Literature 8.2

The contributions that follow derive from the papers presented at the Workshop “A partire dalla Sardegna: una diversa geografia letteraria”, (Cagliari, Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, 14-15 May 2015). These were later developed and re-elaborated by the individual authors.

This is Giulio Angioni’s report which he presented at the opening of our conference. Giulio, our dear friend and colleague, departed this world last January leaving an intellectual vacuum behind him that is not easy to fill, together with heartfelt regret in all those who were close to him and who had the chance to talk to him. Not only we do wish to remember his wisdom and erudition as an anthropologist, his original gaze on Sardinian reality and the precious scientific contributions he gave to us, but let us also recall his activity as a narrator and as an artist. This allowed him to describe and represent our land in all its problematic aspects: two activities which, as he says here, must necessarily be linked together.

In these pages, Giulio Angioni reviews the literary activity and production in Sardinia, and the dialectical, and sometimes contradictory, coexistence of two languages on the Island, both of which are also used in Literature. This paper then takes into account the literary work of Grazia Deledda who, in many ways, was the initiator of the “new” Sardinian literature. Indeed, she was almost an archetype for Sardinian narrators to come, as she introduced a modern approach in narrating Sardinia. Her reception was great in Sardinia, but above all in and outside Italy and the novels she set outside Sardinia were always a flop. This leads to a reflection on the relationship that Sardinian narrators (must) have with their own land, and on what the non-Sardinian reader expects from the narrators of Sardinia, namely, on the relationship between global and local.
[His friends on the Rhesis editorial staff]

The question of a Sardinian literature and of a literary language begins to appear in the 16^th century and is affirmed in the 18^th. The 19^th century shows a split, a schisis, in Sardinian intellectuality, which was divided between loyalty to the Sardinian national values and the new Italian nationality. This fracture is still unresolved, and also manifests itself in a diversified literary production: one in the Sardinian language, and another one in an Italian mixed with Sardinian, so typical today of Sardinian nouvelle vague. The two “tribes” often look at each other with mutual suspicion, without seeking a fruitful connection.

The proximity between southern Italy and Africa has generally been negatively associated to backwardness, poverty and barbarism. Recently, however, this perspective has been reversed in the aim of highlighting a common form of subordination and existence/resistance towards globalization in the global south. The analysis of two books by Sardinian writer Savina Dolores Massa, on the basis of elaborate concepts and tools in the field of postcolonial, cultural and subaltern studies, will allow us to understand how and why there is an association between Sardinians and Africans and what this implies.

In Mia figlia follia, Savina Dolores Massa examines the theme of diversity using a dynamic narrative and a powerful imagination which enable the writer to transcend the condition/notion of marginality. The novel draws on the constant re-definition and violation of logic and social norms. The work establishes ambiguity, excess, anarchy, primitivism, and non-conformist thinking as central narrative and esthetic categories.

In recent years, thanks to postcolonial studies, literature has represented Sardinian anthropology and culture in a different way. Overturning the Eurocentric perspective, which in the 19^th and 20^th centuries often denied cultural dignity to Sardinian specificity, some novels revealed the relations of domination and exploitation suffered by Sardinia, highlighting its postcolonial condition. In some significant cases, contemporary Sardinian narrative thus becomes, on the one hand, the clear expression of the awareness of power devices that have built a stereotyped and restrictive image of the island, a stereotype still alive today in the age of globalization. On the other, lies the attempt to deconstruct these devices by opposing them with a literary form of resistance.

This article aims to show the relevance of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reflections on subaltern classes through the analysis of his unorthodox reading of Gramsci’s writings and his development of the notion of “nazionale-popolare” (national-popular) theorized in The Prison Notebooks. The hypothesis I propose to demonstrate is that his interpretation, albeit philologically inaccurate and in contradiction with some assumptions of Marxism, contains the elements to redefine Gramsci’s theory of literature and to develop a new Marxist approach in the field of subaltern studies.

The spatial framework that operates in Antonella Anedda’s poetry generates a permanent short circuit in which intimate self-identity is split from external objective reality. Lacan’s topic concept of extimité allows us to make an in-depth analysis of Anedda’s peculiar textual patterns, as well as her writing processes, focusing on their relationship. Indeed, within the close connection between Self and Language, Anedda’s expressive isolated gesture shows us body-s and subject-s which become extime when they are united with her poetic creations.

What do we mean when we talk about nouvelle vague sarda? We need to go deeper into this literary phenomenon, acclaimed by the press, but whose boundaries are still unclear. The writers of the nouvelle vague sarda (such as Marcello Fois, Salvatore Niffoi, Michela Murgia, Milena Agus and Francesco Abate, just to list the big names), set nearly all their stories in Sardinia, preferably using crime fiction or noir genres, and a language bringing Italian and Sardinian together in different ways. But can we really talk about a single vague or even about something new? And what are the reasons behind the undeniable success Sardinian writers have achieved in the last fifteen years?

Gramsci approaches issues of culture and ethnic identity using the same tools modern anthropologists employ in evaluating process of modernization in the periphery of the Western world. This contribution contends that common sense, civil society, culture as the product of intellectual and – in this case – literary activity, are situated within a whole, complex and internally antagonistic way of life, with which they actively interact. Philology, as conceived by Gramsci and as it has been more recently resumed by Edward Said in his cultural studies, helps assessing how intellectuals, notwithstanding their contiguity with hegemonic formations, develop into autonomous groups, fostering innovative forms of struggle against a pervasive subalternity experienced throughout a globalized Southern world.

The present paper aims at reflecting on the dialectics between Sardinian and the Italian language in Benvenuto Lobina’s works (1914-1993). On the one hand, in the novel Po cantu Biddanoa (1987), this relationship results in a linguistic awareness, which goes hand in hand with a geographical realisation. On the other hand, Lobina’s literary parabola outlines a trajectory that will lead him to give up the Italian language in favour of Sardinian: the edition of two unreleased poems written in Italian (Tristezza sola and Drammatramonto) – considered missing till now – will be supplied and traced back to the young Lobina’s first poetical production, as a passionate experimenter fascinated by Futurism.

Sardinian identity just like other collective identities is formed through narrative acts. The creation of literary or non-literary narratives, focused on symbolic elements such as mythologized historical memory (epos), language (logos), landscape (topos), etc., falls within the dynamics of construction of regional and national identities. Since identity construction is constantly changing as a result of the cultural and historical context of reference, the self-narration of identity takes on different characteristics. Sardinia is a prime example of this. For nineteenth-century intellectuals, the period of the “Giudicati” was the golden age in terms of the formation of Sardinian collective identity, whereas more recently and still today, scholars consider the Nuragic age as the founding period, as shown by the examples given in this paper.

Le Livre de Sidrac is an encyclopaedic text written in Old French in the late thirteenth century. Its many Italian versions testify to its wide reception in Italy.
Following the authoress’s line of research on variations in the macrostructure of a corpus of manuscripts, this essay aims at classifying a group of codices, which have been written in the Tuscan and Po-Venetian areas, on the basis of a contrastive analysis of the narrative incipits.

This essay aims to highlight the peculiarity of the hagiographic texts, since they join their didactic requirements with the pleasure of entertainment and narration. Moreover, these texts reveal an extraordinary ability of transformation, so that the figure of the Saint appears to the reader as a present and existing figure. In particular, emphasis is placed on the important transformation of textual hagiography in the transition from Latin to the vernacular languages. In the Italian area, a special place is occupied by the unquestionable leading figure of Saint Francis of Assisi and of those who dealt with the task of writing his biography. In the second part of this contribution, there is a focus on the Considerazioni sulle stimmate (appendix to Fioretti di San Francesco d’Assisi), whose writing has to be included within a precise path that was accomplished by the Franciscan hagiography after the death of the founder. The descriptive power of the text and its theological content are not diminished by the use of vernacular Italian: on the contrary, the “fascination” – this element typical of hagiographic discourse – is in many ways strengthened

The Last September (1929) is a novel particularly significant in Bowen’s reflection on the definition of the female identity and on the role of the relationship with other women in determining a woman’s possibilities for self-determination. Starting from Marianne Hirsch’s analysis of mother-daughter plots, this contribution aims to illustrate the reasons for which the initial destabilizing role of the protagonist Lois against the conservatism of the family transforms, in the end, into passivity and subordination. This passage, following both Hirsch and Irigaray’s thought, is due to two factors: the removal of the protagonist’s origins, especially those relating to her mother, and the impossibility of a female genealogy for her surrogate mother and other women belonging to a patriarchal value system.

After having thoroughly reviewed (La scomparsa dell’umanità, «Il Giorno», 2 March 1977) Guido Morselli’s brilliant and visionary novel Dissipatio H.G. (Milan, Adelphi, 1973), Antonio Porta publishes his prophetic Il re del magazzino (Milan, Mondadori, 1978). Notwithstanding some minor differences, there are so many similarities between these two books that they can be considered elements of a diptych. Indeed, both are set in a time in which the earth has been turned into a desert by a mysterious event: just with a whimper, without bursts or explosions, humans have disappeared. The only survivor tries his best to cope with this catastrophe and starts to write as a means of finding solace and to preserve some memories of what the world used to be. But perhaps, after all, life on earth without humans is not so bad. This research aims at detecting persisting forms of images and differences between these novels, focusing on their respective representations of apocalypse. When apocalypse is deprived of any teleological intent, it assumes the same value as an epiphany. Framed within such a dystopic perspective, both Morselli’s and Porta’s works express their judgement against a present which is also our present.