He passes away at the age of 89, struck down by cardiac arrest, intellectual Alberto Asor Rosa always busy between study and social struggle. Born in Rome on 23 September 1933, he graduated from the Augusto classical high school in Rome and then graduated from the Wisdom with speaker Natalino Sapegno. Sloping mustache and flowing hair, as if to underline the rebellious character but, above all, a renowned scholar, professor of history of literature at Sapienza University. Intellectual of Marxist formation who has always been involved in the dialectic between culture and power and in the analysis of social reality. He left the PCI in 1956, like many other intellectuals who reacted horrified to the Hungarian tragedy, and returned only in '72. He works on the transformation of him and is also elected in Parliament, after the fall of the Berlin Wall he was a member of the PDS leadership and took over the leadership of the new “Rebirth".
Alberto Asor Rosa
A scholar in particular of modern Italian literature and the Baroque period, he conceived and directed the monumental History of Einaudi literature. Together with many monographs and crowded university courses dedicated to the great protagonists of Italian literature. For him the classic of a lifetime was Orlando furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. His most political commitment is linked to his collaboration with periodicals such as ”Mondo Operaio”, ”Mondo Nuovo” and to the direction of ''counter plan', "Political Laboratory" and, finally, precisely "Rebirth" in '90/91. Asor Rosa's debut as a scholar takes place with "Scrittori e popolo" of 65, a polemic of Italian literature engaged in between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, discovering its populist perspective and opening a debate on the relationship between intellectuals and the proletariat which obtains great resonance. His subsequent study on "Thomas Mann or bourgeois ambiguity” of '71.
Intellectual, writer and politician
In the 70s he was successful, but his "History of Italian literature" for high schools caused discussions for the choices and the cut. Essays and articles are collected in 'Intellectuals and the working class', 'The two societies', 'The last paradox'. From 92 and '"Out of the West, or reasoning on the Apocalypse", in which he invites us to look for a new idea of opposition, outside the model approved in the richest countries of the West. An autobiographical novel "The dawn of a new world" dates back to 2002, a narrative vein then deepened up to "Suspended love", from 2017.
The volume was released in 2009 The Great Silence – Interview on intellectuals, in which he reflects on the history of intellectuals, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, in Italy. While the collection of essays on literary criticism is from 2011 Le weapons dellacritica. Among his most recent works: Italian literature. History, the classics, national identity (2014); Writers and people 1965. Writers and mass 2015 (2015), in which he tries to bring order to the literary production of writers born after 1960; Machiavelli and Italy. Account of a defeat (2019); The manly hero. Essay on Joseph Conrad (2021). In 2005 studies were dedicated to him in honour: Critique and design. Cultures in Italy from the XNUMXs to today. In 2020 the volume Scritture critici e d'educazione was released, containing a wide selection of his non-fiction and literary production.
(Alberto Asor Rosa on the cover / Photo Ansa)
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