‘Come una specie di guida’: Pasolini’s Reconceptualisation of Dante in his Theory and Practice of Realism

This thesis investigates the role played by Dante Alighieri’s work in helping to shape Pier Paolo Pasolini’s approach to the concept of realism. Pasolini’s Dantism constitutes a rich and well-established field of literary criticism. However, to date, there has been no systematic study that has explored in depth the contribution of Dante to the question of realism in Pasolini’s oeuvre. This research aims to demonstrate that the concept of realism runs through Pasolini’s engagement with Dante in the course his life and changes at different stages of his artistic development. The study follows a chronological approach and uses the lens of twentieth-century Dante criticism to read the dialogue between Dante and Pasolini. The first chapter investigates the influence of Dante’s use of the vernacular, mediated by the reading of Gianfranco Contini and Antonio Gramsci, on Pasolini’s theories on the relationship between dialect and realism in literature (1950s). The second chapter examines the legacy of Erich Auerbach’s reading of Dante’s 'figura' in Pasolini’s cinematic realism at the beginning of his career as a film director (1960s). The third chapter discusses the mid-1960s as a crucial period for understanding Pasolini’s relationship with Dante in his future production and approach to realism. The fourth and fifth chapters investigate the influence of Dante’s prophetism, mediated by Auerbach’s and Contini’s later works (1963-65), on Pasolini’s new approach to realism in the 1970s. In conclusion, this study shows that Pasolini reconceptualises specific readings of twentieth-century Dante criticism (historical-linguistic, figural, and prophetic) to elaborate ever new theories on realism, in response to the changeable historical context of post-war Italy (1950s-1970s). In addition, with the help of selected case studies, the research also explores how Pasolini puts his theories on realism into practice in his literary and cinematic productions: specifically, the 1955 novel 'Ragazzi di vita', the 1961 film 'Accattone', and the 1970s novel 'Petrolio'.