Dialogare con gli anni Settanta. Dinamiche di rinegoziazione della memoria storica in Stefano Tassinari e Jonathan Coe

Abstract

The decade of the Seventies is a period characterised all around Europe by workers protest, terrorist violence, and the profound crisis of economics and politics. Frequently, mainstream narratives about these years provide a bleak representation of this period, underestimating the cultural achievements of the decade and the conquests within the field of civil rights. With L'amore degli insorti and The Rotters' Club, Stefano Tassinari and Jonathan Coe deal with the Seventies in a unique way, linking their reflections on that period to its consequences in the present. After some theoretical considerations on the concept of violence, this essay will discuss the narrative structure of the two novels, demonstrating how their peculiar structures are capable of providing us a vivid representation of the Seventies. Moreover, discussing the choice of the protagonists of the novels, thanks to the Bachtinian ideas about authorship and characters, this essay will focus on the capacity of these two novels of enlarging the debate on the Seventies, giving voice to unusual and silenced protagonists of that decade.