Alcune note sul rapporto tra critica letteraria e concetto di 'traducibilita.' La prospettiva di Antonio Gramsci tra Francesco de Sanctis e Pier Paolo Pasolini

My dissertation is about Antonio Gramsci’s view of literary criticism in relationship to his conception of the world. Though this matter has been widely studied, there is a concept in his thought and work that has been largely unexplored and has only recently gained the attention of some scholars for its centrality to Gramsci’s thought. This concept, which constitutes the core of my thesis, is the one that Gramsci calls “translatability.” Almost all the studies on Gramsci have, so far, essentially ignored the importance of translatability to the interpretation of his thought, work and biography on the whole. According to him, translatability is the theory of the concrete unification between practice and theory; it theorizes both on the “practical power” and effectiveness of theory (i.e. on the impossibility of its transcendence) and on the “knowledge power” of practice. In other words translatability means that practice and theory, in given historical-cultural conditions, are not in contradiction one to the other (as, on the contrary, the main Western tradition of thought holds) and therefore are translatable. And indeed this is an innovative way of positing the conditions for thinking reality.;All this has some crucial implications. First, that Gramsci, far from lowering the importance of theory, arrives to consider it as valuable as practice. Therefore, theory is praxis (a form of practice, politics or ideology that as such constitutes the norm of action of the masses). The fact that theory is a form of practice (i.e., “politics” or “ideology”) is demonstrated in practice, namely, when and to the extent that theory transforms the world and becomes “history.” Thus, critical analysis always ought to take into account this side of the question, since it constitutes an integral part of the meaning of human cultural activity. Second, all this implies that also aesthetic analysis as a specific field of human cultural activity ought to consider that aesthetic effects are to be viewed at once as practical effects, that is, as praxis or as elements (willingly or not) capable of modifying reality and therefore, at the same time, as ideological-political elements.;It is in the first four chapters of my work that I illustrate translatability and the relationship between this innovative concept and Gramsci's philosophy of praxis. Moreover, I attempt to clarify the relationship between his and other philosophies, which he criticized, like Materialism and Idealism, Positivism and Pragmatism, and, more in particular, the philosophers Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile and Nicolaj Bucharin's. In the subsequent chapters, I first deal with the relationship between translatability and Gramsci's way of writing his Prison Notebooks, that is, with his awareness of the historical and political character of language and some of its implications with respect to the question around his own “unaccomplished way” of writing in prison. Second, I try to explain two notions internal to his concept of hegemony, “active” and “passive” revolution, showing their intimate link to translatability and tying them to Gramsci's way of interpreting historical, philosophical, aesthetic and literary phenomena. Hence, I examine Gramsci's debt toward Francesco De Sanctis, a nineteenth century Italian literary critic and philosopher, and his critique to Croce's worldview and aesthetics.;Yet, furthermore, my point is at once to show that Gramsci's continuous parallels between the intellectual function and attitude and the political or ideological layers expressed in it are drawn thanks to his concept of translatability. That is to say, translating the political into the theoretical (and viceversa) constitutes Gramsci's very interpretive method. It is thanks to this method that he puts forward the question about the history of Italy, Europe (and even of North America) as the one of a “continuous crisis;” namely, of a widespread passive revolution, in which, as the expression itself anticipates, the ruling groups constantly try to win the struggle for power over the subalterns, on the one hand granting the people some benefits, whereas, on the other, preventing them to actively participate to social-historical change or processes, making them at once passive and weak—and this is for Gramsci a historical phenomenon that finds its expression, according to different degrees and fashions, in all spheres of human life and culture. On these grounds, I examine Gramsci's assessments over a number of authors of highly cultural and literary or “popular” writings, in which the attitude of detachment above mentioned constitutes a leitmotiv and explains there uneasiness toward the historical and social situation they were facing. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).