ABSTRACT
The association between realism and experimentalism was quite unusual when Susanna Pasolini started talking about it in Officina. Overall, as a number of critics have remarked, the activity of Officina marks the shift from a neorealist culture to that of literary experimentalism, which finally developed into neo-avant-garde literary practices. As Pasolini argued in various articles in Officina, language is not a lingua franca, a neutral tool to describe the world, but a reflection of socio-economic structures: basically, the core of negotiation between reality and literature which can be used to construct social identities or resist the strong forces of dominant classes. According to Pasolini, Giovanni Pascoli’s plurilingualism does not have anything in common with Manzoni’s or Verga’s ideological realism. In Pasolini’s career, the period from 1960 to 1965 can be considered as the ultimate recognition of the end of Dantean realism.
