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Charming the Cobra with a Ballpoint Pen: Liminality and Spectacular Authorship in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Interviews
- MLN
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 122, Number 1, January 2007 (Italian Issue)
- pp. 24-45
- 10.1353/mln.2007.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
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The article analyzes Pier Paolo Pasolini's spectacular authorship as a response to the modified conditions of power in nineteen-sixties Italy. Perceiving the advent of consumer modernity as the affirmation of a disciplinary society, the author is forced to replace the avant-garde strategy of marginality with a spectacular identity that is created and circulated through both literary and non-literary means. Rather than succumbing to the "death of the author" he redefines authorial identity through images. Interviews, printed, broadcast, inserted in poems or film, serve as the privileged arena to observe the author's public performance and his employment of it for critical purposes.