Pogled na zemljopis i plurilingvizam u književnosti (Komentar uz Djelo Carla Dionisottija)
A Look at Geography and Plurilingualism in Literature (A Commentary on the Work of Carlo Dionisotti)

Summary/Abstract: The author expounds the method of the Italian researcher (born in 1908), living in London, who - above all in his work Geography and the History of Italian Literature (1967) - starts from the assumption that the soil is more specific than the epoch. Viewing the literary events from an unusual perspective, Dionisotti convincingly shows on examples the linguistic heterogenerity' of duecento, the share of »foreign« places in the Tuscan trecento, the Latin-Italian bllingualism of the humanist quattrocento, as well as the Italian character of the cinquecento (thanks to the codification of the language). He makes special mention of the Venetian publishing industry and the almost parallel »Tridentine« stagnation which was accompanied by new social phenomena outside courtly patronage such as the emergence of the independent writer and female author under her own name. He continues his consideration emphasizing the leading role of the enlightening-romanticist North in settecento and ottocento. What the author of such a commentary can do is to add similar analyses by means of parallel and contrasting examples, furthermore to point to local omissions, »to take note« of the surprising omission of two neglected centuries - the omitted emigre seicento and the decentralized novecento - as well as a consideration of the lively literary plurilingualism from Baroque onwards. It is obvious that the Italians, apart from their mother tongue, prefer French, without any special effort to make an assessment in the opposite direction (and accept it as stimulating), i. e. to evaluate the Italian share in the works of foreigners (even in Joyce's case). If the concentration on locality could be overcome, above all if plurilinguistic creativeness could be taken into account (regardless of the »insularity« of their protagonists), a new possibility of supranational interaction would open to Dionisotti's method.

• Details
• Contents