Raccontare per saggi. Origine e modi di una contaminazione novecentesca: casi dalle letterature italiana e francese

In my PhD dissertation, I have analyzed the problematical genre of the essay during the whole 20th century. In particular, I have investigated its “contamination” with the narrative in Italian and French literature, especially on some of Serra, Debenedetti, Barthes, Sartre, Manganelli and Lavagetto’s works. I have managed in defining the essay’s genre structurally, following his historical growing and the widespread application of the title “essay” to the different works and, then, finding his perpetuated discursive structure. I have developed my interpretation both with a theoretical and comparative approach. Similarly, I have studied the issue of the contamination too, in his involvement in contemporary Aesthetic and in scientific thought. Although my dissertation focuses on the topic of only one genre, it also reflects the interests in modern genre theory for the implications of the concept of contamination. I believe that contamination contributes more in highlighting difference between genres than in creating a blurred field of literature, where genre itself no longer exists and where it could find a “post-modern death”. I can demonstrate the validity of literary genres through a process that sets the limits of the pertinence of a genre. In a text belonging to one genre, contamination includes different discursive moods coming from other genres. This interpretation promises a new vision of relations between literary genres and works, also beyond the essay.