Biographies and Autobiographies in Modern Italy

Yet, to quote to such illustrious commentators on genres as Verga and Croce, the former fl atly asserted that autobiography was "repugnant to the Italian taste," while the latter countered that autobiography is history and history is autobiography, and that "the autobiographical refl ex emerges in each stage of our lives, at every pause in our actions, as long as darkness gathers in us and forces us to seek the light, to acquire awareness and intelligence of what we have done and what has happened; and autobiography, in its literary form, corresponds to this perpetual ideal motion" (Boynton 291; Furnari Luvarà 31). Taking as his starting point Oriana Fallaci's mammoth 2001 article in response to 9/11, John Gatt-Rutter explores the Italian journalist, author, and sermonizer's "composite self-realization" as her own dramatis persona, in "The Dummy Interlocutor and Oriana Fallaci's Self-Projection in La rabbia e l'orgoglio."