They go searched, that is, besides the mentioned Levi (which the famous Christ Stopped at Eboli has done worthily follow the clock, Words are stones, etc.), In Alberto Moravia, which especially in the stories, short or long as Disobedience has shown that it is able to push deep into that psychological analysis which elsewhere, in the novels proper (Il conformista, La boredom, etc.), remains overwhelmed by the intricacy of “cheating” or by the abstractness of ideologies; in Elio Vittorini, than in the Women of Messina and, moreover, in Garibaldina, he was able to give us, of his “offended” world, not even choral but, at moments, epic representations, as of a humanity seen in a primordial light; in Vasco Pratolini, committed to extending his “chronicles” from the family and Florentine sphere to that of Italian life of this century (Metello, Lo scialo), and to reconcile – not without effort – for the new dimension the two fundamental ways of his narrative: that of lyrical memory and the other of a realism between disenchanted and Tuscan resentful; in Mario Soldati, who gives the tales of A cena col commendatore onwards he revealed a new vitality of his art halfway between moralism and fumisteria; in Giuseppe Dessì, in Mario Tobino, in Elsa Morante, authors of short stories or novels among the richest in poetry, such as, respectively, Isola dell’angelo, Le libere donne di Magliano, L’isola di Arturo ; and again in PA Quarantotti Gambini, Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi, Alessandro Bonsanti, Antonio Delfini, Libero Bigiaretti, Guglielmo Petroni, Carlo Bernari, Mario La Cava, Enrico Emanuelli, Ercole Patti, Ennio Flaiano, Giuseppe Marotta, Ugo Facco De Lagarda. And they should also be sought in older writers (of curriculum if not always of age), who, trained or matured between La Voce and La Ronda, are essayists as well as narrators, and the story or novel alternates the journey, the diary, the idyll, the “prose of art” in short: from Bonaventura Tecchi (who in the recent novel The egoists gave proof of high commitment) to Giani Stuparich, from Giovanni Comisso to Luigi Bartolini, from GB Angioletti to Gianna Manzini, from Anna Banti to Nicola Lisi, from Giuseppe Raimondi to Carlo Emilio Gadda, from the vigolo of Roman nights to the Bacchelli of Giulio’s three slaves Cesare at the Palazzeschi of the Fratelli Cuccoli and Bestie del ‘900. (To which we must add, but placing it in the very first line, the author – unpublished in life – of the Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa). And finally, we should remember those writers, whose disappearance was particularly felt by the young fiction, who looked at them as “guides” or, for the older ones, as teachers: Enrico Pea, who in recent stories still has intense lyrical vibrations ; Corrado Alvaro, who in his diarîs, published in part posthumously, has left us some of his most incisive and evocative pages; Cesare Pavese, who in a form of long story or short novel, mixed between realism and lyricism – Before the rooster sings, The beautiful summer, The moon and the bonfires – had come to express the drama of a moral conscience (and of a generation) torn between a generous desire for human and social participation, for political renewal (the reasons for the Resistance echo in him), and a desperate sense of loneliness, or rather a solipsism of decadent origin; Vitaliano Brancati, who in the Bell’Antonio and Paolo the heat was able to capture, through his sulphurous humor, the deepest and most dramatic notes of sexual obsession; Francesco Jovine, who, after Signora Ava, has provided, with Le terre del Sacramento, one of the best proofs in the field of the novel, and not only of the so-called “southern fiction”.
According to aceinland.com, a set of undoubted grandeur. The same cannot be said, however, with regard to the theater: that, after the disappearance of its major post-war representative, Ugo Betti, it is going through a very uncertain period, in which the “show” element often overwhelms the artistic one. Nonetheless, a dramaturgy inspired by an ethical or religious problemism, but technically shrewd and updated (some examples given by Diego Fabbri), and the attempts, by some of the most qualified writers in the narrative field (such as Dessì, the Testori, the Flaiano, etc.), to bring to the scene dramatic stories, of choral intonation, and of an accentuatedly realistic character or alluding to today’s customs and society, seem to give hope for a new course, full of surprises.
Criticism (see App. II, 1, p. 729). – As for criticism, it should be noted that the knowledge of Gramsci’s work, and in particular of the writings of literature and national life (1950), has exerted a large influence on the younger generations, helping them to rediscover that De Sanctis that first rondism and then hermeticism had set aside or accused of moralism and contentism: thus determining a certain convergence between Marxist and historicist currents, especially of the Crocian left, which (with L. Russo and others) had for many years been advocating the rethinking of the great Desanctisian lesson. But the former have not so far given satisfactory results on a strictly critical level, due to the intrinsic difficulty in establishing mediations between the socio-economic structures and the work of art, while they have proved fruitful on the theoretical one, helping to deepen the concept of realism, in accordance with or in dissent with the postulates of the Lukács (whose work spread in Italy after that of Gramsci). The historicist currents, on the other hand, having long ago overcome the dry antitesides of poetry-non-poetry, and began to consider the artistic fact in its dialectical relationship with the environment, the traditions of culture and the conditions of the society to which it belongs, have continued to give very positive fruits. Thus, a broader knowledge of Spitzer’s and Auerbach’s theories and essays gave a new vigor to that development of philology and linguistics in stylistic criticism, which had already been underway for some time, with now instrumental and subsidiary intentions. compared to integral criticism (almost for a verification or proof of value judgments), now instead of self-sufficiency, placing itself as a total criticism. A development that is undoubtedly of considerable importance in the history of criticism, but which also presents its dangers, especially when Spitzer’s warning (with a Crucian flavor) is forgotten, that “to explain the stylistic peculiarities of a writer, it is not enough to move on the ground of language, or on that of the general psychology of language; but we must appeal to the inner laws of his world “; which, that is, is “the or on that of the general psychology of the language; but one must appeal to the inner laws of his world “; that is, it is” the spiritual content of the poet to shape the form of the work of art “. And the autonomist tendency of this criticism is subject above all to this forgetfulness: in which, with hermetic descendants, which, in their cult of the word, give its technicality something of initiation, of magic, Marxist and Gramscian instances, intended to determine the social origin of forms and styles, of linguistic choices and syntactic systems, mix but do not merge. On the other hand, these hybrid encounters, these prevarications are related to the profound labor of aesthetic thought, and, more generally, of the contemporary spirit; and therefore with that phase of experimentalism and empiricism which, in the anxiety of an adjustment or resolution of the crisis, characterizes, as we have seen, the new literature.
