Eredità denigrate ed eredità condivise: la teoria del romanzo in Milan Kundera e René Girard
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In Testaments Betrayed (1993), Milan Kundera’s third essay on the art of the European novel, the author describes René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) as “the best book I have ever read on the art of the novel”. Despite some evident and seemingly irreconcilable differences in their thinking, a closer analysis of the two writers’ essays reveals a shared “anti-romantic posture”, as defined by critics, through which the relationship between novelist, literature, and the world is understood in similar and counter-current terms compared to the trends of French theory in the 1960s and 1970s. This article aims to trace the genesis of this anti-romantic alliance, starting from the rediscovery of a forgotten radio conversation between the two writers in 1989. Through this lens, the paper opens a broader analysis of three key notions: conversion, seen as a transformative experience that prevents the novelist from falling victim to the romantic postures of the “first phase” of their production; the novel as a disenchanted, clear-sighted, anti-lyrical territory where mediators, whether idols or ideals, no longer hold any allure; and literature as a tool for understanding and exploring the human condition, which is increasingly threatened by modern times.
Source: Status Quaestionis
Author: Vignotto, Valentina
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W6903482792
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