The Anti-Dialogic Function. Conditions of Incongruity in the Dialogues of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry

Abstract

The analysis of the exchanges present in the books of Italian poetry of the twentieth century has shown a horizontal recourse to the expedient of dialogism in a dysfunctional and pragmatically pathological key, between conflicting or meaningless communications; the dialogue, in other words, does not manifest itself as an intimate adherence to a consonant and reciprocal communication, but refers to the malfunctioning of the communication itself. From Giovanni Pascoli’s Canti di Castelvecchio  (1903) to Franco Fortini’s Composita solvantur  (1994), the lyrical episodes that contain verbal interactions seem to originate and refer to an 'anti-dialogical function': pathological conversations, positional failures, conflictual interactions proliferate; speakers tend to interact in a dysfunctional and dislogical way, as if they were built not to communicate. The present article aims to frame the anti-dialogical function through the comparison between some textual samples and the main modules of pragmatic incongruity, first starting from a classification of speech acts, then through a paradigmatic sample.