Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives ed. by Gian-Paolo Biasin and Manuela Gieri (review)

Book Reviews GIAN-PAOLO BIASIN AND MANUELA GIERI, eds. Luigi Pirandel/o: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto Italian Studies: Major ltalian Authors series. Toronto : University of Toronto Press 1999· Pp. 232. $45.00. This anthology of "Contemporary Perspectives" on Pirandello criticism looks back as well as forward through twelve critical essays, two forming the section titled "Introduction," the others bundled in three additional sections entitled "Structures," "Meanings," and "Innovations." The new or newly translated essays by Italian critics such as Franca Angelini and Paolo Puppa are reason enough for non-Italian readers to acquire this significant collection of critical writings on Pirandello by an international group of contemporary writers. Two new essays and four previously published works appear here in English translation, alongside six new essays written in English. The editors, the essayists, and the collaborating translators achieve the volume's promised range through a dazzling array of contemporary critical perspectives on Pirandella . Those interested primarily in dramatic texts will find much to engage them, both in essays devoted specifically to Pirandello's writings for the theatre and in essays that treat other texts but offer new approaches or insights not limited by text or genre. In their introductory essay, "Pirandello at 360 Degrees," Gian-Paolo Biasin and Manuela Gieri amply demonstrate their own command of trends in critical studies as they briefly review the history of critical "itineraries" (4) in Pirandella studies, place the approaches by critics of the present volume in the context of earlier writers, and offer succin~t yet rich previews of the essays that follow. Franca Angelini's "Scenes and Texts: Perspectives in Pirandellian Criticism," the second essay in the "Introduction" section, offers a close-up look at the recent renewal of interest in Pirandello's works, beginning in 1993, when copyright on the works expired. Angelini, one of the foremost Italian Modern Drama, 42 (Fall 1999) 456 Book Reviews 457 critical authorities on Pirandel1o's works, describes new "editorial initiatives" (10) and theatre productions that appeared in the 1993194 season and avoided "routine, fashion, or the anxiety of unmotivated subversion" (23). Angelini offers brief accounts of directorial concepts underlying 1993 Italian productions of Six Characters in Search ofan Author directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Mario Missiroli, and Nanni Garella and 1994 productions of I giganti delle montagne directed by Giorgio Strehler, Leo de Berardinis, and Luca Ronconi. She makes a convincing argument regarding the significance of this remarkable interest on the part of such important directorial "auteurs": it is in the theatre first and foremost that new interpretations of Pirandello's work will be discovered by theatregoers and critics alike, influencing and renewing the public and critical reception of the works. For scholars, Angelini sees an equal1y significant trend in the attention given to new critical editions or newly available aspects of Pirandello's work in the volumes of letters, dialect editions of the plays, and film-related works published in 1993 and t994, all demonstrating the current interest in documents and their importance in providing context for the work. The "Structures"chapterfeatures four essays concerned with structural considerations in the plays and narrative works. Donato Santeramo's contribution, "Pirandello's Quest for Truth: Sei personaggi in cerca d' aUlOre," investigates the complex history of the debate over the drama as teXt and as staged, Pirandella 's own shifting position in that debate, and the significance of Sei personaggi in Pirandello's oeuvre. In "Pirandello and the Theatre-within-the Theatre: Thresholds and Frames in Ciascllno a suo modo," Maurizio Grande traces the nature and effect of the structural boundaries and intersections crossed and merged in the play's alternating scenes of simulated "reality" and "fiction." The function of language and rhetoric in Pirandello's narrative works and their contribution to the effect of humor is the subject of Maria Antonietta Grignani 's illuminating essay, "The Making and Unmaking of Language: the Rhetoric of Speech and Silence." In "Families of Characters and Families of Actors," Paolo Puppa, prolific as a critic and himself a playwright, focuses on the Pirandellian character as developed in the theatre, particularly, and on these "explosive and dizzying arguers" (68) who are simultaneously remnants of earlier narrative works and accomplices of the new...