LIRE DES ROMANS CHEZ EINAUDI: LES CAS DE NATALIA GINZBURG (1944-1964). LE RAPPORTS DE LECTURE AU PRISME DES HUMANITES NUMERIQUES

The objective of this thesis is to study the editorial activity of Natalia Ginzburg at Einaudi publishing house, in particular as an editorial reader of contemporary narrative works, from her arrival to the temporary interruption of the collaboration (1944-1964). We analyse her contribution to decision-making processes, to the construction of the identity and of the catalogue of the publishing house and, more generally, to the definition of the literary culture of her time. Our objective is, moreover, to define the literary models proposed by Natalia Ginzburg to Einaudi’s readers, the way in which her work was part of the intellectual laboratory of Einaudi and in which her idea of literature harmonized with market issues, the relationship that existed between her opinions on the economic and literary viability of a work and the historical-political context, the method and criteria she used to evaluate a book, the relationship that existed between her choices as a publisher and her poetics as an author. More specifically, our thesis aims to analyse the reading reports concerning contemporary narrative works, which represent a fundamental step in the decision-making process that leads to the publication of a work and therefore to the construction of the catalogue of a publishing house. Through these documents, the books to be printed were selected. Reading reports therefore embodied cultural models that need to be interpreted according to a specific historical and cultural context. Concerning the processing of these documents, a database for the inventory of sources has been designed with IT support. This database makes it possible to efficiently account for sources by gathering the fundamental information for the description of the corpus in a structured way. The documents were indeed transcribed and encoded according to a model developed in XML TEI, able to highlight the different types of documents (letters, structured reading reports, minutes, etc.), their structure and the existing relationships between them. The modelling activity had an important methodological and heuristic impact to our work. The tool that was created shows the complexity of the corpus of sources, by highlighting paths that are not immediately evident in a linear analysis of documents, by allowing query and by enhancing their intertextuality and their multiautoriality. The examination of her reading reports, mostly unpublished, provides the basis for a critical reflection on Ginzburg’s editorial activity, a reflection which is rooted in the belief that editorial writing represents a complex critical genre that deserves to be investigated by specific methods.