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.
References
Bacchilega, Cristina, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 1999.
Bixler, Frances (ed.), Original Essays on the Poetry of Anne Sexton, Arkansas, University of Central Arkansas Press 1988.
Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1976.
Bogan, Louise, Verse, in «New Yorker», 27 April 1963, pp. 173-175.
Bono, Paola, Streghe madri e sogni. Anne Sexton, in «Via Dogana», 94, settembre 2010.
Camboni, Marina (a cura di), La doppia immagine e altre poesie. Anne Sexton, Caltanissetta-Roma, Salvatore Sciascia 1989.
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Victor Gollancz, London 1979.
Colburn, Steven (ed.), Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale, Michigan, University of Michigan Press 1988.
Colburn, Steven E. and Ann Arbor (eds.), Anne Sexton. No Evil Star. Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, Michigan, University of Michigan Press 1985.
de Lauretis, Teresa, Genealogie femministe. Un itinerario personale, in Sui Generis. Scritti di teoria femminista, Milano, Feltrinelli, Milano 1996.
Dickey, James, Five First Books, in «Poetry», 97 (1961), pp. 316-320.
Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, New York, W.W. Norton and Co. 1963.
Gamberi, Cristina (a cura di), La zavorra dell'eterno. Poesie di Anne Sexton, Milano, Crocetti 2016.
Gamberi, Cristina, La Zavorra dell’Eterno, in «Poesia», 29, 311 (2016).
Gill, Jo, Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetics, Gainesville, University Press of Florida 2007.
Golden, Amanda, This Business of Words. Reassessing Anne Sexton, Gainesville, University Press of Florida 2016.
Gray Sexton, Linda, Searching for Mercy Street. My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, Little, Brown & Company 1994.
Kevles, Barbara,“The Art of Poetry: Anne Sexton.” Interview with Anne Sexton, in «Paris Review», 52, Summer 1971.
Kristeva, Julia, Within the Microcosm of the ‘Talking Cure', in Interpreting Lacan. Psychiatry and the Humanities, eds. William Kerrigan and Joseph Smith, vol. 6. New Haven, Yale University Press 1983.
Kristeva, Julia, La révolution du langage poétique, Paris, Seuil 1974, trad. it. Silvana Eccher Dall’Eco, Angela Musso, Giuliana Sangalli, La rivoluzione del linguaggio poetico, Venezia, Marsilio 1979.
Kristeva, Julia, Place Names, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Léon Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press 1980.
Kristeva, Julia, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection, Paris, Éditions du Seuil 1980, trad. it, Poteri dell’orrore. Saggio sull’abiezione, Milano, Spirali 2006.
Lowell, Robert et al., A Conversation with Robert Lowell, in «The Review», 26 (1971).
Lowell, Robert, Life Studies, London, Faber and Faber 1959.
Mazzocco, Robert, Matters of Life and Death, in «New York Review of Books», 3 April 1975, p. 22.
McGowan, Philip, Anne Sexton and Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief, Westport, Praeger 2004.
McGrath Smith, Ellen, Anne Sexton, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, a cura di Jay Parini e Phillip W. Leininger, Oxford, Oxford University Press 2005.
Rich, Adrienne, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978, New York, London, Norton & Company 1995.
Rich, Adrienne, Anne Sexton: 1928–1974. With an Introduction by Lynn Emanuel, in «American Poetry Review», 41, 6 (2012), p. 7.
Rosenthal, Macha Louis, The New Poets, Oxford, Oxford University Press 1967.
Salvio, Paula M., Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance, Albany - New York, State University of New York Press 2007.
Skorczewski, Dawn M., An Accident of Hope. The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton, New York, Routledge, 2012.
Sexton, Anne, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1977.
Sexton, Anne, The Complete Poems (1981), New York, Houghton Mifflin 1999.
Storari, Gilberto, L’opera poetica di Anne Sexton, Verona, Libreria editrice universitaria 1983.
Tarozzi, Bianca, Poesia e regressione: Anne Sexton, in «Annali della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature straniere di Ca’ Foscari», 12, 2 (1973), pp. 355-365.
Vaccaro, Salvo, Marco Coglitore (a cura di), Michel Foucault e il divenire donna, Milano, Mimesis 1997.
Wagner-Martin, Linda (ed.), Critical Essays on Anne Sexton, Boston, G.K. Hall 1989.
Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde, Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, London, Vintage 1994.
Wood Middlebrook, Diane, Housewife into Poet: The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton, in «The New England Quarterly», 56, 4 (1983), pp. 483-503.
Wood Middlebrook, Diane, Anne Sexton. A Biography, London, Virago 1991.
Wood Middlebrook, Diane, and Diana Hume George (eds.), Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, London, Virago Press 1991.
Woolf, Virginia, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, a cura di Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1–4) e Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5–6), London, Hogarth 2008.
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (1929), Oxford, Oxford Uiniversity Press 2008.
Woolf, Virginia, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, London, Hogarth 1975-80.
Zuccato, Edoardo, Scavandosi lʼanima con il martello pneumatico: sulla poesia di Anne Sexton, in Anne Sexton, Lʼestrosa abbondanza, Milano, Crocetti 1996.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Cristina Gamberi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
