PROFILO CRITICO DI MAIER SU SVEVO
Maier’s Critical Profile of Svevo

Summary/Abstract: According to Cesare Segre (2001, p. 99), a critic is a reader that is specially prepared to interpret his own reading of the text, pursuing diligently the value of its initial aspect, for which the first function, or the basic one, of the critic remains that of the clarification of the text to the benefit of a less enthusiastic reader, but also to his own benefit. Maier believed that the ingredients to make a critic are: luck, culture, intuition and historical intelligence. He also insisted that in order to talk about any author, one should first aim to get introduced to the author’s work through a careful review as well as through a careful review of the critics, because even a critique derives from a sudden feeling of affection towards the author in question, since every critic has his own personal taste which is contingent on the critic’s cultural and theoretical education, on his reading habits, on his ideology and on his human experience (Giammancheri, Zovatto, 2003, p. 108). The specificity of Maier can be best understood in his close connection to the text itself, since in his essays it is really the text that speaks on behalf of the critic, serving to capably put in light interesting peculiarities and to illuminate its significance and its history. The text, at the end, “is our only asset” (Segre, 2001, p. 99), and there is no critical discourse that is valid more than a text. It depends on the ability of the critic to offer a right interpretation key to make a text alive in the very same act of reading and Maier has left us a “passepartout” to understand the art of Svevo, with all the aspects, external and internal, of his life novels.

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