‘I/eye’: sconfinamenti e poetiche della dissolvenza nei saggi lirici di Anne Carson e Antonella Anedda

One of the characteristics of the ‘lyric essay’ – a recently detected hybrid genre that mingles elements from various literary forms – consists in a peculiar linguistic use of the ‘I’: on the one hand, the ‘I’ shares an intimate privacy with the reader that resembles the one of the personal essay, thus eliciting an autobiographical correspondence between the ‘real’ authorial person and its diegetic projection; on the other hand, this ‘I’ appears “more reticent, almost coy” (Tall and D’Agata 1997), that is, nearer to the poetic transfiguration operated by the ‘lyrical I’ of modern poetry. This ambiguous statement reveals an intrinsic tension of the voice in the lyric essay, in a perennial oscillation between the external world and the inner self, essayistic clarity and lyrical obscurity. The ‘I’ becomes more fluctuant when it comes to its encounter with the landscape, namely one marked by borders and geographical margins: a descriptive and ‘documenting’ aim conflagrates with an experience often close to the sublime and the subsequent dissolution of the autobiographical ‘I’ into metaphoricity, with important consequences both on the diegetic and the mimetic level. This literary and epistemological phenomenon, which may be synthetized in homophonic pun ‘I/eye’, will be observed in the writings of two contemporary authors working with hybrid forms: Anne Carson and Antonella Anedda.