Massimiliano Bampi (UniTn-Dipartimento di Lettere), Icelandic sagas and cultural memory

Over the last two decades, the Old Norse sagas have increasingly been examined within the framework of cultural memory. In this avenue of research, attention has been drawn to the sagas as literary artefacts that forge links with the past, depicting it as a blend of historical fact and artistic invention. In this talk, I will discuss some examples of how the sagas can be studied as bearers of cultural memory.

Massimiliano Bampi is Professor of Germanic Philology at the Department of Humanities, University of Trento. His research focuses on medieval Scandinavian literatures and Middle High German courtly literature. In these areas, he has authored numerous volumes and articles focusing on:

• the role of translation in shaping the Scandinavian literary systems, as well as how translated texts are reworked and adapted within the target culture;
   
• the definition of saga genres in both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, particularly focusing on the dynamics of generic hybridisation in the 14th and 15th centuries;
   
• intertextual dynamics in late medieval multi-text manuscripts;
   
• the Middle High German Minnesang and höfische Epik, especially Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm and Parzival.

Thomas Van de Putte (King’s College London), Distance and the Holocaust. A Micro-Study of Historicism for Lay People

What happens when Holocaust historians leave their academic bubble and start interacting with laypeople? In this presentation, I discuss practices and discourses of historical distance and their effects on vernacular understandings of the Holocaust among white, middle-class Belgians. The presentation comprises findings from my forthcoming book, Distance and the Holocaust, which describes and explains how historians, in interactions with laypeople, strip the Holocaust off its moral meaning and emotional load, narrate it as a ‘system’, and use sick Holocaust humor as distancing strategy.

A detailed interactional analysis and thick ethnographic description demonstrate how the temporal, moral and emotional distancing practices reenforce the lay moralities and political subjectivities of the white middle-class. This comes with (mostly unintended) consequences. Distanced approaches to the Holocaust in non-academic environments reduce empathy for victims and survivors, normalize violence, disconnect the meaning of the Holocaust from contemporary conflict, and re-activate stereotypes about groups who employ more ‘close’ approaches to the Holocaust.

Thomas Van de Putte is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. He works on questions of cultural and collective Holocaust memory, combining perspectives from sociology, linguistics and cultural studies. Thomas worked previously at the Université Catholique de Louvain and the University of Trento. His work is published in the most prominent journals of memory studies, Holocaust studies and narrative studies. He published his first monograph, Contemporary Auschwitz/Oświęcim: An Interactional, Synchronic Approach to Collective Memory, in 2021 with Routledge. Thomas’ second monograph, Outsourcing the European Past. An Interscalar Study of Memory and Morality, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024.