L'accademia ferma gli orologi: romanzo accademico e romanzo del lavoro

From the second half of 1970s to the end of 2000s, the romanzo accademico, the Italian version of the traditionally Anglophone campus novel, has usually portrayed mainly established professors, but recently a new generation of authors emerged, portraying the lives of doctoral students and precarious researchers. This change in perspective, accompanied by a sharpening of criticism directed at the institution, coincided with the hybridization of the romanzo accademico with various literary genres: from the industrial novel La cospirazione delle colombe (2011) by Vincenzo Latronico to coming-of-age novels such as La fine dell’altro mondo (2012) by Filippo D’Angelo or Elena Ferrante’s Storia del nuovo cognome (2012), and even the graphic novel Il segreto di Majorana (2015) by Francesca Riccioni and Silvia Rocchi. Moreover, recent attempts such as Il pieno di felicità (2019) by Cecilia Ghidotti, Raffaele Donnarumma’s La vita nascosta (2022), and Dario Ferrari’s La ricreazione è finita (2023) have been made to define the genre more precisely, contributing to its development as a subgenre of working class literature. The aim of this paper is to analyze some works from the last fifteen years in order to trace on one hand the portrayal of the dynamics that animate the academic field according to the studies of Bourdieu and Passeron – criteria for access, time management, mentor-student relationships, internal rivalries, etc. –, on the other hand the depiction of research activity as work.