Le ragioni dell'altro: La formazione intellettuale di Pasolini tra saggistica, letteratura e cinema

The book offers a reassessment of Pasolini's intellectual formation between 1940 and 1961. Chapter 1 deals with Pasolini's earliest intellectual activity as a student in Fascist, wartime Bologna. Chapter 2 deals with his work in Friuli and in Friulan dialect between 1942 and 1949, looking in turn at poetry, political activism, and prose narrative. Chapters 3-5 move forward to the 1950s and to Rome, examining the early narrative and poetry of the period (Chapter 3), literary criticism (Chapter 4), and the two most influential novels of the 1950s, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta (Chapter 5). Finally, the argument is supplemented and stretched forward into Pasolini's later career by Chapter 6's reading of his first film, Accattone (1961), by way of his 1960s essays in film semiology. The principal aim of the book, and its claim as a distinct contribution to the field of critical work on Pasolini, is to argue for the existence of a coherent and consistent intellectual project beneath his varied oeuvre. In the past, such a coherence has not merely been denied in the critical consensus on Pasolini; rather, its very opposite - contradiction or incoherence (often seen as deriving from a certain magpie-like intellectual eclecticism) - has tended to be exalted as the cornerstone of his intellectual modus operandi. The book traces the ways in which Pasolini's work engages subtly and critically with the dominant modes of political and philosophical thought of his day. An important part of the analysis shows that the much touted points of profound fracture in Pasolini's career - first the move from Friuli to Rome, following expulsion from the Communist Party (PCI) and prosecution for molesting minors in 1949-50; and then the move into film-making in 1959 - mask strong continuities in his concerns and his tactics for addressing them