Second-hand Stories: Reported Testimonies in Contemporary Italian Literature (1980-2020)

The thesis offers a new interpretation of contemporary Italian narrative - in a timeframe that spans broadly from 1980 to 2020 - through the identification of the category of the second-hand story. I call ‘second-hand stories’ contemporary narratives that hinge on the figure of a narrator who listens to and reports other people’s words. Positioning himself or herself as a witness, the narrator engages in a face-to-face encounter with another person and bears witness to this encounter by reporting the other person’s story. Developing the older literary convention of the reported tale and revitalising the figure of the narrator as storyteller (as famously described by Benjamin), this narrative form provides an ethical reflection on the value of listening and reporting other people’s stories. To account for the diffusion and the multiplicity of forms of the second-hand story the present thesis is articulated in four author-led thematic chapters, arranged chronologically. By focusing on Alberto Arbasino’s *Un paese senza*, Chapter One explores the fertile cultural milieu in which the second-hand story has started to emerge in Italy between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. Chapter Two, examining Antonio Tabucchi’s *Tristano muore*, traces the development of the second-hand story during the 1990s concurrently to the Italian debate over the memory of WWII and the Resistance and to the emergence of forms of secondary orality and shared authorship. Chapter Three investigates Helena Janeczek’s *Lezioni di tenebra* to read the evolution of the second-hand story in connection with contemporary discourses on experience, asking how transgenerational transmission of memories and experiences can be represented in literature. Finally, the analysis of Melania Mazzucco’s *Io sono con te. Storia di Brigitte* and Luca Rastello’s *La guerra in casa* in Chapter Four puts to test the ethical, political, and fictional limits of the form of the second-hand story. By tracing the evolution of the second-hand story and by highlighting its salient characters, the thesis achieves two main outcomes: first, it encourages an approach to the analysis of the history of literary forms that challenges easy periodisation and the adoption of restrictive labels; second, it suggests the emergence of a relational paradigm in contemporary Italian narrative.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Pinton, Luigi

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Antonello, Pierpaolo

• Alberto Arbasino
• Antonio Tabucchi
• Experience
• Helena Janeczek
• Italian Studies
• Luca Rastello
• Melania Mazzucco
• Modern Italian Literature
• Postmemory
• Relationality
• Testimony

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/6ee670c6-d828-49c1-9aaa-06029fd85b2d/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.104074

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/360847