La cultura linguistica italiana in confronto con la cultura linguistica ceca tra le due guerre mondiali

[Autom. eng. transl.] The notion of linguistic culture receives programmatic attention in the Linguistic Circle of Prague. He appears in the Theses of '29, of the '32 and in the Introduction of the magazine of the Circle, Slovo in Slovesnost (1935). (Havránek, Jakobson, Mathesius, Mukařovský, Trnka 1935: 2-3). The constructive and innovative commitment stands out, well understood in the design framework of a recently acquired national autonomy (1918) and in the theoretical fervor of a linguistic, structural and functional perspective, promoted and implemented on a European scale and not only. In comparison, the Italian situation appears to be remarkably different, both in political and cultural terms: in the early twentieth century, a lively linguistic-theoretical commitment does not go hand in hand with a very high profile literary tradition. The intervention looks for the reasons, comparing some theses of Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci. "Human knowledge has two forms: either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge for the imagination or knowledge for the intellect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal; of individual things or of their relationships: it is, in short, either a producer of images or a producer of concepts. [...] The science of art and that of language, aesthetics and linguistics, as true sciences, are not two distinct sciences but a single science. Not that there is a special Linguistics; but the researched linguistic science, general linguistics, in what it has of reducible to philosophy, is not if not Aesthetic. [...] Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing. The aut-aut of the premise is followed by a reductio ad unum that rewards the completeness of the work of art, poetic creativity in particular, with respect to the technique of grammatical rules. To the Gentile reform (1923) which proposes that the learning of the national language in the elementary classes be based on the living or spoken expression, the Gramscian claim of the class character of an apparently liberal approach will be opposed. The study of grammar is then conceived as an antidote to social unevenness, such as to allow everyone to know the national language. Unlike the multi-lingual, textualist and realist perspective that will characterize the Prague tradition, a tension and opposition between literary culture and linguistic science that is still not cured is looming between the Twenties and Thirties in Italy, in the opinion of the writer, therefore worthy of of reflection.