Heteroglossia and Diglossia in Italian contemporary Italian novel

PhD Proposal Thesis

Heteroglossia, Diglossiae and Polylingualism, in Italian contemporary and Italophone Post-Colonial novels, identifying common "transnational and cross-lingual process of pollinations".
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE USE OF REGIONAL KOINEI' AND HYBRIDIZED UTTERANCES IN BOTH CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN AND IN ITALOPHONE POST-COLONIAL NOVELS OF THE MOST RECENT DIASPORAS TOWARDS ITALY

RESEARCH PROBLEM
The use of hetereoglossia, diglossia and polylingualism has recently given life to a new literary trend the Italian Novel. In the first ten years of the 21st century, some Italian novelists have experimented the coexistence of Italian, regional Italian language together with local dialects in literature. These mingled use of languages in some novels resulted in best seller all over the world.
In the same period of time, a considerable number of immigrants, come from the underdeveloped world(from South America to East Europe, from Africa to Asia) and settled in Italy. Many of them , as second generation, have also become authors of literary works originally written in Italian language and not as translations from their mother tongue. In this literary production (novels, short stories, essays and commentary blogs) some critics have underlined the interesting phenomenon of creolization and contaminations of the Italian language with the writers' mother tongues. Cross-lingual pollinations and intertextualities among these contemporary writers will be also investigated. The socio-political reasons of this use of Italian hybridized language in their writings will also be explained.
The theorethical framework of referment is the relationship, expressed by the language, between "hegemonic and subaltern culture", "dominant and dominated culture", accrding to the same definitions by Antonio Gramsci; the connection of linguistic studies with the society which a given language represents as in the concept of"Language as ideology" ; the linguistic representations of the "other" or the "different" in Italian; the "colonizer-colonized" opposition; discourse/language as forms of "social practice"; language as an instrument of power and control.
As an historical and starting point of referment I will firstly analyze, from a sociolinguitic point of view, the different use and role of the dialect("romanesco"language) in two Italian novels of the past century, both set in Rome in the fascist and post-fascist era :Carlo Emilio Gadda,"That awful mess of via Merulana," and Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Ragazzi di vita"("Hustlers").
Secondly, I will analyze the use of heteroglossiae and diglossiae in a contemporary Italian novel which uses venetian language, as the latest development of the use of dialect in the novel,: Antonio Pennacchio,"Canale Mussolini"
Comparatively, I will search the mutual and reciprocal contamination of Italian language with other idioms in some translingual Italophone immigrant writers. The language they use in their novels can be classified as a new variety of Italian, because of the many hybridizations(calque and metaphors) with their native idiom. It also presents some comparative aspects in the use of language with the Italian novelists of the first group.

3. THE SUBJECT OF THE THESIS

The diglossiae and heteroglossiae in Gadda, Pasolini and Pennacchio and the Italophone novels of the recent immigration(Lemri, de Britos Delgado and Lakhous ) will be comparatively analyzed according to the "colonizer/colonized" binary opposition together with the socio-political framework and context of these post-modern, literary-linguistic phenomena . The common intertextualities, cultural and linguistic cross-pollination or socio-political interconnections amongst the analyzed novels. The diaspora "route" of the immigrant Italophone novelists will be also tracked down through their literary language . The research will be focused on how this group of Italian and Italophone novelists, using "heteroglossia" and other hybridized utterances in their literary language, can connect themselves to the World Literature discourse, internationalizing Italian Literature which, for some aspects, apparently suffers of provincialism and self-referentiality.


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