Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere
Abstract
Drawing inspiration from Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (“an essayist who tells through anecdotes”), this paper analyzes the presence of numerous short narrative inserts in the essays by Claudio Magris.
Narrative anecdotes have philosophical and didactic purposes: instead of facing each other, utopia and disenchantment can support and correct each other. As in Italo Calvino, also in Magris lightness does not remove the discursive forms of resistance to the dissolution of meaning: and, of all, it is precisely the form of the micronarrative apologue that seems to fulfill this specific function of counter-time resistance of a tension to Totality.
