Dare voce alle vite marginali: plurilinguismo di genere nella narrativa di Laura Pariani

Abstract

This article analyses the literary work of Laura Pariani (1951–), a writer who, over the last twenty years, has gained a niche position in the contemporary canon. After situating Pariani in the context of Italian fiction in the 1990s–2010s, the analysis focuses on the ‘centrality of margins’ as the inspiring principle underpinning her production. In Pariani’s writings marginality — geographical, gender-based, generational, linguistic — becomes a privileged point of view from which to assess the world. The protagonists of her works are women, but also children, immigrants, the socially marginalized, often dialect speakers, or those caught in situations of opposition to or compromise with the ‘language of power’, covering a chronological range from the sixteenth century to today. The decision to place those whom History has ignored at the centre of the stories, to give voice to the voiceless, is investigated here with a focus on multilingualism, on the places of narration, and on narrative structures, and is related back to the author’s youthful militancy in the youth movements of the 1970s, including Milan’s feminist collectives.