%0 Journal Article
%T ¡®I, the Implacable I¡¯: l¡¯opera di Joan Didion negli anni settanta
%A Cinzia Scarpino
%J Enthymema
%D 2012
%I Universit¨¤ degli Studi di Milano
%R 10.6092/2037-2426/2708
%X This essay attempts to read Joan Didion¡¯s work in the 1970s (Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer and The White Album) as resulting from an increasingly sharp aesthetic awareness of the modes, limits and possibilities of literature as personal and political testimony. Claiming a sceptical attitude towards any given ideology, Didion places her two novels (Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer) and non-fiction book (The White Album) within the history of that decade as filtered through an overtly autobiographical and idiosyncratic story. Out of a personal experience and understanding of that decade ¨C of its collective imagination, its shared or unshared events and symbols ¨C as one dominated by a sense of loss Didion creates women characters who survive both the ¡®abject¡¯ of their female bodies and the irreversible impoverishment of the last (and lost) frontiers in which their stories are set. Late-modern versions of a long-abiding and well-established American literary tradition, the character-narrators of Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer and the witness-persona of The White Album respond to Didion¡¯s aesthetic insight into the testimonial mode, its limits and potentialities, and a narratological strategy which, not unlike the postmodern narratives of the same decade, moves toward the dissolution, scattering, and reassembling of narrative functions (author, narrator, character, and reader).
%K Joan Didion
%K anni Settanta
%K New Journalism
%K corporeo femminile
%K scrittura testimoniale
%U http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/enthymema/article/view/2708