Pier Paolo Pasolini's corsair essayism

Abstract

The term corsair or corsarism is commonly associated to Pier Paolo Pasolini. The origin of this association is in the collection Scritti Corsari, published by the author in 1975, which gathered some essays written from 1973 to 1975 for important newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera. This is the moment when Pasolini's political and social criticism is intensified and his work is a complaint about the consumerist model, accompanied by a cultural standardization, introduced in Italy after the Second Industrial Revolution. This project intends to dedicate itself to the book Scritti Corsari trying to recognize in Italian essayist's production a particular way of writing essays, observing the choice of genre and of media associated to his ideological positions. Therefore, we will use as a starting point the studies of critical essays by Alfonso Berardinelli, particularly when he recognizes in this gender three essential dimensions: a theoretical (essayist's ideas), pragmatics (the selected means of public communication) and stylistic (the literary style of each essayist).