L'India d'inverno di Carlo Levi : Quesiti per una prosa in viaggio

The paper focuses on Carlo Levi’s reportages from India (1957), in order to outline how the peculiar mixture of narrative and essay writing conveys these texts into the genre of Travel literature, as well as to reconsider a work so easily forgotten by field studies. A first recognition on the topic shows how little literature has considered the timeframe of this journey up to recent times: due to the uncertain date marked on the only Indian letter sent by Levi to his wife, critics have agreed to range it between several months and a year. The bias is subsequently taken into account as the prism to approach these texts through: in fact, despite the deliberate attempt at sketching achrony for poetical purposes, micro and macrotextual features – with an emphasis on the descriptions of wintertime – allow to place these texts in time, thus confirming the hybrid features of these proses. Through rhetorical and textual analysis, then, the paper discusses the reportages from a theoretical perspective.