Pasolini and Calvino: The Authors' literature

Abstract

In the text the purpose is to comment the nature of the concept of literature in modern Italian authors, based on reflections on the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino. The inter-relations within such pieces are also approached between 'minor' genres, autobiography, fragment and literature, and history. Contrary to a critical perspective endorsing the notion that the XX century would be marked by a pure literature in opposition to an impure literature, findings put other paths and proposals in the spotlight when it goes to what is considered literary in the works of these major authors of the period. Through operations that privilege the fragment, the unfinished, the annotations and the rereading, both have provided new dimensions regarding what is deemed minor in the literary realm. Editorial processes which have defined and shaped the itself were useful for both to affirm projects wherein the autobiographic – coral and overflowing, in Pasolini's case, transparent or at times densely metaphoric, in Calvino's case – occupies a rather relevant position.