Revolutionary Road: Collective Analysis of a Literary Text

The paper deals with a semiotic analysis of the literary text, focusing on Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road (1961): a dramatic mid-twentieth-century portrait of social appearances and their negative impact on personal identities. The analysis was carried out by a group of students as part of a seminar at the University of Bologna, in the master's degree program in Semiotics, and constitutes the outcome of an experiment that led to a research product through a didactic process. In the first phase, the novel was analyzed in each individual chapter; then, through didactic coordination, a few macro-themes (spatiality, temporality, corporeity, gender) emerged which the subgroups proceeded to a specific in-depth study. Among the results, it appeared how spatiality is a relevant feature not in itself, but in relation to the sense effects it produces: such as the opposition between public and private, and the relationship between social appearances and intimate dimensions. The temporal dimension was also considered relevant: a back-and-forth between past and future related to the characters' nostalgia for a future they never realized. Finally, the analysis showed the relevance, within the novel, of the correlation between corporeality, gender and passions, not only functional to describe the characters, but to define their status as social bodies, which in the fictional story possessed a higher value than natural bodies.