Gramsci as a (Non) Literary Critic

Gramsci began writing on questions of literature and culture while a student at the University of Turin. From 1916 to 1920, he reviewed Italian and foreign plays, performed in Turin theaters, in the socialist newspaper Avanti. “Theater Chronicles” have a militant character, occasionally touching on technical and aesthetic questions. Gramsci saw the stage as a tribune for political education, a means for exposing the insoluble contradictions of the bourgeois way of life. This approach led him to favor popular dramatized epics (drammoni d'arena) and even to prefer pochades to plays in which rhetoric dissimulates hypocrisy and moral emptiness. Literary critics have paid little attention to Gramsci's “Theatre Chronicles” on account of their partisan spirit as well as journalistic style

Aesthetics · Art · Bourgeoisie · Character (mathematics · Hypocrisy · Linguistics · Literature · Middlebrow · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Style (visual arts · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci