Critica dell'inespresso. Letteratura e inconscio sociale

This essay is an attempt to propose a theoretical discourse around an essential dilemma in the field of literary studies: the relationship between the text and its supposedly hidden or inner dimension. Bringing into play some of the most notable representatives of twentieth-century Literary Theory, and using as a starting point a fundamental intuition of Antonio Gramsci’s, the author tries to prove that the literary text is essentially linked to a non-text, or an unsaid, which ultimately corresponds with the locus of ideology and the place where literature intersects with historical-material reality. The literary work – to borrow Franco Fortini’s well-found expression – is therefore seen as a depositum historiae, a container in which presuppositions and conditionings, apparently quite unconnected from the specific reality of the text, are acted out. Literature’s social unconscious takes on an unexpressed that, if properly questioned, reveals the fundamental interrelatedness of cultural objects.