Towards a grammar of choral storytelling

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i8.11486
Keywords: choral novel, choral storytelling, voice, free indirect speech, monologue

Abstract

What is choral storytelling? How can the narrative genre integrate within itself something that by statute does not seem to belong to it, namely a chorus, ‘a set of voices singing simultaneously’? The essay attempts to answer these questions starting from the narratological problem of voice and formulating a grammar that moves between two ‘poles’: the monodic chorus and the polyphonic chorus. Texts such as Verga’s I Malavoglia belong to the former category, while texts such as Woolf’s The Waves belong to the latter, two examples that offer two models at the antipodes of what we commonly call the ‘choral novel’: on the one hand a single voice, which becomes the expression of a collective point of view, and on the other several voices, which end up blending into one. On the one hand the anonymous crowd, on the other the voices that become indistinct. On one side the speech of the fabulant community, on the other the lyrical music of soliloquies.

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Author Biography

Gloria Scarfone, University of Pisa

Gloria Scarfone is a Postdoctoral fellow in Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Pisa. She has published three monographs: Goliarda Sapienza. Un’autrice ai margini del sistema letterario (Transeuropa 2018), Il pensiero monologico. Personaggio e vita psichica in Volponi, Morante e Pasolini (Mimesis 2022 – “Dino Garrone” Young Literary Criticism Prize 2023), and Anatomia del personaggio romanzesco. Storia, forme e teorie di una categoria letteraria (Carocci 2024). She has also co-edited a volume on the family novel (“Non poteva staccarsene senza lacerarsi”. Per una genealogia del romanzo familiare italiano, PUP 2020), a special issue (“allegoria” 88/2023) devoted to representations of lesbian desire (Rappresentare il desiderio lesbico: un’indagine sulla narrativa italiana 1930-1967) and the minibook Il monologo autonomo. Penelope di Joyce e le sue varianti (Pacini 2021).

Published
2024-12-28
How to Cite
ScarfoneG. (2024). Towards a grammar of choral storytelling. SigMa - Rivista Di Letterature Comparate, Teatro E Arti Dello Spettacolo, (8), 212-232. https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i8.11486
Issue
No 8 (2024): Simultaneity and polyphony. Choir voices in contemporary drama and the arts
Section
Sezione monografica

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