Phd in CLASSICAL AND MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES

Thesis title: «Non sarei mai diventato uno scrittore» La biografia politica di Giorgio Bassani e l’iter compositivo degli Ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti

This study aims to analyse the genetic and compositional process behind Giorgio Bassani’s fourth Storia ferrarese, Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, which, with its autobiographical preface, stands as a unicum in the writer’s oeuvre. While the primary reason behind Bassani’s writing is his desire to recount his political experiences between 1937 and 1943, the biographical matrix is completely overturned in the text, despite some traces of it remaining in the testimonies that now constitute the genetic dossier. The narrative, suspended between what is said and what is left unsaid, ends up distorting the writer’s activism; therefore, to understand this authorial choice, it was essential to reconstruct Bassani’s political biography from the 1930s to 1956 and focus on his clandestine anti-fascist militancy, while always following a documentary thread. The writer’s activism, described through the concept of the funzione-antifascismo, is placed in the service of literature. Finally, the investigation could not ignore the study of the historical and social context in which fascism developed in Ferrara.