GRAMMAR OF POETRY OR POETIC OF ENUNCIATION? FOR A HERMENEUTIC OF THE 'STILOGATIC GRAMMAR' IN GIANFRANCO CONTINI

Contini's philological reading is never distracted while retracing the authors' paths in poetic and narrative writing along the compositional creation and breaking down of the text. In his linguistic labor a continual enunciatory and semantic outline of the subject-writing should be recorded, in an attempt to guide the language within the themes of the discourse, and within the emotions of the subjective development of the discourse. Indeed, although Contini's attention always starts from the "sign material" of the text with references to its grammatical, phonological, metric and rhetorical components, according to a method of reading close to structuralism akin to that of Jakobson, critical argument retrieves the truth contained in the text, intrinsic to the form, understood in its structure. In short, the grammar of poetic language refers to the grammar of meaning in literature, provided however that the composition of the sentence is understood as an expressive style, rather than as a required response for communication. It follows that unlike Jakobson, attentive to phonetic grammar, Contini preferred to seek a stylematic grammar in the text, with which to reveal the author's meaning within and beyond the language's ability to speak.