Verso una rappresentazione del macrotesto: filologia d’autore e analisi quantitativa nei racconti di Fausta Cialente

Towards a Representation of the Macrotext: Authorial Philology and Quantitative Analysis from the Short Stories of Fausta Cialente . Fausta Cialente’s short fiction was largely published in periodicals during the 1930s and later partially reassembled in the collections Pamela o la bella estate (1962) and Interno con figure (1976), two macrotexts resulting from processes of selection, rewriting, and reworking. The paper proposes an integration of philological and quantitative analyses through practices of modelling and representation of textual micro- and macro-structures, with the aim of investigating Cialente’s short stories from a genetic perspective without directing the inquiry toward the production of a Digital Scholarly Edition. Based on a metadata model that distinguishes between abstract textual units and individual witnesses, and on the construction of a corpus of texts, the paper presents a set of exploratory experiments designed to observe the editorial trajectories of the short stories and the compositional logics underlying the two collections. The aim is to assess whether, and to what extent, it is possible to represent the dynamic nature of the macrotext and to formulate hypotheses for integrated philological- critical investigations, particularly in relation to twentieth-century literary texts that remain subject to copyright restrictions. In the longer term, the model is conceived as extensible to the variant analysis of preparatory materials, including paper-based, hybrid, and born-digital documents.