Lingua madre e regressione.
La metafora della bambina nella poesia di Anne Sexton
Abstract
Since 2004, Anglo-American critic seem to have returned to a confrontation with the complex poetic legacy of Anne Sexton (1928-1974). The aim of this essay is to follow this critical direction in order to offer a biographical and literary profile of the poet, investigating the significance of the poetic voice and the implications that can be attributed to the definition of the confessional and the autobiographical, and to verify whether one can use the Lacanian category of lalangue and Julia Kristeva's category of the 'semiotic' to analyse Sexton's texts. The emergence of the semiotic in Sexton's texts seems evident in the themes of childhood, but also in the ability to graft the relationship with the maternal and the autobiographical metaphor of the child into precise formal linguistic strategies: through the analysis of rhythm and orality, syntax and lexicon, emerges a work with language - here precisely re-nominated as 'mother tongue' - that makes use of a prosodic technique made up of iterations, chanting rhythms, and infantile expressions that evoke the elementary structures of the baby talk and of nursery rhymes.
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