Claudio Magris. Dal palinsesto alle carte

“Claudio Magris. Dal palinsesto alle carte” investigates the relationship between literary writing and archival documentation in the work of Claudio Magris, focusing on the dynamics that emerge between the published text and the materials preserved in the author’s archive. Drawing on research conducted at the Archivio Contemporaneo Alessandro Bonsanti (Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux, Florence), the volume adopts the methodological perspectives of textual criticism and genetic criticism in order to reconstruct the compositional processes underlying Magris’s narrative production. The theoretical framework is grounded in the notion of the palimpsest, understood not only in its material sense but also as a critical paradigm for interpreting forms of “second-degree literature”, in the sense proposed by Gérard Genette. From this perspective, Magris’s works appear as stratified textual constructions, shaped through successive layers of rewriting, intertextual sedimentation, and documentary traces. Particular attention is devoted to novels such as “Alla cieca” (2005) and “Non luogo a procedere” (2015), whose complex narrative architectures reveal a dense interplay between fiction, historiography, and archival imagination. Through the analysis of drafts, manuscripts, preparatory notes, and documentary sources, the book highlights the role of the avant-text in shaping narrative form and thematic structure. The study also considers later works such as “Croce del Sud” (2020), situating them within a broader cartography of Magris’s literary imagination. By placing the archival papers in dialogue with the finished works, the volume proposes a reading of Magris’s oeuvre as a dynamic textual system in which writing develops across multiple layers, from the preliminary materials of the archive to the complex architecture of the published text. In this sense, the book offers a critical exploration of the author’s laboratory of writing, where the palimpsest and the archive converge to reveal the deep structures of literary creation.