HUMOUR, RIRE, SERIEUX DANS LA FICTION HYPERMODERNE ITALIENNE LE CAS DE WALTER SITI
HUMOR, LAUGHTER, SERIOUSNESS IN ITALIAN HYPERMODERN FICTION. THE CASE OF WALTER SITI

Summary/Abstract: What do we mean by humour and to what extent can we talk about humour today? The concept that Luigi Pirandello (1908) defined in modern times as the capacity to know how to express the “feeling of the opposite” appears as a fundamental requirement for the contemporary writer. Recently, Raffaele Donnarumma provided a reading of Italian literature of the last decades through hyper modernity. Indeed, there has been recorded the return to a gravity of tones and a rigour that seem rather evoke modernism: literature and cinema are taken seriously again, if the change to hypermodern, suggests Donnarumma, takes several forms, my proposal is that one of them can be identified in the resumption of humour. It is possible to find all the characteristics that I listed in the story of Walter Siti, a reason that led me to identify it as a case study of this intervention: sense of the opposite, duplication and eccentricity, ambivalence and paradox, impeccable use of irony and techniques of alienation. In this article, through a reading of texts extracted from what I have identified as being the major phase of Siti’s work. the five novels of “autofiction”: Scuola di nudo (1994), Un dolore normale (1997), Troppi paradisi (2006), Resistere non serve a niente (2012), Exit Strategy (2014) - and the comparison with some contemporary writers aims to reason about a possible theorization of a hypermodern humor.

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