Surviving in the “Inferno”: a legacy of Calvino

the present study aims to highlight two survival strategies in the “inferno of the living” that emerge from the analysis of Invisible Cities: lightness and gaze. the value of lightness is visible in the “thin cities”, which share a fragile architecture, the contrary reaction opposing the heaviness of living, the distance from the ground. “the hidden cities”, in turn, provide the motive for a reflection (a lecture) on gaze, with the aim of training the gaze to “recognize that which is not hell”: the happy city inside the unhappy city. In Invisible Cities, Calvino’s gaze still has an ethical and civic function (present in The Day of a Scrutineer). this function, however, will give way to the epistemic and scientific function of Mr. Palomar (from The Cosmicomics onwards), whose eye is exclusively concerned with measuring the limits of knowledge, which never extends, in a revealing way, from the natural world to the human world. thirty years after Calvino’s death, amongst the many legacies leftby his multifaceted literary work, we can recover the ethical and civic dimension expressed by the values of lightness and gaze.

Preliminary Data on Linguistic Reduplication in the Literary Language of Vigatese: The Adjectives’ Reduplication between Diegesis and Mimesis

The article presents the results of research on linguistic reduplication in Vigatese, the literary language invented by writer Andrea Camilleri. This is an aspect of Camilleri’s storytelling that is often noted by scholars but that has not yet received a dedicated study. The research is conducted on the corpus of 101 texts starring Salvo Montalbano—composed of 29 novels and 72 short stories published between 1994 and 2020—within which about 300 different reduplication forms and more than 2,200 total occurrences have been recorded. Here, the data on the expressive reduplication with adjectives are given: 64 forms with 379 total occurrences analysed for different literary scales, at sentence level and paragraph level. The collocations within the corpus, the possible spelling variations, and whether the use is in mimesis or diegesis are restored. The methodological approach is of a mixed-methods nature: a digitally assisted text analysis (DATA) following the concept of scalable reading (Mueller, 2014) follows the traditional close-reading analysis. A second analysis of the data on the diegetic and mimetic axis was carried out. The results obtained were then used for a data-driven comparison conducted on the corpus of all of Giovanni Verga’s narrative works. These initial results show that three out of every four reduplications are a diegetic recurrence. Despite the extensive use of mimesis in the texts, the true orality of Camillerian storytelling seems to reside elsewhere. This research is part of a broader study of all narrative texts under the general hypothesis that the formal equivalents of the writer’s popularity are to be found in the repetitiveness that was originally, and perhaps too hastily, criticised.