L’interprete fragile: gli studi umanistici al tempo dei trigger warnings

In the US, recent disputes about the literary canon are sometimes seen as a continuation of the culture wars that inflamed the last decades of the 20th century. There is however a crucial difference: contemporary debates are no longer propelled by scholars and intellectuals. Thanks to the impact of social media activism, it is now up to students to inspire new protocols and priorities, such as the possibility to be excused from reading texts or authors that could trigger traumatic memories. This essay argues that the compliance with which many American universities have embraced these demands should be examined within the field of institutional development that Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. The dissemination of concepts like trigger warning and safe space is thus analyzed as a downstream effect of infocracy, a digital information regime in- compatible with the discursive expression of dissent which is essential to a democratic society.