Neither Utopia nor Juvenile Transgression: Retracing the Link between the Movimento del ’77, Autonomy, and Literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the link between Italian Autonomy, the Bolognese Movimento del ’77, and associated literary works: Enrico Palandri’s Boccalone and Andrea Pazienza’s Pentothal. Scholars have generally interpreted such works as venues for the expression of a fleeting moment of juvenile transgression, subsequently to be overcome. We contend instead that the work of Pazienza and Palandri can be viewed as evidence of the Autonomist project fuelling the Movement, as manifest in their concern with non-hierarchical forms of sociality free from the trappings of capitalism. This alternative politics emerges in the ‘adolescent tone’ adopted in Boccalone and Pentothal. We argue that, because adolescent writing hinges on (re-)creating communal spaces independent of adult power, these works should not be seen to mark an overcoming of the Movement’s collectivist politics, as scholarship to date has proposed, but as literary spaces that enable us to access the sociality of 1977 and its challenges.