L'istanza poetica nel romanzo e nel cinema del Novecento: tra Debenedetti e Pasolini

With the aim of demonstrating the ‘non-exclusivity’ of the albeit important relationship between novel and cinema, the article proposes a reflection on the “poetic” tendency that both genres assume during the 20th century. Starting with anti-naturalism, or naturalism’s impossibility in the new century, the theoretical contributions by Giacomo Debenedetti’s Romanzo del Novecento and the Cinema section of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Empirismo eretico are discussed. An analysis of La religione del mio tempo, a poetic collection published in the same year as Pasolini’s first film Accattone (1961), is then proposed, demonstrating that, if it is true that novel-writing ‘anticipates’ the transition to directing, poetic writing accompanies it.