Giacomo Debenedetti

Giacomo Debenedetti (born June 25, 1901 in Biella , † January 20, 1967 in Rome ) was an Italian literary critic and writer .

life and work

Memorial stone in honor of Debendetti, which was placed on Corso San Maurizio 52 in Turin in 1987

At a very young age, the versatile Debenedetti moved to Turin , where he studied three subjects one after the other: mathematics , law and philology . With Sergio Solmi , Mario Gromo and Emanuele Sacerdote he founded the literary magazine Primo Tempo in 1922 , which appeared until 1924 and in which he published articles on Benedetto Croce , Carlo Michelstaedter , Giovanni Boine and Umberto Saba . He then wrote until 1928 in Il Baretti by Piero Gobetti , with whom he was good friends; reviews about Saba, Raymond Radiguet , Italo Svevo and Marcel Proust appeared there . He was one of the first in Italy to draw attention to the scope of psychoanalysis - also and especially for cultural work - and recognized the genius of Proust, whose Du côté de chez Swann he translated into Italian.

Since his collection of short stories Amedeo ed altri racconti , published in 1926, had only moderate success, he switched from writing to literary criticism at an early stage. In 1927 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the early Gabriele D'Annunzio , and in 1929 the first series of his literary critical writings appeared under the title Saggi critici (further volumes came out in 1945 and 1959). In addition to his critical contributions to Il convegno , Solaria and La fiera letteraria , he also wrote film scripts and worked on translations (Proust, George Eliot , Henry Miller , Katherine Mansfield ).

Since the entry into force of the Italian race laws in 1938, as a member of a “Jewish” family, he was forced to publish anonymously or under a pseudonym in order to avoid fascist persecution. He documented his traumatic experiences during the raids and deportations in Rome's Jewish ghetto in 1944 in the two stories Otto ebrei and 16 ottobre 1943 , which were also translated into German. In his 1949 essay Probabile autobigrafia di una generazione , he described his political experiences, which led him, as well as numerous other intellectuals of his generation, from the resistance to the Communist Party (PCI).

After the Second World War he began teaching Italian literature , first in Messina , then in Rome. The communication of contemporary literature and its central, complex statements took him completely in the context of his academic work, so that he changed his writing style and only published occasionally. In 1967 he was awarded an Antonio Feltrinelli Prize . Most of his valuable university records were published by his wife Renata after his death in 1967.

Critical approach to literature

Giacomo Debenedetti was a unique critic. With him, every sentence can also be understood as an intellectual autobiography . But behind his pointed pen and his stylistic flexibility, the fearful need to secure himself with intellectual greats was hidden, which is why he sought orientation from bourgeois authorities such as the literary historians Francesco De Sanctis , Benedetto Croce and Renato Serra at a young age . With increasing education and experience, however, he broadened the horizon of his interpretive perception and placed his readings not only in the purely Italian, but also in a pan-European or occidental context; he understood it not only from a purely literary and historical point of view, but also with the help of other disciplines such as v. a. psychoanalysis ( Freud , Jung ), phenomenology ( Husserl ), modern physics ( Bohr , Heisenberg ) and cultural anthropology ( Lévi-Strauss ).

Since the focus of his cognitive processes were not objective facts, but the subjective , inner motives and problems of an author , he did not commit himself to a specific method and rather left the exploration of special author-specific symbols and myths to his own intuition , which was appropriate to the respective requirements . d. H. the subjectivity of the reader , which he deliberately consulted. In this way, Debenedetti's reviews of his works repeatedly became high-level art prose or “critical narratives” (“racconti critici”), as they were often referred to by contemporary receptionists .

Central to Debenedetti's understanding of literature was the human being as a literary figure - he dedicated an entire book to him with Il personaggio uomo and described it as a " provisional obituary " ("commemorazione provvisoria"): Because modern man after his studies of various characters in fiction Trapped in hopeless, indissoluble neuroses , he sees himself exposed to permanent alienation ; and the bourgeois type of clearly identifiable figures that still prevailed in the 19th century ceased to exist. He is convinced that there is still a human, protesting core in every figure, but this is prevented from expressing itself by a society that is no longer in harmony with itself - it is always dragged off and nipped in its bud.

He saw it as the most important task of both the writer and the critic to trace these mechanisms of alienation down to the last nooks and crannies and thus to point out the existential crisis of man in modern mass society . In addition, according to Debenedetti's idealistic self-understanding, the critic is supposed to save the humane values of literature into the future after temporarily denying them - even at the price of becoming out of date. Provided that he really believes in these values ​​and was not mistaken about them, each value would then emerge as a necessary development stage to achieve new, deeper forms of expression.

Works

stories

• Amedeo e altri racconti. Edizioni del Baretti, Turin 1926.
• 16 ottobre 1943. Il Saggiatore, Milan 1959.
• Otto ebrei. Il Saggiatore, Milan 1961.

Essays / literary criticism

• Saggi critici. Vol. 1: Edizioni di Solaria , Florence 1929; Vol. 2: OET, Rome 1945; Vol. 3: Il Saggiatore, Milan 1959.
• Radiorecita su Marcel Proust. Macchia, Rome 1953.
• Intermezzo. Mondadori, Milan 1963.
• II personaggio uomo. Il Saggiatore, Milan 1970.
• Il romanzo del Novecento. Garzanti, Milan 1971.
• Niccolò Tommaseo. Garzanti, Milan 1973.
• Poesia italiana del Novecento. Garzanti, Milan 1974.
• Forgot il naturalismo. Garzanti, Milan 1976.
• La vocazione di Vittorio Alfieri. Editori Riuniti, Rome 1977.
• Pascoli: la rivoluzione inconsapevole. Quaderni mediti. Garzanti, Milan 1979.
• Rileggere Proust e altri saggi proustiani. Mondadori, Milan 1982.
• Al cinema. Marsilio, Venice 1983.
• Quaderni di Montaigne. Garzanti, Milan 1986.

German translations

• October 16, 1943. Eight Jews. The Arsenal, Berlin 1993.

literature

• Cesare Garboli (Ed.): Giacomo Debenedetti 1901-1967. Il Saggiatore, Milan 1968.
• Cantatore, Lorenzo: Bibliografia di Giacomo Debenedetti . Rome: Carucci, 1990
• Agostini-Ouafi, Viviana: Giacomo Debenedetti. Traducteur de Marcel Proust . Caen: Presses Université de Caen, 2003

Web links

• Literature by and about Giacomo Debenedetti in the catalog of the German National Library
• www.giacomodebenedetti.it (Italian)
• Short biography from libero.it (Italian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Debenedetti, G. in an interview for the daily newspaper L'Unità on March 27, 1963: “(…) un nucleo umano protestatario e imbavagliato, tenuto in mora, impedito di esprimersi da un mondo, da una società non più in accordo con se medesima. "
2. ↑ See ibid .: “A costo di sembrare inattuale, il critico deve tenere in salvo per l'indomani i valori, transitoriamente sconfessati, se crede davvero che siano valori. Posto che egli non si sia sbagliato (ma allora lo si vede subito dai difetti della sua dimostrazione critica), ciascuno di quei valori, apparirà come una tappa necessaria per giungere a nuove e profonde forme d'espressione. "