Marcello Carlino

Interview

• "From the allegorical voyage to the symbolic voyage: the Paris of Walter Benjamin and the global village of the Internet" (Rome, 04/06/97)

Biography

Marcello Carlino was born in 1949. A researcher at the Department of Italian Studies and Performance Arts at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza', he is interested in modern and contemporary Italian literature and currently teaches the theory of literature.

His critical method has been particularly influenced by the theoretical positions of Galvano della Volpe and Walter Benjamin, on whom he has written various studies published in reviews and books.

From della Volpe he has derived the notion of "polysemy", as a determining abstraction, instrument and function of the specificity and political characteristics of the literary text: from Benjamin the notion of allegory, which he has attempted to reread in relation to contemporaneity (thus in contrast with every postmodern trivialisation) and to revive as the orientation of alternative writing (as in Letteratura italiana del primo Novecento (1900-1915), written with F. Muzzioli).

Della Volpe and Benjamin are also the basis for the hypothesis of materialist writing which he elaborated with the collective of the 'Quaderni di critica'(a fundamental part of his work) and which is the pivot of the group's research material and criticism of literature: from their book on the neo-avant-garde to that on Gadda, from their publications on the literary theories of the Frankfurt School to those on Volponi and Cacciatore.