Resistance, War and Contingency

Abstract

Focusing on the specific case represented by the debut collection of the poet Franco Fortini, the paper chooses to investigate not only the presence of war as a founding engine of a Western literary canon but also, more specifically, the nature of the impact caused by the resistance event on a renewed conception of existence and of the world in a political and aesthetic sense. The event in question, conceived in its radicality and as a universal human capacity to stand before and take a stand against an otherness perceived as imposing, coercive or generally harmful to man, seems in fact to assume the function of a true terminus post quem datare a radical redefinition of the literary field.