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• Luigi Russo: the union of science and life

  10-19

  Andrea Manganaro

  Views:

  255

  In his work as a historian and literary critic, Luigi Russo considered literature not in the perspective of the limited disciplinary knowledge, but always tended to correlate it with wider aspects of reality, history, to “make history” rather than to “know how to read”, to always connect “science” and “life”, theory and practice, study and ethi-cal-political values, according to the teaching of Francesco De Sanctis, set out in the extraordinary Neapolitan prolusion of the same name of 1872, interpreted by Russo in the monograph 1928 Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana. The work of Luigi Russo, anti-authoritarian, anti-demagogic, anti-dictatorial, can still be a point of reference for those who care about the values of culture and the polis together.

• The "facts of Bronte" (1860) and a “monument” of literary realism: Libertà by Giovanni Verga

  60-72

  Andrea Manganaro

  Views:

  122

  Giovanni Verga’s short story Libertà has often been read as a historical source, and its alleged alterations of the historical events of 1860, the bloody revolt in the town of Bronte, on Mount Etna, and the repression carried out by Garibaldi’s troops led by Nino Bixio (the ‘facts of Bronte’) have been noted, even sharply, with the authority of Leonardo Sciascia. We propose here an interpretation of this short story as a literary “monument”, and not as a “document”, noting the immanent tension towards a “truth content” to which Verga’s realism aspires, with its narrative proxy, the renunciation of authorial judgement, the multiplicity of points of view, the friction that derives from their juxtaposition in the narrative also with respect to the perspectives of the readers, who are necessarily called upon to assume responsibility.