La vergogna della lingua. Gli scrittori dell’esilio tra XX e XXI secolo

he study focuses on the shame of the language in the translingual authors, inves- tigating its different meanings (modesty, embarrassment, awe, guilt, sin, oppression, jealousy) and circumscribing the analysis from the post-war period to today: a time in which the legacy of totalitarianisms, the colonialism and the birth of new nationalisms reverberates in the ancipite feeling – a mixture of nostalgia and shame – towards a language and its metaphorical and cultural implications. For Luigi Meneghello, for example, the reacquisition of Italian through English means freeing himself from the shame of having introjected, partly unconsciously, a fascist, Catholic and Crocian education and rhetoric; similar sentiment permeates the choice of Italian by Julio Monteiro Martins, who expatriates from Brazil when he realizes that the end of the dictatorship had not led to a real change; in the German Helga Schneider, however, the Italian is the possibility of getting free from the historical fault of the Nazism, after discovering that his mother had been SS in concentration camps.