Significance of the theme of the voice in 'Narratori delle Pianure'

Significance of the theme of the voice in 'Narratori delle Pianure'

1. Poetics, Structure, Post-modernist traits

   • Errance, less structured prose (away from Calvino's style) Absence of the home as an anchor, displacement
   • A criticism of post-war development which is eradicating tradition
   • Lack of a straightforward storyline, an open-ended structure
   • Post-modernist abandonment of control and a strong subject position
   • Poetics: de-subjectivisation, de-centralisation
   • Gianni Celati Postmodernista Problematico: Lettura di Notizie ai Naviganti (Alessandro Viti)

2. Verso la Foce quotation (p.57)

3. Place and Space, the plains and Narration

   • Inspired by walking and getting to know somewhere that at first glance seems desolate
   • ppt slide 15 - The plains as a frontier between the past and the present (rural/traditional vs. modern/industrial). 'A journey to recover traces of the past and a sense of shared experience'.
   • "The plains as a metaphor for the narrative text. Writing = walking the landscape. A more relaxed attitude to literature
   • ppt. slides 24 Place and narration - stories emanating from a place
   • Similarity to Dante: errance and chance encounters
   • The significance of the map - link between place and narrative?
   • Il ritorno del viaggiatore

4. Orality and Narrative style, Linguistic features

   • Syntactic structure (look this up) lots of detail in ppt 41/42 about linguistic tools used to replicate orality
     • Ombre e fantasmi nel remoto della "bassa". Deissi e passato prossimo nei Narratori delle Pianure di Gianni Celati (Francesca Gatti)
   • Shared context, oral exchange, narrator and listeners are co-present
   • Oral tradition, sense of community which is vanishing. Morals?
   • Untrustworthy narrator ('come mi hanno raccontato' etc.)
     • Changing voices
   • Voice as a storyteller, fantasticazione?
   • Informal (colloquial?) language, deceptively simplistic
   • Oral style incipit, verb/tense choices typical of oral accounts
   • Different narrative style (compared to previous monologic style)

5. MARINA SPUNTA

   • Voicing the Word
     • Chapter 2: Gianni Celati's Cinema Naturale: ascoltare/parlare il visibile
       • Le Condizioni del Narrare. Il cinema naturale di Gianni Celati (Francesca Gatta)
   • Trends in Contemporary Italian Narrative 1980 - 2007
     • Chapter 3: Inhabiting Displacement (Spunta)
   • "Abitare lo spaesamento" - narrating the Po valley in contemporary fiction and photography
   • Aspetti del comico nell'opera di Gianni Celati, Daniele Benati e Ermanno Cavazzoni

6. Gianni Celati interview by Marco Belpoliti

7. Il narrare come attività practica - Gianni Celati (own article and referenced in the Belpoliti book)

8. On the path of Gianni Celati: A reading of Narratori delle Pianure

9. Gianni Celati's Poetic Prose: Physical, Marginal, Spatial (Barron)