Vasco Pratolini y la tradición del cuento boccacciano: un análisis sociocrítico de <em>Le Ragazze di Sanfrediano</em>

Abstract

Starting from the clear links between Pratolini’s work and the tradition of the boccaccian tale, the perspective we have adopted will be based upon the motif of the retrieval, use and abuse of excluded narrative discourses. We shall underline how a different use of themes and formal structures, as well as the relationship between the text being analysed and its original cronotopos, contribute towards a semantic enrichment of the novel. Through a reading which will take into account mecanisms such as textual “calcos” (textual discoursive indexes), “textual  loans”,  allusions  (and  other  structural  components  which  operate  as “anaphoric elements”), we shall attempt to demonstrate how the novel acquires a new status, deriving from the incorporation in its structure of excluded languages (mostly boccaccio’s  language), as well as from the reenactment of meaningful practices in a way which undermines readers’ expectations, accustomed as they were to a certain type of politically committed neo-realist narrative. If we consider Le ragazze di Sanfrediano as a veritable “crossroad of intercomunicating texts”, we shall be able to analyse the relationship which this very same text establishes with history, literary or otherwise, as well as with the “new”, current cronotopos, thus evaluating it as a synthesis of diacronic and sincronic dimensions. The study of  the novel’s referenciality, of the dialectic tension to which the elements that compose the work are submitted, shall allow us to better grasp the new no-realist meaning produced by Le ragazze.