The poetics of community in the writing on poetry by Natalia Ginzburg

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg wrote regularly for newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera and La Stampa, often about literature and cinema, besides essays on the social, moral, and political conditions of this period. In this article, we propose initially a link between Ginzburg’s ideas of society and of human conduct and her ways of perceiving the transformations of the fictional representation of reality. Then we present fragments of her texts of literary criticism, highlighting her reading standards and how composition mechanisms of a literary text are unfolded into an ethical approach. This interpretation path allows us to understand that Ginzburg’s criticism has a relational thought as a basis, that is, is it composed of the transit between the specificities of the commented works, the human conduct, and the ways that the art achieves to represent poetically the reality. Our objective is to stand out how Ginzburg’s idea of poetry involves the conjunction of opposed elements and attributes main importance to the strength of transmission of an artistic work.