Bio
Michele Paragliola is a PhD student in Humanities and Technologies (literary curriculum) at Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples. At the same University, he is a tutor of the Master’s Degree Course in Digital Humanities and of the Master in Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine. His studies focus on some aspects of Saba’s poetry (the relationship between solitude and sociality in the Canzoniere) and the Montale’s poetry (the tree metaphors) and he has published essays on these topics in scientific magazines and volumes. He currently deals with the relationship between literature and places with particular attention to the islands of the Neapolitan archipelago (Capri, Ischia and Procida) and Narrative Illness (autopathographies) in contemporary Italian literature.
micheleparagliola1995@gmail.com
Saba’s Autobiographical Writing between Modernism and Antimodernism
On the geographical-cultural margins of the late nineteenth century, considered by contemporary critics a poetic voice distant from the prevailing hermetic line, Saba offers in many different aspects a unique case compared to “modern and twentieth-century” poetry (Mengaldo) and therefore less interesting (Gargiulo). His autobiographical writing in the Canzoniere, the best expression of the «anti-novecentista» line (Anceschi), link to the tradition on content and style, looked over only in the 1950s of the last century as a work that oscillates between anti-modernist and modernist characters (Debenedetti, Luperini). In fact, his autobiographical writing that aims the «clarity» (the first title of the Canzoniere) lend to simplistic interpretations that underlines its conservative character as opposed to the innovative one of the «pure and modernist» lyric. But, it’s also true that it already stood out in the 1920s (cfr. the rewriting of the Canzoniere 1921 and the collections Parole and Ultime cose) for a reconstitution of meaning through modernist characters of an epiphanic and allegorical type, distinctly analytic and freudian (according to Contini Saba is «psychoanalytic even before psychoanalysis»), which translate on the formal level in the segmentation of the verse, increasing value of the pauses, in the more lighning-fast nature of the analogy, in the shorter composition (Mengaldo). My intervention therefore analyses, also with the use of modern textual interrogation software, the «classicismo sui generis» of Saba (according to Montale) that distinguishes the dual character of Sabian’s autobiographical poetry and shows the oscillations between modernism and anti-modernism, one the most complex (Pasolini) and authoritative (Morante) voices of the Italian literary twentieth century.