“HOW DO WE HAPPEN TO BE INSPIRED?” LITERATURE SURVEYS FROM THE 1930s
“HOW DO WE HAPPEN TO BE INSPIRED?” LITERATURE SURVEYS FROM THE 1930s

Summary/Abstract: The question of creative inspiration, pertaining to aesthetics, poetics and the philosophy of culture, became the subject of literary review debates in the interwar period, in the context of a growing concern for authenticity. Under the title “Why Do You Write?” the literary review Facla launched a survey on this issue in 1935, to which over two hundred literati responded. The result was a genuine novel about writing, conveyed in the form of a cultural chronicle of those times. Extremely diverse, the answers oscillated among a multitude of perspectives ranging from empirical to social, political, psychological, metaphysical or mystical, raising, in fact, as many question marks. The discourse coordinates were framed by the register of interrogation and negation, through the cultivation of irony, paradox and the anti-literary profession of faith.

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