Language and reality in Gian Mario Villalta’s neodialect poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the relationship between the Italian questione della lingua and Gian Mario Villalta’s neodialect poetry. It emphasizes how Villalta’s poetic dialect engages the conflicting linguistic experiences of the poetic subject as well as the socio-historical transformations that have occurred in the reality of his community. This analysis demonstrates how Villalta’s neodialect poetry constructs an original form of dialogical realism, that is to say a poetic strategy capable of incorporating into the text itself the socio-linguistic tensions within and between the subject and his community as exemplary of the tangible persistence of a particular – albeit upended and scarcely recognizable – historical reality.