«Il semplice», laboratorio di brevità

This paper proposes an initial analysis of the experiments around the short forms of narration carried out in the six issues of the journal «Il semplice» (1995-1997). As statutory and unavoidable dimension of the textuality of a journal, brevitas in this case becomes the real ‘cognitive radical’ from which derives the choice of an endless variety of textual typologies in the journal’s indexes, from practical writings to micro-narratives or transcriptions of the living voice of dead people. The short form is the instrument of a battle waged by Ermanno Cavazzoni, Gianni Celati, Daniele Benati and the other editors of the journal against the omnipresence and conformist omnipotence of the novel, but also the terrain of expression of a common ‘repertorial’ vocation testified to by the Catalogo delle prose secondo la specie at the opening of each issue, which conceals an idea of literature as a mapping of the world. A capillary and eccentric enterprise, necessarily imperfect, and for this reason inexhaustible