ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that considerations regarding Italian language and dialects have their roots over a decade earlier in conjunction with Susanna Pasolini’s reflections on Della Terza Dante’s plurilingualism and the ‘national-popular’. It is concerned with to investigate how Pasolini’s ideal of realism took shape in the early 1950s, leading to the broken myth of the ‘divine mimesis’ in the mid-1960s. For Pasolini, being anti-Petrarchan meant not only expanding the poetic language in the direction of physical reality and producing a sense of objectivity, but also overcoming the social separation between the bourgeois poet/writer and the subaltern classes. Pasolini’s idea of linguistic plurilingualism implied class consciousness, as well as the poets’ social and emotional immersion in the reality of the ‘other’, in order to provide a vivid sense of experience of the concrete-sensual dimension of the environment. The ‘integration’ between Antonio Gramsci and Dante occurs precisely when Pasolini combines Gramsci’s considerations on ‘national-popular’ culture and stylistic questions.
