This body of works is described as being formed of novels and other literary texts, which share various stylistic characteristics, thematic constants, and an underlying allegorical nature.
[citation needed] Over the next few days the writers proposed and discussed the expression in debates at other North American colleges, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, within the context of the programme of Comparative Media Studies directed by Henry Jenkins.
[5] In late 2008 Wu Ming put online a version of the Memorandum marked '2.0', or annotated and extended, with replies to some criticisms and closer examination of the more controversial points.
[citation needed] The Memorandum was intended as an "open suggestion of comparative reading, an album of notes to be borne in mind, remembered, used"[6] and suggests that attention should be paid to a group of works written in Italy over the past fifteen years (1993–2008), seeking unexpected similarities or, conversely, dissolving connections too often taken for granted[7] The Memorandum has also been described[8] as a literary manifesto, by virtue of the fact that it contains a classification.
These premisses concern historical and geographical specificities: this part of the memorandum describes in broad brushstrokes the social and cultural context in which the works are born, and to which explicit or allegorical references are made.
The seven characteristics identified by Wu Ming 1 are: To this list, with version 2.0 of the memorandum and interventions by other writers and academics,[15] were added thematic constants that may be found in NIE texts, for example the 'death of the founder': many books in the 'nebula' describe the consequences of the passing of a clan leader or founding father, a figure who represented a world that is now in crisis, or has actually constructed a world but has not prepared his descendants to manage the crisis it falls into.
Online or in the pages of some newspapers (such as L'Unità, La Repubblica, Liberazione and Il Manifesto) almost all the authors mentioned by Wu Ming 1 have taken a position on the subject.
In La Repubblica, Carlo Lucarelli has interpreted the memorandum as an invitation to Italian authors to take a greater interest in the dark sides of the country's national history, and has in turn exhorted them to move towards a 'new frontier that is not only physical (new environments, new worlds to create and explore) and it is not only narrative (new plots, new adventures, different montage techniques, themes and extreme emotions), but also stylistic (new words, new constructions) in [...] mutating novels.
One can resort to forms of adventure narrative, as long as the outcome is achieved: making people think, in a realistic or metaphorical way, about the collective perception of an alienated everyday.
[19] Marcello Fois (prominent novelist of a Sardinian Literary Spring[20]), presenting his own works in France, defined the New Italian Epic as the last development in a trend to recover popular literature, ignoring the diktats and prescriptions of the critics, a tendency begun in the nineties by certain authors (including those brought together in Group 13).
[22] Intervening in Il Manifesto, Tommaso Pincio voiced his perplexity about the expression 'unidentified narrative objects', at the same time interpreting the NIE memorandum as the signal of a conquered centrality of the novel form in Italian cultural production, after a long period during which critics had viewed it with suspicion.
[23] Later, interventions have been made in various forms and in various media by other writers, including Giuseppe Genna, Michela Murgia, Giulio Angioni,[24] Antonio Scurati, Vanni Santoni, Gregorio Magini and many more.
More like a GMO than a product with denomination of origin... it is an interesting cyberbook of literary theory [...] in this essay you can hear, palpitating, the need to draw mental maps between the books, pair up authors with greater or lesser amounts of judgement, create remarkable points to survey positions and routes in Italian publishing.
In January 2009 the Wu Ming collective used a phrase by Benedetti reported in the daily newspaper Libero ("[Il New Italian Epic] is nonsense.
In February–March 2009 Wu Ming 1 published online a two-point analysis of the 'rhetorical strategies' employed by detractors, entitled: "New Italian Epic: gut reactions".
In October 2008, at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies of the University of London a round table was held on NIE, in which the writers Wu Ming 1, Vanni Santoni and Gregorio Magini of the group Scrittura Industriale Collettiva took part, along with researchers and academics from various countries (including Monica Jansen, lecturer at Antwerp University and author of the book The Debate on Postmodernism in Italy[32]), who went on to form a research group into NIE.
In March 2010, a panel entitled "The New Italian Epic between Pulp and political intervention" was held at the 8th annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association, which took place at the University of California, Berkeley.
Timothy S. Murphy, How (Not) to Translate an Unidentified Narrative Object or a New Italian Epic, in: Garin Dowd e Natalia Rulyova (ed.