Rhetorics of Torment (Manzoni and Sciascia)

Abstract

This article compares the ways in which Alessandro Manzoni and Leonardo Sciascia portray the institutional government of the bodies. It basically deals with the question posed by traditional criticism about how authors rewrite what other authors had written before. This seems to be more interesting in those novels in which references to a model work, if not as mere justification, at least as to legitimate the existence of the novel itself. More specifically, this article investigates the absence (in Manzoni’s History of the Column of Infamy) or the presence, if not the excess (in Sciascia’s Council of Egypt) of a “bodily saying”, namely the representation of the grief of a mutilated body and its political function.