Le dimensioni spazio-temporali del genere letterario : Enrico Falqui e la pluralità della prosa d'arte

Literary genre cannot be conceived of as an unequivocal and unidimensional notion. It appears in the field of literature and criticism in a multiplicity of ways, meanings and functions. One aspect creating the variety of manners in which genre occurs, is that of duration, i.e. the extent to which genre is determined by co-ordinates of time (historical moment) and space (cultural environment). Together with duration varies the measure in which a genre is specified by distinguishing features: the novel is characterized by more specific features than the novellistic, but less specific than the naturalistnovel. These dimensions of time and space are here called "genre", "mode", "poetics". The time-space dimensions of literary genre play an essential role in critical discourse, both historical and contemporary. In critical studies different dimensions of genre should not exclude one another but rather be integrated in a pluridimensional concept. Moreover, adeguate reconstruction of his-torical debates requires an analysis of the ambiguity and complexity caused by diverse meanings of genre. These assumptions are illustrated by analyzing the use of the notion of prosa d'arte in the anthology Capitoli (1938) by Enrico Falqui, in which polemic argumentation depends in part on the intertwining of different dimensions of prosa d'arte.