Lettura ‘affettiva’ di un romanzo contemporaneo. Per una proposta di attraversamento testuale

Barbara Ronchetti — 2024-05-10

Following in Virginia Woolf’s footprints, recognizing the need for a book to «adjust to the body», the article proposes a reading ‘in context’ of a contemporary Italian novel, Riccardo Capoferro's first work, «Oceanides». Based on several critical perspectives which, especially during the twentieth century, have described the reading as a form of active participation (Iser, Jauss, Gadamer etc.), the essay analyzes the structure, the literary echoes, the stylistic and thematic resonances of the novel. The latter are put in dialogue with literary traditions, explicitly or implicitly mentioned in the text, and with the ‘literary heritage’ active in the cultural atmosphere of the present time. This involves the imaginative horizon of writer and reader. The link between text and reader is strengthened by the need to include the physical presence of the bodies and surrounding spaces in the critical act of reading. The novel thus becomes (also) a concrete object and a traveling companion, not only for its ability to create narrative worlds, but also for its being actually ‘with’ the reader. As an appendix to the essay, there are some photographic images that reproduce the book ‘in the context of reading’: a critical and real journey of the reader together with the novel. This concise narration through images, testifies to the sharing of experiences on multiple levels, fictional and existential, mnemonic, and visual, which are at the basis of the critical analysis of Capoferro's novel. Therefore, the elements involved in the interpretative process of the ‘affective’ reading, as proposed here, appear as fundamental moments, equally contiguous and distant, united and separate, in the re-construction of the textual meaning. Furthermore, the coexistence of numerous factors shows the capacity of ‘active’ reading to give shape (also) to extra-textual associative chains that produce bonds (including affective ones) with the text itself.

François Wahl éditeur et passeur

MARTINE VAN GEERTRUIJDEN — 2024-05-23

Abstract français

Cet article se veut l’esquisse d’un homme, un éditeur engagé, qui a eu un poids indéniable dans la vie intellectuelle française entre la fin des années 50 et le début des années 90. Entré aux Éditions du Seuil en 1959, François Wahl a régné sur le domaine des sciences humaines et sur la littérature italienne pendant 30 ans, publiant, entre autres, Jacques Lacan, Françoise Dolto, Paul Ricoeur et Roland Barthes, relisant et même réécrivant les traductions de Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italo Calvino et bien d’autres. La correspondance avec ses auteurs et traducteurs nous permet d’entrer dans l’atelier d’un éditeur exigent, intransigeant même mais passionné, et de montrer à quel point il a appliqué à son activité la doctrine structuraliste, construisant un véritable système qui dictait ses choix, acceptations et refus tous significatifs.

English Abstract

This paper offers a sketch of a man, a committed publisher, who played an undeniable role in French intellectual life between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1990s. François Wahl joined Éditions du Seuil in 1959 and for 30 years reigned over the humanities and Italian literature, publishing works by Jacques Lacan, Françoise Dolto, Paul Ricoeur and Roland Barthes, and rereading and even rewriting translations of Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italo Calvino and many others. The correspondence with his authors and translators allows us to enter the workshop of a demanding and even uncompromising but passionate publisher and to show the extent to which he applied the structuralist doctrine to his work, building a veritable system that dictated his choices, acceptances and rejections all of which were significant.

Cognitive philology

Lettura ‘affettiva’ di un romanzo contemporaneo. Per una proposta di attraversamento testuale

François Wahl éditeur et passeur