Italian Theory and Criticism 2. Twentieth Century

The history of Italian literary theory and criticism in the twentieth century can be written, for the pre-World War II period especially, as a series of attempts to grasp and develop, or to critique and overcome, the thought and influence of (1866-1952). Although he hated and seldom used the word, the "structure" of Croce's immanent Spirit gave it impressive range and legitimizing power. In a way, it can be said that he adapted G. W. F. Hegel to : stop the Absolute Spirit from its spiraling through history and rest it on a fixed, "olympic" architecture, balancing it atop four basic categories, namely, the aesthetic, the logical, the economic and ethical, and the historical. This also permitted the adaptation of a dualist scheme: art and were the idealized, pure disciplines of which the economic, the pragmatic, the lived everydayness that go into the making of history were but the concrete aspect and evidence. Croce's fundamental aesthetic principles can be summarized as follows: art is an autonomous spiritual category; it falls under the sphere of theory; it is constituted by images and intuitions uncontaminated by intellectual, moral, practical, or material concerns. In other words, art does not distinguish, is not analytical, and cannot be philosophical, being pure fantasy. In the work of art, intuition and expression coincide. But this does not mean that Croce's aesthetic was irreducibly abstract, for as an erudite historian he placed great importance on concrete philological research and documentation, and he was a thoroughly militant critic. The polemic over verism, which held that art had to attain a maximum level of impersonality, reaching a sort of perfect mimesis with the unfolding of everyday reality, compelled Croce to consider whether, on the contrary, it was art that was necessarily personal, unique, the expression of one single individual's emotion or vision, and as such in tune with a representation of a pure form or spirit. In this view, naturalistic and realistic writing tend to lose aesthetic power and consistency, and it is lyric poetry that is enthroned as queen of the arts, Euterpe replacing Calliope. Croce studied most intensively the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, times during which the arts both raised the tension of individual expression and self-assertiveness and also introduced a more psychological time scale. During these centuries we see the emergence of subjectivity as it attempts to be more scientific and secular. But the Grund is: there is one unrepeatable human life, with its own specific, unique voice. In the Logic (1909) Croce gives a fuller exposition of his epistemology: thought and knowledge can in fact be linked, but the "method" of reasoning, the discourse of interpretation, proceeds by artfully written syllogisms. Philosophy explains art, phenomena, indeed reality itself, by using concepts that can be organized according to the laws of induction and deduction. Yet philosophy is not reality. In the later, more readable version of 1912, the Breviario di estetica, Croce reiterates that art is an a priori synthesis of feeling (sentimento) and intuition that has turned into a full, complete representation. From this brief sketch of the premises, we expect several corollaries to follow. There is no "content" to look for in an artwork. Art expresses the sentiments of its author. Poets cannot be compared, as each is unique. Translation is impossible; it is only a pedagogical necessity. The responsibility of the interpreter is to capture "the mood or state of being (stato d'animo) of its author." Finally, since all arts aspire to the purity of the lyrical, understood as the vox anima, the question arises whether it is at all possible to write literary history or a history of literature, for in the background Clio demands to be heard. The problem is the following: if we try to write a literary history, we are doing no more than tracing a map that is fundamentally conceptual, a philosophical enterprise, and we would be treating individual works of art as if they were laboratory objects or logical constructs. This has no bearing on aesthetics, for it is a logical problem; in principle we should not even call it literary history, but the philosophy of art, as the aesthetic category is one and universal. As a result, Croce would only write "monographs." But history, as it turns out, is of the four probably the most problematic cornerstone in Croce's edifice of Spirit. In Croce's thought and in that of three generations of scholars, critics, and historians, the notion and understanding of history certainly underwent the greatest amount of development, in a sense forcing Croce to make occasional modifications to his aesthetic in order to be coherent. It must be remembered that the aristocratic, secular liberalism that underlies his thought was badly shaken by World War I, then a decade later again by the rise of . In the early stages, history was identified with aesthetics, insofar as what can represent a concrete individual person is a pure form. In this conception, not only distinctions such as those between what is real and what is not are illogical; time and space themselves are thought to be incidental, contingent: they are "ingredients" of Spirit, Croce argued, and not "ordering" principles. There can be no history of the expressions of Spirit, because history is spirit in the making. By the 1920s Croce's absolute idealism identified history with the philosophy of history. In the 1930s this was further elaborated into an even broader ontology wherein historicism became the truth of humanism, serving as the foundation of culture, legitimizing its claim to being human, and, finally, motivating the claim that history is the need of and search for freedom. But the fundamental separation between the two categories, between that of art or the aesthetic and that of thought or the logical (or scientific), remained. It could only be bridged by a third faculty, that of judgment. To even begin to think about what history is one must acknowledge the necessity of linking spirit to individual, or as Croce states in the first paragraph of the 1902 Aesthetics, fantasy and intellect, the individual object with the universal one, the single things and the relations among them. As a result, in evaluating a work of art we undertake two separate and yet interconnected pursuits: we reconstruct the personality of the author, and we characterize the "moment" in which the work happened in terms of whether it achieved the a priori synthesis of intuition and expression. Insofar as art is a special event, and the expression of human genius, we do a critique of taste. The fact that the earlier, pivotal notion of art as individual lyrical expression was later altered to become art as cosmic expression only proves that history was to become the necessary common ground to both art and philosophy. In the later stages of Croce's thought, in short, the poem expresses no longer solely an individual contingent reality but an entire universe. According to Mario Puppo (La critica letteraria del novecento, 1985), the monographic conception of history is not the exasperated manifestation of an individualistic notion of the work of art, celebrating the author as model or authority against some hierarchy, but rather, and almost to the contrary, historiographical research focused on the work itself, on its unity and uniqueness. Critical judgment for Croce is, at one and the same time, philosophical (because it seeks to establish an intellectual mediation), aesthetic (because it speaks to the values of the work), and historical (because it is the locus where the two coincide). And yet, owing to his conception of spirit, Croce ultimately believed that there was no substantial difference between the critic and the artist, for what obtains at most is a distinction of degree, not of originality and authenticity. One may overhear here echoes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even Oscar Wilde, as well as an uncanny hermeneutic predisposition. Through his journal La Critica, begun in 1903, and subsequently through the industrious editorship of authors from abroad as well as from less-traveled corners of the Italian cultural grid, Croce intervened in all sectors of critical and theoretical discourse. Marxism and sociology were banned early on from any aesthetic and literary evaluation, so much so that there later developed a sort of "leftist idealism" or "idealistic materialism." This can be perceived already in and will be variously developed in the work of literary historians such as Natalino Sapegno (whose "comment" to The Divine Comedy has been studied in Italian high schools for over 40 years) and, since the 1960s, Giuseppe Petronio. Idealist-historicist principles underlie also the crucial and influential work of the Indo- European linguist Giacomo Devoto, whose criticism did have the advantage of focusing on the parole, although the background assumption concerning the langue was that it consisted of four aspects, the literary or controlled, the habitual, the expressive, and the technical (Studi di stilistica, 1950). This reproduces Croce's later scheme in La poesia (1936), wherein artistic expression is said to be--or is interpretable according to the categories--sentimental or immediate, poetic, prosastic, and oratorical. Devoto's criticism and linguistics pulled more toward Karl Vossler and Leo Spitzer, very important interlocutors on the Italian scene, than toward Ferdinand de Saussure, for whose influence we must wait until the 1950s. On the same horizon we find the stylistic contributions of Cesare De Lollis and, later, Aldo Schiaffini. These critics adapted the Crocean paradigm to account for aspects that had been left undetermined and therefore dangling. Although in different ways, both sought to explain also the meaning of "tradition." De Lollis explored how "passions" go into the making of the work of art (though, strictly speaking, he used no psychological metalanguage), suggesting that the purpose of literary study is not to (re)exhume a text for its own sake but rather to respond to it in a general way, keeping in sight the individual workings of a text in relation to any and all possible connections with other cultures and writers. Moreover, when doing criticism, we seek not only the "manner" or the how of our reading, which is a mediating factor, but also the "purpose" or the why of the investigation, which is an ontological consideration. Schiaffini instead sought the "fusion" between the inherited literary patrimony and the poem itself. The post-World War II stylistic criticism of Mario Fubini (Critica e poesia, 1956) can also be read in this light. Other versions or motivated rejections of Crocean thought came from Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Adriano Tilgher, and Renato Serra, all of whom were, strictly speaking, aestheticians or what would later be called cultural critics rather than philologists or literary historians. Serra in particular has been rehabilitated most recently by Ezio Raimondi and others for his approach to the text, which borders on what would come to be called "reading." But by and large, these critics cannot be understood outside the Crocean horizon. Art has no real purpose besides that of becoming itself, Croce had decreed; it does not relate to empirical reality, neither ontologically nor cognitively. Its pure state is by definition unrelated to anything, including the materials that went into it. This blocked out large areas of culture, experimentation, and all avant-garde art. Positivistic philology in the tradition of Adolfo Bartoli at the end of the nineteenth century and Vittorio Rossi at the beginning of the twentieth was strongly opposed to these dogmatic principles, but the historicist-idealist credo penetrated academia nevertheless. According to Giuseppe Petronio (Teorie e realtà della storiografia italiana, 1981, xlix), one can follow the rising influence and hegemony of an abstracting or "totalitarian idealism" (a phrase used in Borgese's 1913 reaction to Croce when the former took over the editorship of La cultura) by reading sequentially the several books titled History of adopted in the formative, pre-university curricula written by G. A. Cesareo (1908), Eugenio Donadoni (1923), Attilio Momigliano (1933-35), Natalino Sapegno (1936-47), Mario Sansone (1938), and Francesco Flora (1940). On another front, that of literary genres, criticism made little progress, as genres were condemned theoretically by Croce. Naturalism was seen as too obviously grounded upon a logical or conceptual framework or nonaesthetic principle, and this grounding prevented it from becoming pure individual coincidence of expression and intuition. "Decadentism" was interpreted as the crisis of dissociation and close to art for art's sake. The historical avant-gardes, beginning with the scapigliatura and on through futurism and its epigones, were not even allowed within shouting distance of the pantheon of Poetry. Croce, moreover, is responsible for revaluing and relaunching the critical method of Francesco De Sanctis, to whom in fact most of the above-mentioned critics later also turned in various guises. But in Croce's version the importance of De Sanctis lies primarily in the latter's having thematized the problem of history through literAture, which he did by proposing an aesthetic of literature as made up of individual forms of a pure form that is somehow also capable of being dynamic, of "progressing" through factual historical time. But after fleshing most of Hegel out of the greatest nineteenth-century Italian critic, Croce reiterated that the work of art was autogenetic and absolutely individual; thus it was the passion, the commitment, and the notion of pure form in De Sanctis that remained of value, not his reading of Italian literary history. Against De Sanctis, Croce argued that it was mistaken to read the history of Italian literature as saying anything about 's concrete development in other areas, because art is art; it does not matter whether it is upper- or lower-class, Italian or non-Italian, political or moral or scientific. As a matter of fact, extreme emphasis on "content" is anathema to pure expression and ultimately irrelevant to critical evaluation. "Back to De Sanctis" was also in part the call to arms of one of the most important critics who came to prominence in the period between the two World Wars, Luigi Russo (Problemi di metodo critico, 1950). Sensitive to the value-oriented and yet formal readings of a Giosuè Carducci, and trained at the school of the great scholar Michele Barbi (see, e.g., his La nuova filologia e l'edizione dei nostri scrittori da Dante a Manzoni, 1938, reprint, 1977), Russo gave more relevance to context, to the lived experience somehow referred to in the work, as well as to the specificity of the literary phenomenon. His readings rejected the use and imposition of any one method, and he stayed away from closed unitary ideologies. His approach is more historical and less aesthetic than Croce's, as it points toward what might be called a genealogy of effects, and ultimately discloses an intentional and/or ethical finality of the work that paved the way for the (re)discovery of poetics as an integral element of interpretation. Criticism is understood here as a dialectical activity in which the poem and what is being said about the poem, the many poetics that grow around it, interact and can be reciprocally enlightening. By becoming a "poetics," criticism cannot be made absolutely "systematic" or, worse, "universal," insofar as each reading was for Russo essentially an experiment, a hypothesis, and a metacritical exercise (La critica letteraria contemporanea, 1967, 643), as well as a conscientious intervention in the cultural debate. Russo's Croceanism was leftist, so to speak, somewhat closer to Gramsci's, for he ultimately questioned not the theory but the method, not the aesthetic principles per se but the actual reading, the use of historical information, and the notion of what constitutes judgment. For Gramsci, who admired and respected Croce's thought, interpretation must take place in the context of ideological struggle and in terms of the role and function of the critic as crucial cultural mediator. Thus a break in Croce's circle is effected. Likewise Russo, who also shared most of Croce's tenets on art, breaks through the fiction of pure philosophy: interpretation is always impure, he argues, it is intrinsically unstable, as it is also in part a self-clarification set in motion by the complex and uncanny emergence of those "flowers," the artworks, that grow in the "hecatomb of history." In the mid-1930s the notion of poetics emerges as a major concept for literary theory and aesthetic interpretation. Besides that of Russo, we can identify at least three influential versions. First we have Walter Binni, whose La poetica del decadentismo (1936) valorizes the literary context, including the author's own writings on art, and is predisposed to a social role of art while staying away from the sociology of art. Second is the final map of Croce's system, La poesia (1936), which while still holding pure poetry to be the "mother tongue," a "conversation with God," and an eternal and necessary spiritual category now introduces a new category, namely, that of literature, understood as "one aspect of civilization and education, similar to courtesy and etiquette," a civilizing institution, a mentor and a force, a "conversation with men." The difference between poetry and literature (i.e., prose) foreshadows many post-World War II debates on the status of poetry vis-à-vis the other verbal arts, especially in Structuralism and Hermeneutics. At this point comes the first philosophically informed alternative to Crocean interpretation, and the third version of poetics, Luciano Anceschi's Autonomia ed eteronomia dell'arte (1936, reprint, 1976), which proposes a phenomenological aesthetic and methodology capable of reading the shifts and effects of the between thought and art, theory and praxis, art as social and historical and art as autonomous and eternal. In this book one also finds the seeds of what in later years Anceschi will develop as the phenomenology of poetics (see his Le istituzioni della poesia, 1968, and Le poetiche del novecento in Italia, 1974). From this perspective, the ideas contained in a work are an integral and key aspect for its understanding, as are those expressed in a "critical" mode, as when, for example, an artist jots down notes on how to proceed with a given work in progress. Anceschi thus introduces terms such as "implicit" and "explicit poetics" when considering the work; on the interpreter's side, notions such as the horizon of comprehension and the referents of signification calibrate the assessments. On this terrain, moreover, Anceschi develops the notion of "institution(s) of criticism," which can be thought of as stylemes, representative metaphors, or the tenets of a school or movement and which create, for critic and artist alike, a common field of references, a more localized or regional ontology, or a recognizable historical horizon. With the founding of his journal Il verri in 1956, Anceschi also spurred the birth in the early 1960s of the last true avant-gardes in Italy, the Novissimi for poetry and Gruppo 63 for prose. Finally, mention should be made, for the period between 1920 and 1940, of Massimo Bontempelli's novecentismo, which argued for a practical, professional approach to the writing arts, going so far as to advocate unionization independent of ideological and aesthetic preferences, in order to reach and respond to a real and contemporary public, not one idealized or situated in the deep past (L'avventura novecentista, 1974). In the post-World War II period we can perceive in the culture as a whole a conceptual shift from the theoretical to the methodical and to praxis, from metaphysics to epistemology, so to speak. The 1950s were marked by the explosion of the long-suppressed Marxist verb, the issues of realism, of commitment, of being able to finally reach the people, the new commodified urban mass. But these years were also marked by the frenetic activity of "importing" the new metalanguages from the rest of Europe and elsewhere that 20 years of fascism had more or less successfully kept out of the country. Practitioners of the Italian version of Stilkritik and historical linguistics, such as Benvenuto Terracini (Analisi stilistica: Teoria, storia, problemi, 1966), Domenico De Robertis, and Gianfranco Contini (Varianti e altra linguistica [1938-1968], 1979), were quick to school themselves in the new structural linguistics and were, moreover, open to the various structuralisms, not only the more glorified one from Paris but, even before that, those from the schools of Moscow, Prague, Copenhagen, and later Tartu, as well as to American figures such as Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Charles Morris, and Noam Chomsky (see also Moscow-Tartu School and Prague School Structuralism). Contini in particular developed the "critique of variants," which opened up inquiry to the process of text construction, amplifying and fine-tuning both the philological responsibility of the critic and the idealistic and nominalist premises of his own aesthetic. The 1960s were witness to a true "structuralist decade," and we can point to the work of Cesare Segre (Semiotica filologica, 1979), Maria Corti (Principi della comunicazione letteraria, 1976; Introduction to Literary Semiotics, 1978; La felicità mentale, 1983), and d'Arco Silvio Avalle (Principi di critica testuale, 1972) for crucial contributions, especially at the level of textual analyses. In the 1970s one can refer to Gianluigi Beccaria, Stefano Agosti (Il testo poetico, 1972), and Angelo Marchese (Metodi e prove strutturali, 1974) for representative cases of a Roman Jakobson-inspired criticism that relies on Jakobson's five functions of language. Poetry is here understood as simply one of the functions that can be emphasized during the transmission of the message, in short, poetry as écart from a given code or paradigm, fleshing out the work of all extratextual referents connected with Jakobson's conative, phatic, metalinguistic, and emotive aspects. Segre in particular has consistently and influentially held that a literary history as such is impossible, that what we can aspire to is a history of literary techniques focused on structure, a mapping of the shifts in literariness, and accounts of the strategies of communication within reformulated Saussurean premises (Time and Structure, 1983). One major difficulty of this position is that it does not emphasize the reader, or the receiver of the message. However, in his latest work Segre has altered his views somewhat in order to vindicate the crucial nature of the phenomenology of the reading act, integrating insights from Russian semiotics concerning literature as a "field" and as "model of the world" (Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text, 1988). In the 1980s a newer generation of critics, including Costanzo di Gerolamo and Franco Brioschi (see their Elementi di teoria letteraria, 1984) and in particular Marcello Pagnini, have instead elaborated the pragmatic aspect of text construction and reception, sensitive to insights coming from sociology, Semiotics, and Rezeptionsaesthetik (see Reception Theory); in a way they stand for what is most fruitful and interesting at the moment. Semiotic perspectives were introduced in Italy in the 1950s primarily by logicians and philosophers of language. Among them was Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, who edited, translated, and wrote a book on Charles Morris in 1957. Rossi-Landi would subsequently call on semiotics to answer questions concerning the procedures, analogies, and transactions of ideology and economics. Among the insights useful to literary study is the homological method employed to read economics in linguistic terms and to consider sign behavior as subject to the processes of production, exchange, and consumption much as an economic entity is. In this perspective, stock phrases or "ordinary language" can become also metacritical, and "common speech" is in fact a technical term and conceptual referent in Rossi-Landi's work (Between Signs and Non-Signs, 1992). The main influence for structuralism and semiotics alike, however, came through the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the semiology of Roland Barthes. Among the fruits of such an encounter were the introduction of Narratology, 's early writings on mystery novels and mass culture, and much-needed scientific rigor in literary analysis. By 1975, however, Eco had overcome the aporias and abstractions of a semiology based on the Saussurean model and shifted to a more Aristotelian model, counterpoising communication and signification, relating the possibilities of the code to the modes of sign production, and finally making , Charles Sanders Peirce, and Charles Morris the three main modern precursors of the discipline. Semiotics now treated art as an "ideolect" and aspired to become the general science of culture. In the 1980s Italian semiotics shifted the emphasis to sign reception, moving from the text qua text to the codes of the receiver, and to the systems of signs that preexist sign production. In this area one ought to look at the work of Gianfranco Bettetini (Produzione del senso e messa in scena, 1975), Alberto Abruzzese, Mauro Wolf, Omar Calabrese, Ugo Volli, Patrizia Magli, Augusto Ponzio, and Paolo Fabbri. Yet while semiotics became the adopted methodology in areas such as cinema studies (see Film Theory), architecture, mass media studies, and so on, in literary study it was less successful than structuralism (where at most, especially in the case of the students of Segre and Corti, the two are combined). Marxist thought did not really enter the literary scene until the late 1940s, when circulation of leftist literature was again permitted, Antonio Gramsci's Notebooks were published, and Georg Lukács was translated. Although he also believed in the autonomy of art, Gramsci paid much more attention to the interpretations given to art in specific periods or conditions, in this being true to his materialist conception of history. In this view, the critics, or more broadly the "intellectuals," assume the status of a social category that is necessarily involved in all stages of cultural exchange. Intellectuals are the bearers of culture and shapers of education and therefore are responsible for the culture's appropriate mediation and transmission of values. Because there is always the danger that the intellectual will turn into a spokesperson for this or that regime or group, the true critical objective is to correlate functionally the historical and epistemological values of the aesthetic artifact with the specific aspects of its form, that is, with the expressive instruments through which it came to be realized and mediated and is uniquely distinguishable. Apart from the ideological-political call to "commitment"--which made for lively debates among members of the various currents from the mid-1950s through the 1970s--we have here the theoretical premises for a Marxist aesthetic and criticism that was most fully developed by Galvano Della Volpe in his Critica del gusto (1960, 3d ed., 1966, Critique of Taste). In his view, it is form that leads to thought, as it arises from the problem of the construction of meaning; content, in contrast, leads us back to the image, as it arises from the cognitivesensorial domain. Diametrically opposite to Croce's aesthetic and ontology, Della Volpe was also moving away from the influential Lukácsian current, which in its dualistic premises and specular realism still prevented a fuller appreciation of the avant-garde and such writers as , Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. Della Volpe successfully integrated Marxism with structuralism and contributed to broadening the horizons of both. In fact, the concrete historical situations of both writer and reader require that we consider reference, effect, and the sphere of interaction. Della Volpe argued that whether we deal with prose, poetry, or dialogue, language is the common denominator of all human undertaking. We can therefore distinguish between literary discourse, which is polysemous and, like all art, subject to subsequent interpretations; scientific discourse, which is univocal and universal, perfectly translatable (think of formulas); and common speech, which is ambiguous and unstable, even the most habitual environment requiring during communication the constant monitoring of a host of other factors in order to determine for each utterance in what sense a given expression is to be understood. This criticism, which was more influential at the theoretical than at the practical level, places a premium on semantics, on the meanings the artistic forms generate, and finally on the references variously coded or interspersed in a work, its "organic contextuality." Thus poetry can no longer be conveniently suspended in the realm of a pure expression devoid of ideas; rather, it participates actively in the interpretation and construction of values. The opposition between art and science is misconstrued, according to Della Volpe. Both require imagination, thought, and processes of realization; the means of expression, the specific language used, changes, but the truth content is the same if the truth be one. Among the most original and influential Marxist critics are Alberto Asor Rosa (Scrittori e popolo, 1964), Carlo Salinari (La questione del realismo, 1960), Gianni Scalia (Critica, letteratura e ideologia, 1968), Edoardo Sanguineti (Ideologia e linguaggio, 1970), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Empirismo eretico, 1972, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, 1988; and Passione e ideologia, 1960), Franco Fortini (Verifica dei poteri, 1965), and Romano Luperini (Il Novecento, vol. 2, 1982). Asor Rosa in particular has been engaged in demystifying Gramsci's notion of popular (or populist) literature and in conceiving of Italian literary history in terms of two major blocks, one extending from the origins to the seventeenth century and another, triggered by the rise of bourgeois culture, capitalism, and the concomitant decline of Italian society in Europe, from the seventeenth century on (see Letteratura italiana, ed. Asor Rosa, 9 vols., 1982-87). This by way of explaining the feeling of "unrelatedness" or "non-appurtenance" in much modern Italian literature. Psychological and Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism arrived relatively late on the scene, but by the mid-1960s both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan were amply discussed and tested on specific texts. Among the critics who practiced a structuralist literary psychoanalysis, often on non-Italian texts, are Michel David (La psicanalisi nella cultura italiana, 1966), Francesco Orlando (Lettura freudiana della "Phèdre" and Per una teoria freudiana della letteratura, 1971, 1973, Toward a Freudian Theory of Literature, trans. Charmaine Lee, 1978), Giuliano Gramigna, Mario Lavagetto, and Stefano Agosti (Modelli psicoanalitici e teorie del testo, 1987). Critics who developed a literary-philosophical perspective on Freudian thought include the early Franco Rella and Giuseppe Sertoli. Perhaps more important and more subterranean has been the influence, especially in the 1950s, of C. G. Jung, as we perceive in the criticism of Giacomo Debenedetti (Il romanzo italiano, 1971), Furio Jesi (Letteratura e mito, 1968), and the young Edoardo Sanguineti (see Archetypal Theory and Criticism). Despite the activity of several collectives that published their own journals, such as dwf, memoria, and most recently diotima, Italian Feminist Theory and Criticism never really took off, in the sense that it never gained a strong foothold in the universities. Well informed and constantly translating their French and American counterparts, Italian feminist critics have suffered from too close association with specific political or theoretical currents or were mired in broader social problems. In the Italian panorama the sociology of literature is one thing, studied by sociologists and not terribly empirical, and the sociology of criticism is another, a terrain guarded by educators, editors, and publishers. "Sociological criticism" has been a primary pursuit of Marxists of all stripes, and after Gramsci and Lukács we perceive, especially through the 1960s and into the 1970s, the growing relevance of Lucien Goldmann, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School. On another front, as in the work of Alberto Abruzzese, the social aspect of literature has been studied with reference to other sociosemiotic systems, such as television, newspapers, and special print events. On yet a third front, there have been many fine studies on the "influence" a particular work or author has had on the ideas and taste of his or her time and society, as well as on the politics of publishing, for instance, by Gianpaolo Vené, Walter Pedullà (La letteratura del benessere, 1973; L'estrema funzione, 1975), and Gian Carlo Ferretti (Letteratura e ideologia, 1964; Il mercato delle lettere, 1979). Although sociological criticism has been interested in the aesthetics of reception and in the work of Hans Robert Jauss in particular (see Reception Theory), most writings in this area tend to be informative (and only occasionally theoretical) rather than, strictly speaking, textual. It should be noted that given the specific cultural history of Italy, much criticism appears on the pages of nonspecialized publications, from the cultural pages of major daily newspapers to the review sections of weeklies, partisan journals, and endless encounters in nonacademic spaces. Especially important has been the criticism of the writers themselves, who have often gathered their interventions in volumes that have later been discussed and dissected by professional critics and have typically influenced younger writers as much as have the works themselves. These writer-critics include Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elio Vittorini (Diario in pubblico, 1957), (L'uomo come fine, 1964), Italo Calvino (The Uses of Literature, 1989), Umberto Eco, Alberto Arbasino, Alfredo Giuliani, and others. Until the late 1970s, Rhetoric was confined to traditional philological and historiographic reconstructions (see Historical Theory and Criticism and Philology). After that time, with the introduction of Chaim Perelman, Gérard Genette, Max Bense, and Groupe m and in conjunction with developments in Stylistics on the one hand and Phenomenology on the other, new proposals began to emerge. Important in this sector are the studies of Ezio Raimondi and his school at the University of , which focus on the relationship between poetics and rhetoric and most recently hermeneutics (see Raimondi, Ermeneutica e commento, 1990). The philosopher Giulio Preti rekindled the discussion of how rhetoric and logic are really not so different (Retorica e logica, 1968), and he has been echoed in this by Marcello Pera (Scienza e retorica, 1991). Renato Barilli's conceptual Rhetoric (1979, trans., 1989) supersedes Barthes's semiological model, while Giovanni Bottiroli (Retorica della creatività, 1987) breaks through structuralist limitations and addresses the issue of the creativity of texts. Working from the United States, and impressively going beyond structuralist, rationalist, and semiotic approaches to the rhetorical, Paolo Valesio brings in both philosophical and theological reconsiderations, exploring the figura and the dilemma of silence (Novantiqua: Rhetoric as a Contemporary Theory, 1980). Another Italian expatriate, Ernesto Grassi, who spent most of his adult life in Germany, instead brought Heideggerian thought to a rethinking of metaphor and the essence of poetry. Coupled to his own rediscovery of Giambattista Vico, Grassi initiated a revival and reappreciation of the literary insights of Italian humanism in particular and the creative act in general (Rhetoric as Philosophy, 1980). Lastly, although Bice Mortara Garavelli's very useful manual (Manuale di retorica, 1988) is still basically in the tradition of Heinrich Lausberg and Textlinguistik, we should turn to Armand Plebe and Pietro Emanuele's manual by the same name (also 1988) if we want finally to place the rhetorical on a par with the philosophical, for here the focus is on invention (both conceptual and, strictly speaking, linguistic) rather than on elocution, with important consequences for literary study and interpretation. This is particularly significant at a time when some branches of philosophy and literary theory, in Italy as well as elsewhere, are redirecting their sights on the rhetorical constitution of all human constructs, both critical and creative. Finally, and ironically for a country whose literary culture has always been politically sensitive, there is very little in the way of critical readings that focus on issues of race, gender, or ethnicity in literature. Moreover, there is a dearth of research on "minor" literatures, and whereas studies on writings in dialect are showing signs of growth, there is next to nothing, for instance, on theory and literature by Italians outside of Italy and what that might mean to more canonical forms of theorizing. This extends also to the relationship between literature and religion, and literature and science. Carlo Dionisotti's attempt to introduce geography, or "geopolitics," into literary study (Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, 1967) has not had a following, except, perhaps, outside of Italy. One last note: in the past few years many philosophers--and not just hermeneuticians and aestheticians, but philosophers of language and of science as well--and even critics have turned to literature for help in either understanding or solving some riddles or issues. This has often had an effect on their thinking, and in some cases their writing, which is neither scientificphilosophical nor literary but both at the same time. Ultimately, it appears, critical thought is facing the seduction and the horror of creation head-on. I do not mean only those critics who have written novels--such as Eco, Corti, and Valesio, who raise a host of problems concerning roles, styles, and social categorizations--but also texts produced by such diverse figures as Aldo Gargani, Giorgio Agamben, Giampiero Comolli, Raffaele Perrotta, Franco Rella, Guido Ceronetti, and a few others. These latter figures produce amorphous, borderline texts, still to be studied and described but certainly likely to raise even newer questions concerning genres, reference, meaning, and the relationship between thought, language, and reality.

Peter Carravetta

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Notes and Bibliography

See also Benedetto Croce, Galvano Della Volpe, Francesco De Sanctis, Umberto Eco, and Antonio Gramsci.

Andrea Battistini and Ezio Raimondi, "Retoriche e poetiche dominanti," Letturatura italiana, vol. 3 (ed. Asor Rosa, 1984); Gianfranco Bettetini and Francesco Casetti, "Semiotics in Italy," The Semiotic Sphere (ed. Thomas A. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok, 1986); Filippo Bettini and Mirko Bevilacqua, eds., Marxismo e critica letteraria in Italia (1978); Walter Binni, Poetica, critica e storia letteraria (1963, 2d ed., 1964); Peter Carravetta, "Postmodern Chronicles," Annali d'Italianistica 9 (1991); Ottavio Cecchi and Enrico Ghidetti, eds., Fare storia della letteratura (1986), Sette modi di fare critica (1983); Remo Ceserani, Raccontare la letteratura (1990); Maria Corti and Cesare Segre, eds., I metodi attuali della critica in Italia (1970); Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistics (1902, trans. Douglas Ainslie, 1953), La poesia (1936, 6th ed., 1963, Benedetto Croce's Poetry and Literature: An Introduction to Its Criticism and History, trans. Giovanni Gullace, 1981); Costanzo Di Girolamo, Critica della letterarietà (1978); Costanzo Di Girolamo, Alfonso Berardinelli, and Franco Brioschi, La ragione critica: Prospettive nello studio della letteratura (1986); Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (1989), Opera aperta (1962, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni, 1989), The Role of the Reader (1979), A Theory of Semiotics (1975); Gilberto Finzi, L'utopia letteraria (1973); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings (1986); Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980); Furio Jesi, Letteratura e mito (1968); Guido Lucchini, Le origini della scuola storica (1990); Romano Luperini, "Criticism in Contemporary Italy," Rethinking Marxism (1992); Filiberto Menna, Critica della critica (1980); Luciano Nanni, ed., Identità della critica (1991); Giorgio Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1934, 2d ed., 1962); Santini Ritter, Lea Raimondi, and Ezio Raimondi, eds., Retorica e critica letteraria (1978).