that has only begun to be clearly seen and investigated by critics in the last few decades. The overarching ambition of the project is not simply to fill a gap in the scholarly editions of Ceresa’s works but to explore her writings in the light of interdisciplinary research.
By providing a multimedia digital edition of selected unpublished, dispersed, and posthumous works, the project will reclaim and assemble new testimonies within a singular Open Access digital platform, allowing to develop new research perspectives. The four research subprojects connected to the edition will open up new critical standpoints within the Italian Studies, by investigating the role of language and translation in the shaping of literature that transcends national boundaries and by re-evaluating Ceresa’s anticipatory position that intertwines genre and gender deconstruction. «Arcipelago Ceresa» provides an innovative digital edition with multimedia components that responds to the demands of the distinct configuration of Ceresa’s work, whose transmission didn’t remain circumscribed within the manuscript and print culture. The edition – conceived in close collaboration with the Data Science Lab of the University of Berne and the Swiss Literature Archives – will therefore integrate radio readings of (partly unpublished) texts by Ceresa, produced by the Radiotelevisione Svizzera di lingua italiana (RSI) in the late 1970s. Within a corpus of different text types (i.e. fiction, theatre, essay), the edition will provide a large selection of dispersed texts and unpublished texts (embracing significant parts of a repeatedly announced but never completed novel trilogy) and posthumous writings (included the “Piccolo dizionario dell’inuguaglianza femminile”, in an expanded and enriched edition, with unpublished lemmas and the audio documents broadcasted by RSI in 1978).
The editorial endeavours will be accompanied by four subsidiary projects, each focusing on themes pertinent to the two groups involved: the équipe UniBE will study the multilingual dimension of Ceresa’s texts, starting with translated works or multilingual versions. Studies on plurilingualism and transnationality will deepen Ceresa’s experiences as a migrant and multilingual writer, reflecting on the cultural negotiations involved. The UZH group, on the other hand, will take up and deepen existing research on experimentalism and feminism in Ceresa’s work, innovatively combining them by conducting an examination of the deconstruction of literary genres as a way of liberation from the constraints of binary sexuality and gender normativity. This investigation will refer to contemporary philosophical perspectives on gender, decolonial theories and some anticipatory positions of the lesbian studies of the Seventies. «Arcipelago Ceresa» is bound to have a significant impact on several fronts. The digital edition will provide unprecedented access to a significant yet largely inaccessible corpus, paving the way for dissemination and research. It will serve as a model for examining intermedial impacts on textual editing, contribute to the international renown of a major Swiss archival collection, and support wide-ranging interdisciplinary research, in terms of literary experimentalism, genre, gender, multilingualism, and transnationality.
