Regenerating Community, Territory, Voices

The two volumes collect many of the papers presented and discussed in the XXV AIA Conference (15-17 September 2011) hosted at the temporary location of the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia in Bazzano, some kilometres away from the earthquake city of L’Aquila. Also in their written form, every single keynote lecture, paper and/or poster illustrating the multiple relations between traumatic events of distant and recent pasts and the urge to ‘start again’, to reconstruct, re-formulate and reshape discursive spaces are perfectly resonant with the ‘regeneration’ it was hoped could soon happen to the community, territory, and voices of L’Aquila. The literary, cultural and linguistic analyses collected here with their strong emphases on the processes of renewing, re-telling and re-writing find their echoes in the devastated space of the territory and the interrupted or wounded lives of its inhabitants, at the same time offering possible models and paths towards regeneration.