RAPPRESENTAZIONE DELLO SPAZIO E ARCHITETTURE NARRATIVE NELLA NOVELLISTICA DI SOLDATI (1959-1979)

“Representation of Space and Narrative Architectures in Soldati's short stories 1959-1979" investigates the literary production of this versatile writer in his varied professional life, having space as its main perspective and interpretative guideline. As space actually represented an essential category for Soldati in the very perception of his own existence, a fortiori it pervades his literary work, which became copious in the two decades that are examined in this dissertation. This production, which was very heterogeneous and is still nowadays pretty neglected by critics, was also fueled by his collaboration with newspapers, on which many of his novellas were first published. On the other hand, the frequent and extensive authoring of short stories is somehow contrasted by the long-time generation of his novel of a lifetime, Le due città, which the author had been working on since 1959. Two crucial places in Soldati's creative geography, Rome and Turin are offered as paradigmatic models of a complex treatment of space, in which autobiographical notes, symbolic suggestions, realistic accuracy, imaginative intervals and intertextual or intermedial echoes are to be found. Accordingly, the investigation aims at identifying the solid network of narrative, rhetorical and stylistic devices that support the shaping of space and of its meanings. In Soldati’s collections space is offered in its articulate and multifaceted aspects, all of them being relevant in La Messa dei villeggianti, 55 novelle per l’inverno and its "complementary" 44 novelle per l’estate: space in descriptions, space as passed through in the journeys of a pilgrim literate holidaymaker (villeggiante), space as evoked, as well as the concepts of liminality and heterotopia. In the reconstruction of Soldati’s narrative architectures, the importance of space as space of a text or macrotext has also been considered, a strategic system and distribution of places through the collections support their consistency and organic feature.