"Narrativa di frontiera".
Fenomenologia di una forma aperta.
Creators: name: Giustini, Francesco <1981>
Publisher: name: Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
Year: 2009
Subjects: L-FIL-LET/14 Critica letteraria e letterature comparate

description: «Fiction of frontier». Phenomenology of an open form/voice.

Francesco Giustini’s PhD dissertation fits into a genre of research usually neglected by
the literary criticism which nevertheless is arousing much interest in recent years: the
relationship between Literature and Space. In this context, the specific issue of his work
consists in the category of the Frontier including its several implications for the XX
century fiction. The preliminary step, at the beginning of the first section of the
dissertation, is a semantic analysis: with precision, Giustini describes the meaning of the
word “frontier” here declined in a multiplicity of cultural, political and geographical
contexts, starting from the American frontier of the pioneers who headed for the West, to
the exotic frontiers of the world, with whose the imperialistic colonization has come into
contact; from the semi-uninhabited areas like deserts, highlands and virgin forests, to the
ethnic frontiers between Indian and white people in South America, since the internal
frontiers of the Countries like those ones between the District and the Capital City, the
Centre and the Outskirts.
In the next step, Giustini wants to focus on a real “ myth of the frontier”, able to nourish
cultural and literary imagination. Indeed, the literature has told and chosen the frontier
as the scenery for many stories; especially in the 20th Century it made the frontier a
problematic space in the light of events and changes that have transformed the perception
of space and our relationship with it.
Therefore, the dissertation proposes a critical category, it traces the hallmarks of a
specific literary phenomenon defined “ Fiction of the frontier” ,present in many literary
traditions during the 20th Century. The term “Fiction” (not “Literature” or “Poetics”) does
not define a genre but rather a “procedure”, focusing on a constant issue pointed out from
the texts examined in this work : the strong call to the act of narration and to its oral
traditions. The “Fiction of the Frontier” is perceived as an approach to the world, a way of
watching and feeling the objects, an emotion that is lived and told through the story- a
story where the narrator ,through his body and his voice, takes the rule of the witness.
The following parts, that have an analytic style, are constructed on the basis of this
theoretical and methodological reflection. The second section gives a wide range of
examples into we can find the figure and the myth of the frontier through the textual
analysis which range over several literary traditions. Starting from monographic chapters
(Garcia Marquez, Callado, McCarthy), to the comparative reading of couples of texts
(Calvino and Verga Llosa, Buzzati and Coetzee, Arguedas and Rulfo). The selection of
texts is introduced so as to underline a particular aspect or a form of the frontier at every
reading. This section is articulated into thematic voices which recall some actions that can
be taken into the ambiguous and liminal space of the frontier (to communicate, to wait, to
“trans-culturate”, to imagine, to live in, to not-live in). In this phenomenology, the frontier
comes to the light as a physical and concrete element or as a cultural, imaginary, linguistic,
ethnic and existential category.
In the end, the third section is centered on a more defined and elaborated analysis of two
authors, considered as fundamental for the comprehension of the “Fiction of the frontier”:
Joseph Conrad and João Guimarães Rosa. Even if they are very different, being part of
unlike literary traditions, these two authors show many connections which are pointed by
the comparative analysis. Maybe Conrad is the first author that understand the feeling of
the frontier , freeing himself from the adventure romance and from the exotic nineteenthcentury
tradition. João Guimarães Rosa, in his turn, is the great narrator of Brazilian and
South American frontier, he is the man of sertão and of endless spaces of the Centre of
Brazil. His production is strongly linked to that one belonged to the author of Heart of
Darkness.