The Double Text. “Alternative Variants” in Italian tradition

This article deals with the case of alternative variants, i.e. those variants which are written by the author after the first draft of the text, but on which the author does not give us precise indications: “competing readings between which the author does not know how to decide, or in any case does not give certain signs of knowing how to decide” (Isella 1983, xxxv). The alternative variants are a “double text”: the first step of rewriting the text, where the author’s will manifests itself in a dual form. Thanks to the extraordinary richness of case studies offered by the Italian tradition — from the fourteenth to twentieth century (from Petrarch to Gadda) — alternative variants will be analyzed in their different typologies, over time to verify whether the ways of representing the “double text”, the “double will” of the author, have been similar or different in time, and whether it can be compared with alternative variants of other literary traditions.