Beyond the words: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the language as spirit of life

Abstract

During his rich and varied activity, Pier Paolo Pasolini was very intrigued by linguistic theories, and he himself committed to many interesting dissertations about language. The reflection about the nature and the conditions of all different forms of expression has always been the core of his personal and artistic life, starting from his own experience as a dialectal poet (which he always motivated and commented in his theoretical linguistic essays), passing through his famous intervention of 1964 concerning the advent of a new, technological Italian language, until his last, desperate complain about the ruin of Italian dialects. This overview about Pasolini’s contribution to Italian linguistic scene of last century may be useful to reassess the value of his penetrating insights, too often neglected by the critics because of his unconventional and provocative way of reasoning, which prevented him from being taken seriously from a theoretical standpoint. Since many of his intuitions have proved to be valid over time both from a social and a linguistic point of view, it may be interesting to consider Pier Paolo Pasolini’s heritage not only in terms of his literary, critical or cinematographic work, but also, finally, under a linguistic perspective.