Storia di una storia con poca storia: l’ispanistica italiana tra letteratura, filologia e linguistica

Abstract

History of a story with little history: Italian Hispanicism between literature, philology and linguistics

During the twentieth century, the mainstream of the Italian scholar and academie tradition concerning moderm and contemporary Spain has been based and centered on philology and literature.
Even after 1945 most of the books, essays and journals written and published in Italy on Spanish topics were almost entirely devoted to literature and the arts, with various biographical sketches of the most famous writers and artists, many editions of their single or collected works and few literarian anthologies and iconographie catalogues. Each genre needed and implied history, but always conceived it as an instrument or as a matter of contents, more than as a real context or as an autonomous discourse and a critical strategy for focusing the past of Spain in itself. History was just a narrative, used to support and link a collection of personal stories, figures, book and characters. For more recent literature as for any other genre of strictly contemporary culture production the notion and the word of history could even disappear, misplaced by other and more synchronical labels, as i.e. panorama and overview. In Italy and for Italian Spanish studies, the focus on history is a very recent achievement, and paradoxically could be related with the crisis of literature and history, due to the worldwide diffusion of the structuralism, the collapse of ideologies, the polemics of the so called revisionism and the international rise of hermeneutics, postmodernism and computer based linguistics.