Make it Explicit: Documenting interpretations of literary fictions with conceptual formal models (MITE)

Programma di finanziamento: PNRR 2022

Ente finanziatore: MUR

Responsabile scientifico: Michele Paolini Paoletti

Ruolo UniMC: partner

Durata: 24 mesi

Literary texts are a fundamental component of cultural heritage. However, literary studies and criticism tend to be highly fragmented. For instance, the different approaches to criticism, each one embodying its own epistemological culture, only seldom interact to compare results or elaborate common methodologies. In addition, even when literature is approached by scholars from other fields, a prominent case being that of philosophers, there is scarce interaction between disciplines. This lack of cross-fertilization has a negative impact for both research and education, for even when similar challenges are identified, each community tackles them from what are perceived as contrasting and non-overlapping approaches. The core aim of this project is to propose a modeling framework allowing agents involved in interpretation practices to document their interpretations by getting profit from the methods for ontological analysis and formal modeling which are common in analytic philosophy and applied ontology. By putting literary scholars, critics, and students at the heart of the framework, the project aims at valorizing their practices by providing them with tool boxes supporting the documentation and comparison of interpretations, as well as by making explicit meta-information of interpretations like their sources, methods, promoted literary and cultural values, etc. To better frame the research scope, the project takes the study of (interpretations of) fictional entities (ficta), i.e. the fictional characters populating the worlds of literary texts, as a promising starting point. The choice of focusing on ficta depends on that, first, they are predominant within literary texts. Second, ficta are at the core of multiple studies, hence their analysis is fruitful for an interdisciplinary investigation. Third, ficta occupy a central role in almost every interpretation practice, from the most intuitive to the most complex and cultivated interpretations. In current research, ficta are often characterized with respect to either their authors' intentions or metaphysical positions of different sorts. Our goal is to conceptualize them with respect to interpreters in the criticaldiscourse. This will be done by means of case studies from Medieval Italian literature focused on the interpretations of some of the most stimulating female characters in Dante and Boccaccio. Our project is innovative in three main respects: first, for its theoretical and methodological aspiration to overcome certain epistemological barriers between analytical philosophy, hermeneutics, and critical discourse; second, because it proposes an ontological theory of ficta grounded on critical interpretation practices; third, because it sets up a modeling framework that can serve as the ground for a computer application (to be implemented in future developments of the project) to document and compare texts' interpretations by taking into account different critical approaches.