A writing monument. Individual and collective auto-biographism in Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the retrospections and “dated traces” of experiences contained in Leopardi’s intellectual diary, seeking to reveal their potential connection to issues of a social nature. The examination of excerpts from Zibaldone enables positioning the work within both the discourse on the diary as a literary genre and the essence of autobiographical reflection itself, revealing its strategies, forms, and capacities for assimilating other literary forms. The analysis also addresses the narrative identity (as conceptualized by Paul Ricoeur) emerging in Zibaldone, where the biographer and autobiographer continuously negotiate, through their narratives, the terms under which the boundaries of self-knowledge and the surrounding reality are constructed. This work identifies elements of intersubjective dialogue supported by the diversity of voices and testimonies that have imprinted themselves on the author’s consciousness (including family, historical figures, fictional characters, and Leopardi’s contemporaries). The study endeavors to highlight elements of the work that, on one hand, facilitate the continual renewal of the promise of self-reference through the form of “mirror talk” (Susanna Egan), and, on the other hand, address the conflict between the individual and society. Ultimately, it proposes a perspective directed toward reconciling the individual with a broadly understood collective.