Last month, exactly on november 15th, by the Italian-Greek Chamber of Commerce, Valerio Massimo Manfredi, professor of Archeology and writer, presented his new book: "The Empire of Dragons". The author centers all his speech on the difference between two different forms of expression: the literary one, which is a very old form of communication, and the technical one. By the analysis of the two English words "story" and "history" the writer shows that we could define the latter as something very academic, something that can be compared to the ancients Tucidide, Herodotus or Tacitus, while story is something strictly related to the narration and older than history. As he reminds us the two pillars of Western literature belong to this category: the Iliad and the Odyssey, works that don’t tell us about real facts but about all that can be exciting for mankind.

The key sentence of the whole speech says: "history proceeds through problems, literature proceeds through emotions", this means that in Manfredi’s opinion the main aim of a literary writer is to tell a story talking about life and the emotions deriving from it. Communicating notions is not among his the duties.

Valerio Massimo Manfredi is a successful literary writer of books inspired to the historical facts of the ancient times, but at the same he is a professional archaeologist and university professor; this is considered a contradiction by those who refuse the idea of history as narrative freedom. For this reason the writer explains that his aim is to create a unambiguous and rectilinear narration, as if he were eye witness of what he’s writing about. When an author tells a story, the way he reconstructs the environment has to be impeccable because it is this realism that gives emotions and credibility to the narration itself. On the contrary if one wants to write about a historical fact the proceeding of the story described would be problematic, difficult and limited.

Posted in HISTORY - ARCHAEOLOGY | LITERATURE AND ARTS Ilias Lucarelli's blog | login or register to post comments | Italian  | 2528 reads