Resistenza antiretorica: strategie narrative in Calvino, Pavese, Meneghello e Fenoglio = Anti-rhetorical Resistance: Narrative Strategies in Calvino, Pavese, Meneghello and Fenoglio

This thesis aims to investigate the concept of ‘anti-rhetoric’ applied to certain literary works on Italian Resistance: this label has been particularly overworked by critics and sometimes by the authors themselves, and it requires contextualisation and interpretation. The so-called ‘anti-rhetorical’ novels this thesis focuses on are Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno by Italo Calvino (1947), La casa in collina (1948) and La luna e i falò (1950) by Cesare Pavese, Una questione privata (1963) and Il partigiano Johnny (1968) by Beppe Fenoglio and I piccoli maestri (1964) by Luigi Meneghello. This research identifies the narrative strategies that allow the readers to define these novels as ‘anti-rhetorical’, and the limits of such a definition. The introduction and chapter 1 investigate the historical and cultural reasons that lie behind the concepts of ‘rhetoric’ and ‘anti-rhetoric’ of Resistance. Chapter 2 introduces the novels and authors this thesis focuses on, and remarks how recent critics have found an ‘obstacle’ in the category of neorealism. The following chapters present a comparative analysis of the oeuvres. Chapter 3 focuses on ‘anti-rhetoric’ as the representation of the characters’ and narrators’ process of de-educating themselves from rhetoric. The analysis then proceeds to focus on those themes that show how the novels critically converse with the public discourse around Resistance: long before historians, writers of fiction raised some key issues by portraying the most controversial aspects of the armed struggle. These chapters deal respectively with the representation of partisans as anti-heroes (chapter 4), the complexity of the choice of becoming a partisan (chapter 5), the disunity among and within partisan groups (chapter 6), the representation of the Resistance as a civil war (chapter 7), the representation of partisan violence (chapter 8) and finally the representation of the social ‘others’ (chapter 9), namely the popular class, partisans from the South of Italy and women.