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• Between description and re-enactment: fantasies of a return to the South in the short stories of Giovanni Verga

  Laura Lupo

  Views:

  195

  In his works, Giovanni Verga does not depict Sicily through an accurate description of reality, but through a mental representation of the same from the distant city of Milan, where he lives. Beyond the borders of Sicily, modernity devours characters, whose destiny is not described by Verga. He is the only one allowed to move in this space “di là del mare” (lit.“beyond the sea”), from which he observes “dall’altro lato del cannocchiale” (lit. “as from the other side of the telescope”) the “larve” (lit. larvae) that live in the island. The purpose of this article is to show how Fantasticheria, I dintorni di Milano, Di là del mare, and Passato! have as a common ground a process of recreation of Sicily as a place linked to a past that is never coming back, so the island is described from an idealized and nostalgic perspective. Modernity is indeed a condition as irreversible as death, which, in Passato!, appears as a ruthless conclusion of this process of reconstruction. 

• 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.

• "Locking in one's own troubles": the "code of closure" in Mastro-don Gesualdo

  47-59

  Luigi La Grua

  Views:

  180

  In Mastro-don Gesualdo the body and the gesture are the main mean through which Verga’s writing allows the «unveiling» of the characters’ inner life to the reader. This paper aims to describe how the characters of the novel, consistently with the social processes that Verga intends to represent, live a form of closure to communication that finds its most «exact» representation in silence and, concerning the body, in the pose of the turned shoulders.

• 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.