Dal funambolo al subalterno: note su Joyce postcoloniale, da una prospettiva gramsciana

Mauro Pala

2022-01-01

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Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s Gramsci’s name was often cited by the architects of the postcolonial critical period, for the most part with reference to the concept of hegemony and in a fairly generic way. Meanwhile, Gramsci and Joyce, as protagonists and interpreters of the turbulent genesis of the Short Twentieth Century, have much in common regarding the link between culture and subordination. Even on a formal level, Gramsci’s reflections on language as a “continuous process of metaphors” and the history of semantics as “an aspect of the history of culture” were not taken into account, although these notions could illustrate how Gramsci’s positions are consonant with, or even analogous to, qualifying features of Joyce’s poetics. Here it is hoped that thanks to Gramsci’s contributions, Joyce’s work will be seen as an extraordinary example of philological reflections on reality, and emphasizing that the most recent critical trends, putting aside the antidemocratic glorification that characterized much modernism, together reject the nihilistic outcome of a certain deconstruction.