Abstract
The project consists of a study of selected works by two authors who have not been connected or compared before, experimental poet Elio Pagliarani and noir writer Giorgio Scerbanenco. Specifically, the study explores several coinciding representations of lower-middle class women in Pagliarani’s poem La ragazza Carla and Scerbanenco’s collection of short stories Milano Calibro 9. Through references to existing scholarship on each author and analytical readings of the texts, the study aims to demonstrate how the two writers, who were active at the same time in Milan, showed much attention to class and gender issues in their work, and thus obtained similar results through very different stylistic approaches. In addition, the study explores the underlying reasons for which Pagliarani and Scerbanenco chose to focus on realistic representations of Milanese women within their distinct narrative scopes. Finally, the article has the secondary goal of breaking the canon by focusing on two genres, experimental poetry and popular literature, which are rarely if ever considered together.
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