An approach to the problem of realism in linguistic terms, starting from a consideration of the linguistic institute as “mediation between poetry and culture”, is at the origin of the verse production of the neo-avant-garde (see in this App.) And of authors that follow similar paths, reached through a completely independent work of elaboration or more or less correlated to the neo-avant-garde experience.

Villa (The privilege of being alive ; We are ancient beings), G. Musa (The artificial night ; Berliner Mauer), C. Marsan (The marginal condition), C. Vivaldi (Details) and many others. On the level of a very personal invention of a comic-pathetic style, in which the use of non – sense constitutes a structural element, the Poems of the end of the world are placedby A. Delfini. From a work of selection of linguistic materials on the basis of the mimesis of the procedures and messages of the unconscious, the most recent poem by A. Zanzotto is born (IX Ecloghe ; La beltà ; Gli sguardi fatti e senhal ; A che valse?). Similarly secluded and built on the original “gnomic-metaphorical” inventive plan already experimented with La restitution, the most recent production of E. Cacciatore (The mirror and the spinning top ; All powers) is born.

According to THEFREEGEOGRAPHY.COM, the situation of Italian fiction at the beginning of the 1960s also moves within the context of needs expressed in the immediately preceding years through a series of extremely significant proposals and experiences. The publication of V. Pratolini ‘s Metello had marked the definitive crisis of Neorealism, with the debate that had begun on the novel. Metelloin fact, hailed by certain sectors as an example of an overcoming of neorealism in the direction of realism, it had offered the occasion for a recovery of that theory of art engaged in an immediately political sense which had constituted the central theme, explicit or latent, of the problematic art of the immediate postwar period. Having beaten the theory of socialist realism in the Zdanovian formulation, it was now re-proposed in a version that borrowed from the last Lukàcs the definition of realism as the master line of a progressive and positive art. Such a response to the situation of the narrative in Italy could only prove to be wholly inadequate to the level of critical awareness actually achieved in the post-war field of literature, in particular through the experiences of C. Pavese and E. Vittorini. The attempt to recover reality, implemented by Pavese through the rejection of history and reason, and the reference to being, to nature, to myth as a universal objective order, and by Vittorini through a procedure of generalization of the empirical data in an allegorical key, in fact, he had unequivocally indicated the way forward for Italian fiction, despite the uncertainties and delays that had characterized the very experiences of the two writers.  After Pavese and Vittorini, in short, it was clear that the problem of realism in literature was to be set as a research in the direction of expressive levels and not as a finding of new contents. It is precisely in this sense that the historical function of the series of fiction i must be understood Gettoni directed by E. Vittorini for Einaudi during the 1950s, not exempt in turn from contradictions generated by a certain abstractly programmatic rigidity that sometimes undermined the writer’s choices. However, it is precisely starting from the “experimentalism” of the Tokens that the problem of realism in literature is set up as the ability to adhere not to new data but to a new relationship with data, that is, to a relationship between “responsible novelty of language” and ” specific novelty of the time “. The proof of the correspondence of this line to the Italian cultural situation can be found by analyzing the fate of two novels, Il Gattopardo and Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, published almost simultaneously in the late 1950s. While the volume publication of CE Gadda ‘s Pasticciaccio (published in magazine since 1946) opened a new phase of fiction in Italy, starting it, through various avenues, towards ways of anti-traditional experimentation, Il Gattopardo by G. Tomasi di Lampedusa formula of the historical novel, the old naturalistic model. It is precisely to this character of the work, which appeared at a crucial moment in the literary elaboration in Italy, that the real terms of a controversy that saw the Italian culture divided, apparently on the evaluation of the novel, but in fact on the development and future outcomes of fiction.

The real extent of the controversy about Il Gattopardo is confirmed by the large number of inquiries on the novel that were carried out in those years by numerous periodicals (from Ulysses to Il Paese, Nuovi Argomenti, Il Verri, etc.) in which, and this will be the characteristic of the literary debate of the Sixties, the project and the positive proposal now prevailed over the destructive criticism. Undoubtedly, this heated discussion on the novel genre also played a role in determining the series of movements aimed in three main directions that characterized Italian fiction production over the last fifteen years.