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• «In piedi, guardando dal finestrino». Memoria, parola, corpo nell’immaginario ferroviario di Leonardo Sciascia

  73-84

  Andrea Schembari

  Views:

  40

  A disruptive and recurring image in Italian novels and novellas, starting from the mid-nineteenth century, the train assumes, in the work of Leonardo Sciascia, a peculiar function, not simply thematic. Linked to the indelible memory of the first journey of his childhood, the train soon becomes, for the writer from Racalmuto, a topos to resort to for the representation of some of the literary motifs dearest to him: the exercise of memory, the power of the word, the joy of bodies. Through the textual findings considered most significant, the contribution intends to offer a representative exemplification of the arguments proposed.

• The novel Libertà by Verga and the demythologization of Risorgimento rhetoric

  30-38

  Mario Cimini

  Views:

  297

  Giovanni Verga’s tale Libertà has often been object of multifaceted – and frequently discording –critical interpretations, being the most common readings those of who saw in it a clear bias for the Italian Risorgimento (despite its violent development), and those who read it as an expression of resilient skepticism by the author towards the same historic event. Leonardo Sciascia, for example, uses the term “mystification” to describe Verga’s attitude towards Bronte’s insurrection, at a time – 1860 – when Garibaldi was carrying out his well-known Expedition of the Thousand.

  The essay goes through all the noteworthy moments of this critical tradition, eventually deducting that it is by no means possible to draw firm assertions about Verga’s political ideology with the sole literary work as a point of reference. It argues instead that the author’s literary eminence must be seen in his outstanding ability to raise such a vast array of multilayered interpretations in the readers.

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

  60-72

  Andrea Manganaro

  Views:

  105

  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.