★In the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth – 2022
★A year from the centenary of Italo Calvino’s birth – 2023
★Complete French translation available

Pierpaolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino, two very different ways of understanding literature, compared. Wrestling with the crisis of modernity, Calvino and Pasolini embody two different outcomes of postmodernism in Italy: one edulcorated and perfectly integrated in the literary establishment, the other in open conflict with it.
In this essay, first published in 1998, a seminal critique of two central figures in Italian literature, Carla Benedetti sums up their complex evolution. Enhanced by a new preface, Pasolini contro Calvino returns to bookshops to mark the centenaries of the two authors.
In Benedetti’s view, if on the one hand Calvino tends to shut himself in the wholly literary dimension of stylistic variation and the “apocryphal effect”, in line with Italian tradition, on the other Pasolini leaves the “cage of literature”, almost triggering a short circuit between life and works in the “performance” of his own death.
On account of the “impurity” Pasolini introduces to the literary game, some leading critics have expelled him from the world of poetry and deny the quality of his work. Without withdrawing into the controversy, the book reacts against his expulsion in the name of a more restless idea of literature, receptive to the possible.

Carla Benedetti (Pisa, 1952) teaches Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Pisa. Her books include L’ombra lunga dell’autore. Indagine su una figura cancellata (The Long Shadow of the Author. Investigation into a cancelled figure, 1999), Disumane lettere. Indagine sulla cultura della nostra epoca (Inhuman Letters. Investigation into the culture of our age, 2011), Frocio e basta. L'omosessualità, la morte e le molte verità occultate (Fairy Period. Homosexuality, death and the many hidden truths, 2015) and La letteratura ci salverà dall'estinzione (Literature will save us from extinction, 2021). With Bollati Boringhieri, in addition to the first edition of this book (1998), she has published Il tradimento dei critici (The Critics’ Betrayal, 2002). She was among the founders of “Nazione Indiana” and “Il primo amore”.