biblioteca di studi di filologia moderna – 10 - Firenze University Press

due Parole sulla PARALETTERATURA 53
Paraliterature is thus whatever needs to be denied in order to assert
the importance of a form and the centrality of its associated community.
The genres that embody the experience, values, and knowledge
of that group must be made to seem natural and universal, and genres
that challenge or ignore the group’s identity must accordingly be
defined as abnormal, eccentric, and nonliterary.
for this reason alone, it is worth gathering together the various
paraliterary forms in order to see what they say about our culture. The
audiences they appeal to, such as children and women; the settings
they invoke, such as the West or outer space; the storytelling formulas
they have developed, such as the voyage of adventure or the solving
of a mystery: these are the repressed elements of the cultural self.
This knowledge is what literature cannot acknowledge 29 .
nei saggi successivi contenuti nella rivista si consolida l’idea che ormai
la paraletteratura non abbia più bisogno di legittimazione, anche se
trapela comunque una diffusa insofferenza per la persistenza, nell’opinione
comune e anche nella produzione critica, della percezione di una
dicotomia incancellabile. Per esempio, John Huntington parla di «overwhelming
shadow of the privileged concept of ‘literature’» 30 , mentre
david Ketterer cita il caso di Frankenstein (1818) di mary shelley, un romanzo
indubbiamente paraletterario che negli ultimi venti anni è stato
subdolamente «maneuvered into the slowly reconstructed pantheon of
canonic literature» 31 . Jean marigny ricorda che «Poe was ignored in his
lifetime, lewis carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) was long considered
a book for children only, and we might find many other examples
of this kind» 32 , mentre david n. samuelson sostiene addirittura una superiorità
della paraletteratura (il lateral thinking), che una volta accolta
dal canone potrebbe morirne (the kiss of death):
Paraliterary forms with which i am most familiar – science fiction,
utopia, fantasy, myth – often entertain broader visions of the universe
and of human behavior than the academy recognizes. […] like any
social institution, the 20th century literary canon is myopic, measuring
the past by relevance to its own formation. […] indeed, much
past writing would be paraliterary were it produced today. […] gender
and ethnic barriers may have cracked, but paraliterary forms are
still excluded, and with them, the kinds of lateral thinking and world
views they embody.
The academy rarely takes seriously even well-executed and thoughtful
paraliterature. indeed, canonical recognition may be the kiss of death
for paraliterary forms alive in the market, which depend to an extent on
not being assigned reading. once the market abandons a paraliterary
form, however, as it probably will, only the academy may be equipped
to keep it alive in the future, even as a memory 33 .