Antonio Gramsci's Sociology of Literature

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature. Until 1975, with the publication of Valentino Gerratana's critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's Quaderni del carcere (prison notebooks), there was no authoritative text with which to assess Gramsci's notes on literature and culture in general. The Einaudi volume entitled Letteratura e vita nazionale was first published in 1950 and for twenty-five years this "popular" edition, which arbitrarily isolated Gramsci's reflections on literature and related topics from their original context, served as the basis of scholarly investigations on Gramsci's contribution to the sociology of literature.' Given the reductive compartmentalization of Gramsci's thought in the early Einaudi editions, it is no wonder that critics have distorted his contribution to this discipline and have cast it into tendentious schemes.2 (Until the Gerratana edition it was extremely difficult to analyze Gramsci's thoughts on literature in a philologically 'Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale (Turin: Einaudi, 1950); Gerratana's critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). Parenthetical page references in the text refer to the Gerratana edition; all translations are my own. Evaluations of Gramsci's sociology of literature can be found in the publications of the three major conferences on Gramsci: Studi gramsciani, atti del convegno tenuto a Roma, nei giorni 11-13 gennaio, 1958, ed. Istituto Antonio Gramsci (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1958); La Cittd futura, saggisulla figura e il pensiero di Antonio Gramsci, ed. A. Caracciolo and G. Scalia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1959); Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, ed. Pietro Rossi (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969). This last volume has a Gramscian bibliography covering the years 1922-1967. For a discussion of the Einaudi edition of the Quaderni, see Nello Ajello's book Intelletuali e PCI 1944/1958 (Bari: Laterza, 1979), pp. 105-12. 2See Tito Perlini, Gramsci e il gramscismo (Milan: CELUC, 1974), esp. "Danni culturali de crocio-gramscismo," pp. 66-72, and "Cripto-idealismo di Contemporary Literature XXII, 4 0010-7484/81/0004-0574 $1.00/0 ? 1981 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin SystemThis content downloaded from 86.134.210.241 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 19:51:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions accurate way.) As Palmiro Togliatti once said, Gramsci "belongs to everyone." As if to confirm this, in reviewing the Lettere dal carcere volume of 1947, Croce stated that he agreed with all of Gramsci's literary judgments included there, i...

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