Utopia in Late Modernity: Literary Critiques of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’

Abstract

Abstract Naples in the 1990s enjoyed an extraordinary period of urban and cultural renewal known as the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’. This article addresses two novels – Giuseppe Montesano’s Di questa vita menzognera (2003) and Ruggero Cappuccio’s Fuoco su Napoli (2010) – which alert us to the utopianism of the cultural and ‘symbolic politics’ of the Neapolitan Renaissance and its vulnerability to exploitation. Lending credence to the idea that utopian fantasies grow out of the societies to which they are a response, both works envisage post-apocalyptic events leading to the reconstruction of Naples as a theme park, on the part of organized crime. They interrogate the imbrication of the Neapolitan Renaissance with the criminalization of global capital and the populist politics of Berlusconi at the national level. In so doing, they exemplify Ruth Levitas’s distinction between utopia as product and utopia as process, while exploring utopia’s contemporary manifestation as postmodern pastiche or retrotopian romance.