Silvia De Laude

Paolo Desogus

Emanuela Patti

Hervé Joubert-Laurencin

Roberto Chiesi

Gian Luca Picconi

Jessy Simonini

Marco Antonio Bazzocchi

Pierre-Paul Carotenuto

Stefania RImini

This issue of Engramma is inspired by a reflection on the theme of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Middle Ages which started last September during the Pasolini Summer School and it is an anthology of the contributions by the authors who intervened then. The original core was then expanded with a small collection of essays aimed at enriching the scientific debate. Overall, this volume intends to shed light on the complex aspects of language, poetry and themes related to models deriving from the Medieval traditions, dominated by Dante and by other authors like Petrarca, Boccaccio, Giotto and Cimabue, and on the ways Pasolini appropriates and reinvents them. Figurative art, poetry and prose of the Middle Ages all played a crucial role in Pasolini’s works - whether literature, theatre or cinema.

189 | Il Medioevo secondo Pasolini

What role did Dante play in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)? His unfinished and fragmented imitation of the Comedia, La Divina Mimesis, is only one outward sign of what was a sustained dialogue with Dante on representation begun in the early 1950s. During this period, the philologists Gianfranco Contini (1912-1990) and Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) played a crucial role in Pasolini’s re-thinking of ‘represented reality’, suggesting Dante as the best literary, authorial and political model for a generation of postwar Italian writers. This emerged first as ‘Dantean realism’ in Pasolini’s prose and poetry, after Contini’s interpretation of Dante and of his plurilingualism, and then as ‘figural realism’ in his cinema, after Auerbach’s concepts of Dante’s figura and ‘mingling of styles’. Following the evolution of Pasolini’s mimetic ideal from these formative influences through to La Divina Mimesis, Emanuela Patti explores Pasolini’s politics of representation in relation to the ‘national-popular’, the ‘questione della lingua’ and the Italian post-war debates on neorealism, while also providing a new interpretation of some of his major literary and cinematic works.

Emanuela Patti

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