L'uomo inquieto: Identita e alterita nell'opera di Antonio Tabucchi (Etudes Romanes)

The work of Antonio Tabucchi, one of Italy’s greatest contemporary writers, is permeated with the topic of individual identity. His texts query the self-perception, the relation with the Other and the relation with the historical and cultural world while expressing at all these levels an experience of dissolution. L’uomo inquieto. Identità e alterità nell’opera di Antonio Tabucchi (The Anxious Man. Identity and Alterity in the Work of A. Tabucchi) offers a textual analysis of a series of figures and motives using M. Bachtin’s concept of “dialogism” and G. Vattimo’s “weak thought” a starting point.The first one serves to define the narrating subject in Tabucchi’s texts, the second concept describes the position of the subject of Postmodernity. The topic of the dissolution of identity has often caused the categorization of Tabucchi as a postmodernist author. However, this book emphazises that this very topic belongs first and foremost to the great Modernist literature from the beginning of the 20th century. What renders Tabucchi a postmodernist is rather the fact that he expresses not only a nostalgia for the lost meaning, but also a recognition of the impossibility to find it again.