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Dialogare di sé, con sé. Discorsi diretti e voci nella ‘Vita’ alfieriana

Additional information

Authors
Type
Journal Article
Year
2014
Language
Italian
Abstract
Readers interested in the narrative techniques will notice the quite complete absence in Alfieri’s Vita – a work that has often been labelled as the first Italian novel of the 18th century – of any form of dialogue, one of the most typical features of novel writing. The resulting text is therefore apparently ‘deaf’ to all other voices but the author’s one. Moving from the analysis of the rare occurrences of direct speech and dialogue in the text, the article proceeds in several directions, investigating two possible models of the author’s self-writing: on the one side the autobiographical and memorialistic narrative, typical of the Italian and French tradition of the 18th century, and, on the other side, the historiographical writing (reaching back to the classical age), a genre considered by definition impermeable to subjectivity. Eventually, a third model will be suggested, focussing on Alfieri’s mise-en-scène of his interiority as the result of his arduous commitment to becoming a tragedy writer.
Journal
Stilistica e metrica italiana
Number
14
Start page number
67
End page number
93