DAL LACANISMO ALL'ESEMPLIFICAZIONE TESTUALE: RIPENSARE L'OLTRANZA POETICA DI ANDREA ZANZOTTO

Andrea Zanzotto’s poetic career can be regarded as an endless pursuit of linguistic experimentation. This concerns not only surface-level stylistic features, but also the innermost core of semantics. Over the decades, critics have been both attracted and challenged by the metalinguistic inclination of his verse, shaping an interpretation myth which laid the basis for an extremely positive evaluation of Zanzotto’s poetry and the precocious canonization that followed. According to such myth, Zanzotto forced the boundaries of poetic language by dismantling the dichotomy signifier/signified in accordance with structuralist and Lacanian theories. Even though this interpretation is in line with Zanzotto’s openly declared positions, it could prove not completely adequate to explain his poetry, not least because it may be too dependent on the self-assessment strategies embedded in his poetics. Furthermore, it is necessary to question and historicize Lacanian approaches to Zanzotto’s work, and decouple critical interpretations from the high-density poetics of the author, which was deeply influenced by the most cutting-edge innovations in the Human Sciences. My thesis advocates the need for a paradigm shift, based on the concept of Textual Exemplification developed by the literary theorist Franco Brioschi: Zanzotto’s stylistic options can be regarded as an intensive and radical strengthening of traditional literary devices, such as iterative chains and etymological proliferation. More than aiming to render the pure signifier, poetry seems to be an ingenious attempt to stretch literary language to the limit. In the first chapter, I examine the iterative structures within the syntax of Dietro il paesaggio (1951), Zanzotto’s first poetry collection. By means of a thorough investigation and cataloguing of iterative phenomena, it can be demonstrated that Zanzotto’s style heavily relies on reiteration, which results in the creation of an uninterrupted, seamless syntactic flux, while the meter tends, on the contrary, to establish a centripetal force. The second chapter deals with the figural syntax of Dietro il paesaggio, and contains an in-depth analysis of the of the major phenomena which involve the construction of poems as a series of images. Thus, the collection of poems of Dietro il paesaggio is shown to be built by means of a visual style; the poems call for a visual, non-linear reading with a parallel weakening of the ordinary reading mode. In the third chapter I discuss the theoretical core of my thesis: drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art, I describe Zanzotto’s position-taking in the literary field and the main features of his interactions with critics. I then analyse two essays by Stefano Agosti, the champion of the Lacanian interpretation, and I move on to show how Brioschi’s textual exemplification can be applied to the case of Zanzotto. Lastly, in the fourth chapter I exemplify the interpretive potential of the paradigm shift advocated in the previous part of thesis, by means of an in-depth analysis of Pasqua di maggio, a poem included in the collection Pasque (1973), which belongs to Zanzotto’s experimental period. Using methods taken from Text Linguistics, I show that Zanzotto stretches cohesive structures to breaking point, while building, at the same time, a supplementary coherence via iterative syntactic structures.