Università Roma Tre

Writers on writing.
'An ichthyologist cannot be a fish'. This is how Viktor Sklovskij stigmatised the commonplace that would like the practice of writing to be distinct from any theoretical discourse on literature. Sklovsky was, himself, a formalist scholar - his Theory of Prose (1924) is famous - and a writer. In turn, some of the most famous contemporary storytellers - from Raymond Carver to Stephen King to Murakami Haruki - have published manuals on creative writing, often as a result of their teaching activities, which flourished in American universities. Even in Italy, well before the advent of creative writing schools, going to the workshop represented the best apprenticeship to become a writer. This was the case for Vincenzo Cerami, whose memorable debut (Un borghese piccolo piccolo, 1976) was proofread by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had already been his teacher in secondary school. Mindful of Pasolini's magisterium, Cerami - as well as Giuseppe Pontiggia, among others - published Consigli per un giovane scrittore (1999), a book that Francesco Orlando, one of Italy's leading 20th-century literary theorists and a professor at the University of Pisa, considered worthy of appearing in his examination bibliographies. Before, however, becoming an attractive genre on the publishing market, the invitation to writing, whether poetic or narrative, declined in epistolary form or as a collection of aphorisms, had tempted some of the greatest modernist authors, including Rainer Maria Rilke and André Gide. The course, in presenting some of the most significant titles of this production, on the basis of a comparison between different cultural traditions (from Soviet Russia, to the United States, to Italy) aims at measuring the gap between practice and theory of literature in the author's handbook.

Two texts to be chosen from:

V. Sklovskij, Il mestiere dello scrittore e la sua tecnica
R. Carver, Il mestiere di scrivere
V. Cerami, Consigli a un giovane scrittore
G. Pontiggia, Per scrivere bene imparate a nuotare
M Haruki, Il mestiere dello scrittore

Other readings will be provided during during the course