2023-06-22 11:54:13
A paradox. The literary critic and essayist Raffaele Manica rightly points out on Facebook that while the traces of maturity are all from the twentieth century, the school programs almost completely ignore the twentieth century. Have the graduates ever heard the names of Salvatore Quasimodo and Alberto Moravia? Difficult. And yet, here they are, this year as in previous years, strictly unknown authors or almost: including poor Giorgio Caproni, almost mocked in 2017, but then Ungaretti, Saba, Pavese, Montale, Primo Levi, Magris, Bassani, Sciascia.
It could be objected that the school should offer the useful tools to deal with any text, but pure illusion that reading Leopardi then also allows to decipher Quasimodo or reading Dante or D’Annunzio allows tout court to understand Montale. Moreover, the deliveries are essentially content-oriented (cutting out the dimension of beauty and style), as if literature were a newspaper article. And we know instead how different the twentieth-century forms are from the traditional ones.
It would rather be desirable to be able to broaden their gaze (to expect students to broaden it) to the contemporary not only in the hours of the written test but also in the previous five years. And this would be true not only for literature. The texts by Piero Angela, Oriana Fallaci and Belpoliti on waiting are very interesting and it is clear that many have rushed to them, feeling they are closer than Quasimodo and Sputnik.
But without having ever exercised the argument in writing, without having ever read a newspaper page on current events, without having known a single piece of essay by Goffredo Parise, Pasolini, Calvino, Sciascia, Arbasino, Testori, Eco, by Elsa Morante, it is difficult to avoid the risk of being gray, generic, impressionistic, sentimental, ineffective, banal. Rather, it is better to propose a passage by Manzoni or Machiavelli, already widely studied, one supposes. Instead, if contemporaneity must be, then let it be contemporaneity not only in maturity.
June 22, 2023, 11:41 – edit June 22, 2023 | 11:41am
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