Mapping Sicilian Literature: Place and Text in Consolo and Bufalino

This article examines the articulation of a 'poetics of place' as found specifically in essays and prefaces by the Sicilian writers Gesualdo Bufalino and Vincenzo Consolo. It places both authors within a tradition of writing about Sicily, a tradition which is, it has been argued, 'citationary' and intertextual. It then outlines the three principal techniques the authors use to construct a particular rhetorical discourse of the Sicilian place, which entwines texts and landscape in a particular manner: they create literary cartographies and topographies of Sicily, they describe and recuperate past landscapes through citations of canonical Sicilian texts, and they use figures and metaphors which unite the material and the symbolic, with the effect of positioning their own texts as monuments to a disappearing place. Finally, the article discusses the relation between this prefatorial production and the status of its authors as intellectuals within the Sicilian context