Thesis title: Scritture della Relazione. Comparazione tra Édouard Glissant, Luigi Meneghello e Salman Rushdie
The subject of this thesis is the relationship between world and literature at the turn of the old and new millennium, considering the processes of globalization and creolization that have complicated the notions of contact, language, identity, and place. In particular, the thesis aims to analyze similarities and divergences between the poetics and the novels of Édouard Glissant, Luigi Meneghello, and Salman Rushdie through four main axes: 1) the globalization of the literary phenomenon (World Literature) and the movement within the transnational literary field; 2) the reflection and the particular novelistic form employed, which we define as worldly-novel, and its relationship both with the global novel and with the occidental tradition of the novel; 3) a rhizomatic and relational approach to authorship and identity, and the consequent narratological strategies (rhizome-narrator, multifocality); 4) the relationships between written
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and oral language, dominant and dominated languages, translingualism, the centrality of the poetics of translation, and transcultural intertextuality.
Glissant’s poetics of relation arise from the search for a language/identity for the Martinican subject, torn between French (the written language of the colonizer) and Creole (oral). The context of the Antilles is, for Glissant, a model, as in the contemporary world everything is becoming creolized (identities hybridize with one another in violent and unpredictable ways): to the Western root-identity, Glissant opposes the identity-in-relation, which is founded on interaction with otherness. The writer of the tout-monde writes «in the presence of all the languages of the world»: writing is a multilingual practice, not generated by authorial genius, but by translational processes between languages. «Dispatriation» (dispatrio) is the generative force in Meneghello’s poetics: translations from English to Italian, through the Vicentine dialect, and his academic research in Reading characterize a transcultural way-of-life. The expatriated subject finds stability in a perpetual alternating current movement between identity poles. His novels are the site of an interplay that involves: the de-fascistization of the Italian language through free transitions between languages, and the overcoming of the conventions of realism and neorealism through poetic, anthropological, and essayistic contaminations. Rushdie interprets his migrant condition (Bombay, Karachi, London, New York) through the poetics of the «translated man»: hybridizing different languages, idioms, and cultures within one’s own identity from a transcultural perspective. Rushdie writes in an English creolized by the rhythms, music, and settings of Hindi/Urdu. His authorial condition allows for an understanding of the imagined nature of nations: Rushdie rewrites the Western bourgeois novel through polyphonic narration, a story of the crowd in which the writer becomes rhizomatic. It is an oral narrative in written form, a deconstruction of official history through a proliferation of microhistories.