Essay - Alessandro Portelli, the Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories:...

Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form ***** Meaning in Oral History.

Abstract

***** paper begins by situating Alessandro Portelli's oral history in the context of the postwar reaction in Italy against the historical theories ***** the influential Neapolitan philosopher Benedetto Croce. It then proceeds to a discussion of Portelli's methodology by reference above all ***** the essay The ***** of ***** Trastulli, whose starting point is the death at ***** hands of the police of a young Terni steelworker in 1949. Portelli's essay is not concerned with verifying, in ***** mode of the documentary historian, the precise circumstances ***** which Trastulli was killed, however. His concern was r*****her to account for the diverse memories, which have grown up around the ***** event. Portelli's oral ***** methodology ***** inspired by his pathbreaking discovery that erroneous memories possess his*****rical value. The paper concludes ***** raising some possible criticisms of the methodology.

The most ***** Italian historian in modern times would certainly be the Neapolitan philosopher and literary critic Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). For many historians, however, Croce's indisputable greatness is badly flawed by the blatant elit*****m of his philosophy of history. In his Filos*****ia e storiografia (*****), ***** example, he represented human beings as falling into two classes: ***** politically-active few who are intrinsically part of t***** historical process and the majority who, like mere animals, stand outside it. Historiography, according to Croce, has no reason ***** concern itself ***** the second, essentially passive class of beings: they belong to the realm ***** nature, rather than the dynamic, indeed heroic process by which history is made (Portelli 293 n. 6).

***** the ***** period, *****, ***** Italian masses became much more active politically ***** Croce would have thought possible or considered desirable. His the*****ies about the inevitable passivity of ***** majority seem profoundly disconfirmed ***** the widespread politicization of the 1950s and 19*****0s, which culminated in ***** legendary "Hot Autumn" of 1968-69. A key feature of post-fascist Italy was the growth of a large-scale communist movement. The most *****fluential communist intellectual in this period was Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Toge*****r with the writ*****gs ***** Salvemini and Borgese, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which were posthumously published in 1947, played no small part in wean*****g Italian intellectuals from Croce's overpowering legacy (Roberts). For Gramsci, Croce 'was the most sophisticated, influential and dangerous philosophical opponent of Marxism and working class revolution in Italy and Europe.' Gramsci blamed Croce's theories for creating the political inertia he attributed to t***** ***** ("Overview of the ***** Notebooks"). As fascism vanished, a more inclusive mode of writing about ordinary Italians was pioneered by Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945) and numerous works on magic and ritual in southern Italy produced between 1948 and 1961 ***** the socialist folklorist Ernesto de Martino (Portelli 36).

***** is against ***** backdrop of the reaction ***** Crocean historiographical elitism characteristic of postwar Italian communism *****, towards ***** end of the 60s, Alessandro Portelli took up a t*****pe recor*****r and traveled