L’afflizione in seconda persona nella scrittura. Dall’alloglossia alle esperienze non autoctone

Abstract

According to the Jankelevitch classification, there’s a death in the first, second, and third person which corresponds respectively to one’s own, someone’s beloved, and a stranger’s death. This research deals with the trauma caused by the cancer of the Other who is the nearest and the dearest one (the death in second person). In Italian literature his father’s tumour is the narrative centre of Requiem (1991) by Antonio Tabucchi, as well as of Vita e morte di un ingegnere (2012) by Edoardo Albinati. Her son’s abdominal fibrosarcoma lay behind Paola Natalicchio’s writing Il Regno di Op (2013). His wife’s lung neoplasia is the main concern of La fine del giorno (2013) by Pierlugi Battista where the author’s own tragedy – his woman’s tumour – is compared to the identical partner’s experience among some European writers like Michel Onfray, Magda Szabo, Doris Lessing and Philip Roth. The works under research represent a wide palette of different shades of suffering in second person that sometimes exceed the pain for its own identical diagnosis