Autobiografie umoristiche d’attore: Ettore Petrolini

Authors

  • Donatella Maria Giovanna Orecchia Università Roma Tor Vergata

Keywords:

Attore, autobiografia, teatro di Varietà

Abstract

Ettore Petrolini’s autobiographical writings are invaluable material for examining how an unprecedented way of narrating the interweaving of tradition and modernity, orality and writing, the collapse of the subject, the deconstruction of linguistic canons, and polyphonic narrative construction took shape in the selfrepresentation of one of the greatest early-20th century actors in Europe. Through analysis of Abbasso Petrolini ! (1922) and Modestia a parte… (1931), this essay focuses on some core aspects of the actor's autobiographical writings : relationship with the popular culture of origin and its characteristics; marked intertextuality (also through recontextualised self-quotes and quotes from other texts) ; explicit and implicit polyphony ; and the poetics of parodic rewriting, metalinguistic deformation of types of language, and the ‘idiozia sublime’ (‘sublime idiocy’).

Author Biography

Donatella Maria Giovanna Orecchia, Università Roma Tor Vergata

She is associate professor at the University of Roma Tor Vergata where she teaches History of Theatre and Performance as well as Dramaturgies in contemporary theatre. Her fields of research concern, in particular: Theory and history of acting in the 19th and 20th Centuries; History of theatrical criticism in Europe; Oral history and theatre; Italian variety theatre and its methodological problems. Her books include: La prima Duse. Nascita di un'attrice moderna (2007); Il critico e l’attore. Silvio d’Amico e la scena italiana di inizio Novecento (20122); Memorie sotterranee. Storia e racconti della Borsa di Arlecchino e del Beat 72 (with L. Cavaglieri, 2018). She is founder and director with L. Cavaglieri of the project Ormete and is the founder and scientific director of Patrimoniorale, a Web portal for the oral memory of theatre.

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Published

2018-11-15

Issue

No. 11 (2018): Auto/biographie, polyphonie, plurivocalité – Auto/biography, polyphony, plurivocality – Auto/biografia, polifonia, plurivocalità

Section

Articles