Discussions about the methodological approaches to contemporary literature have grown more frequent, and more and more discordant or even contradictory estimates have made their appearance in Italiy. Two books concerned with twentieth century Ital an literature whose authors are Guiseppe Petronio and Romano Luperini have appeared at the high point of the debate. Petronio, a well-known historian, critic and theoretician maintains the thesis that alongside interpretations which consider works as monads, there have to be those which investigate a work in its »social aspect«, as it is interwoven into external relations, meaning that every consideration has to be horizontal a;nd synchronic. According to him, a work of literature can be determined only by a number of coordinates. From these positions, he sets out in search of dialectical connections and the mutual interwo- veness of cultural phenomena, the poltical atmosphere and the personal experiences of the writer he is investigating, keeping in mind the fact that everyone has to pay tribute to tradition. Besides this, Petronio defends the idea that »genres« and »collective processes« have an advantage over individual writers and books. The search for coordinates, for the points of the past which are relevant to the birth of a particular work, has caused a condensation of material, that is a synthetic revelation of the content’s meaning and of the formal harmony of the artistic act. Because of this his hook does not wholly illuminate the depth of impact of a particular writer, although the contribution the writer made to the broadening of the boundaries of knowledge is dealt with. Romano Luperini changes the starting point of his investigation. A text to him is not merely a sign but also a symptom of individual arid social severance. The investigation of the relation of correspondence between the economic-productive and the literary system led this critic to identify tendencies, groupings, trends and poetics. He resorts to this new approach believing that the literary ideology rarely spreads out of the initiative of a single person, but only out of the participation of a whole group. Writing his history of literature NoVecenta he keeps to texts and to those occurances which gave them a connotative meaning. He orders and evaluates them after numerous readings and in doing so shows that his critical instruments differ from those of Pertonio. Both critics aimed at the advancement of critical standards and the improvement of approaches to literature and .methods of elaboration. The first deserves merit for strengthening the foundations of the Marxist concepcion of literary phenomena, the second for taking another step in his desire to bring the thought of Italian criticism nearer to new tendencies, and for attempting to get into the depths of literary achievements.
