Edoardo Sanguineti Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The article aims to discuss the methods and the usefulness of the study of personal archives (of writers, intellectuals, artists) to reconstruct not only the social and cultural context of an historical period but also the "narrative of the self" that the creator of the archive, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, has built to testimony his own life experience. The personal archive can be read as an autobiography established through the documents of both the private and the public spheres. This approach is useful for understanding both the work of an author and his cultural discourse in its synchronic and diachronic development.
The example of the Archive of Enrico Filippini shows that by the comparison of the public image of the author and the image reflected by the archive it’s possible to better understand not only his works and the context in which they were written, but also the intellectual discourse underlying his multiple activities: writer, literary editor, Germanist, translator, journalist, cultural mediator. Enrico Filippini (Cevio 1932 – Roma 1988) is the Swiss Italian intellectual that in the years 1958-1988 has contributed the most to promote culture across national borders and languages between the northern and southern hemispheres. Emigrated to Milan in the 1950s, he worked in the 1960s as an editorial consultant for the publishing house Feltrinelli, translating and introducing in Italy German authors of the Group 47 (Uwe Johnson, the Nobel prize winner Günter Grass) and Swiss authors (Max Frisch, Friedrich Dürrenmatt) among many others. He should also be remembered for his important translations of philosophers Edmund Husserl, Walter Benjamin and the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. In the early 1960s, his knowledge in the field of foreign literature of experimental area allowed him to lay the foundations of the Gruppo 63, which consisted in meetings of experimental writers inspired by the German Group 47; in this context he wrote his first experimental short stories and plays. In 1976 he began his career as a journalist as of the foundation of «la Repubblica». He wrote in twelve years about five hundred cultural articles, interviewing and debating with many of the most influential contemporary thinkers (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Gianfranco Contini and many others).
The originality of my paper consist in highlighting the dynamics characterizing the eclectic activity of Enrico Filippini through a comprehensive study of his archives in order to reveal the author’s “narrative of self". Analysing the works and the creative process of the author (sketches, unpublished and unfinished work), studying his correspondence with other intellectuals (among the most important of the late twentieth century in Europe), considering the documents related to his editorial and journalistic work it’s possible to highlight new authorial aspects which characterized his entire cultural activity. For example, his creative laboratory is a work in progress where his life experiences are often recorded in memo form, without being reworked and fixed in a finished form in order to intentionally avoid the closure of experience. If the task of literary critics is to ensure the disclosure and the memory of an author, for example by publishing collection of short stories, novels, newspapers articles, in the case of Enrico Filippini is necessary, from a critical point of view, to consider and report his deep aversion to the closure of experience. Only then can we understand his fondness for experimental narrative during the 1960s and his propensity for journalistic activity and cultural mediation in later years. For these reasons it is useful to consider not only the published works of Enrico Filippini but also the “self-narrative” that emerges from the archive; the more fragmented his testimony appears to us, the richer it is because it allows us to understand the complexity of reality.
For its content and methodological discussion, the study may be of interest as well to researchers of other Humanities including areas such as other Literatures, Historiography, Archival science, Philosophy, Publishing History, History of translations, Modern European Intellectual History. The paper could also be interesting for the Comparative Literature Studies since the identification of the modus operandi of Enrico Filippini opens new paths of research, e.g. in order to better understand the similarities between his writing style and the one of Uwe Johnson, as well as the one of French writers of the nouveau roman.
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Lo studio degli archivi offre la possibilità di sondare il terreno fluido tra dimensione pubblica e privata delle carte, tra attività creativa e professionale di un autore, tra poetica del singolo e contesto culturale. I documenti dell'Archivio Enrico Filippini testimoniano una “narrazione di sé” che l'autore, in parte consapevolmente, ha costruito per testimoniare la sua esperienza di vita e che può essere letta come un’autobiografia da ricomporre. L'articolo intende fornire un'anticipazione dei risultati di uno studio complessivo delle carte, dal quale emerge il ritratto di uno degli intellettuali più notevoli della seconda metà del Novecento italiano.