Bio
Sarah Bonciarelli (PhD University of Siena) is a language lector in the Italian studies section at UGent. She was a member of the MDRN research group of the University of Leuven (2011-2015) and professeur invité at the UCL Louvain (2019/2020; 2020/2021).
Among her most recent publications: “What can silence tell us. Centomila nessuno between Pirandello and Beckett” in Rivista di Estetica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2022; “Dai paesaggi su carta alle città scolpite. Il progetto artistico de Le città invisibili” in Calvino, Tabucchi, le voyage de la traduction, Thea Rimini ed., Presses Universitaire de Provence, 2022; “Dovrei andar vestito peggio, costruzione della favola biografica ne I Diari di Prezzolini” in Gentes. Rivista di Scienze Umane e sociali, 2021; Literature as Document. Generic Boundaries in 1930s Western Literature (with Anne Reverseau and Carmen van den Bergh (Leiden, Brill, 2019).
The Mute Parrot. Reflections on the Role of Sounds and Silences in Aldo Palazzeschi’s work
The parrot does not speak. People pass by, look at him, talk to him, whistle, but he does not react. He remains silent. We are speaking of the mute parrot imagined by Aldo Palazzeschi in I Cavalli bianchi (1905), this strange animal that escapes the laws of nature and its biological destiny and refuses to speak. In this paper, we deal with this and other parrots imagined by Palazzeschi in his works and argue how this symbolic figure can be considered a starting point to open up some specific approaches in the analysis on Palazzeschi’s Modernism. Despite being one of the authors of 20th century most attentive to sound, musical aspects of his writing and onomatopoeia, he chooses to stage a parrot that, through its silence, shirks social expectations and the role that is socially attributed to it – as will happen later with the vegetarian lion in Bestie del ‘900 (1951) – and imposes the reader a reflection on the concept of personal identity and its connection with biological and functional individuality. In the mute parrot we also find those signs of posthumanism that many studies (Ryan 2015, Braidotti 2013) have detected in other examples of modernist literature. These studies have shed new light on 19th- and 20th-century literature by stressing how, in modernist literature, humanity is defined through the encounter with the other or the non-human: The imagining of non-anthropocentric views of the world can properly be called ‘posthumanist’ in their attempts to decenter the human and move beyond humanist individualism and universality. Finally, we find in the figure of the mute parrot that quest for the individual’s right to originality and that emphasis and exaggeration of individual diversity as a cheerful sign of nature’s infinite variety, recently underlined by other scholars (Godioli 2015)