10.13125/2039-6597/5985
This interview with Alberto Prunetti focuses on his work both as a writer (Amianto, 108 metri, Nel girone dei bestemmiatori), and as the editor of Alegre’s “Working-class” series and one of the organisers of the Working-Class Literature Festival (Campi Bisenzio, March 31st — April 2nd 2023). One of the most relevant voice’s in Italy today on the topic of working-class literature, Prunetti explores here some questions on literature, class struggle, and trying to find one’s own voice.
application/pdf
2039-6597
5985
26
it
urn:nbn:it:unica-29732
Nicole Siri
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between
Asbestos
Dov’era l’Io fare il Noi. Una conversazione con Alberto Prunetti sulla letteratura working-class
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
13
Conversation Pieces / Interviews: Ed. Massimo Fusillo
2023-11-30
2023-11-29
2023-11-30
2023-12-01
195-207
1
Nicole Siri
2023/11/30
10.13125/2039-6597/5985
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2039-6597
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Asbestos
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29732
Dov’era l’Io fare il Noi. Una conversazione con Alberto Prunetti sulla letteratura working-class
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13
           Where Ego Was, “We” Shall Be.
               A Conversation with
                 Alberto Prunetti
            on Working-Class Literature

                             edited by Nicole Siri

Abstract
     This interview with Alberto Prunetti focuses on his work both as a writer
(Amianto, 108 metri, Nel girone dei bestemmiatori), and as the editor of Alegre’s
“Working-class” series and one of the organisers of the Working-Class Lit-
erature Festival (Campi Bisenzio, March 31st — April 2nd 2023). One of the
most relevant voice’s in Italy today on the topic of working-class literature,
Prunetti explores here some questions on literature, class struggle, and try-
ing to find one’s own voice.

Keywords
      Working-class literature; Italian contemporary literature; Working-class
literature festival; Alberto Prunetti; Asbestos




Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5985
Nicole Siri (ed.), Where Ego Was, “We” Shall Be




     Where Ego was, ‘We’ Shall Be.
  A Conversation with Alberto Prunetti
     on Working-Class Literature

                                edited by Nicole Siri




     Where Ego was, ‘We’ Shall Be.
  A Conversation with Alberto Prunetti
     on Working-Class Literature

                                edited by Nicole Siri

      This interview arises from a dialogue held at the University of Siena on
April 5th 20221, during a seminar on biographical writing. The reflections
that emerged on that occasion were then further developed and enriched
in the light of the most recent developments in working-class literature in
Italy.

     First of all, I’d like to ask you about your “working-class trilogy” (Asbestos:
The Story of a Tuscan Welder, Down and Out in England and Italy, In
the Circle of Blasphemy2). In particular, I wonder how you would describe the


      1
       I thank professor Riccardo Castellana, who organised the Seminar on bio-
graphical writing at the University of Siena, and, by kindly inviting me to discuss
with Alberto Prunetti on that occasion, made this interview possible.
    2
       Alberto Prunetti’s “working-class trilogy” has not yet been fully transla-
ted into English. There is no complete translation of the first volume, Amianto.
Una storia operaia (Asbestos: The Story of a Tuscan Welder); however, there are two


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                                        Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



relationship between fiction and non-fiction within it, and how that relationship
evolved over the years, as the volumes of the trilogy progressively took shape.
       At the beginning of Asbestos you write: “I wish this story hadn’t really
happened. What’s that expression? A product of the author’s imagination. But
instead, reality knocked on the doors of these pages”; and also: “imagination filled
the holes like cheap stucco, helping to reshape certain episodes in order to better
tell the story of a life and death”. The photographs that accompany Asbestos often
show the authenticity of even the most minute anecdotes that are told (this appears
to be the purpose of the photograph of the trawl, for example). This is not so much
the case with Down and Out in England and Italy, where there is a disclaimer:
“This is a work of autobiographical fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places
and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a ficti-
tious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events
is purely coincidental” (even though you add a wink at the reader: “Sort of”).
       The relationship between truth and fiction is once again different in the third
book, In The Circle of Blasphemy, where you play with the idea of a Tuscan
welder in dialogue with the most important poet in the Italian literary tradition,
Dante, and offer a partial, contemporary comic integration of his Inferno.

     With my Trilogy, my aim was to talk about reality, but I never felt
obliged to adhere strictly to the poetics of realism.
     In Asbestos, adherence to reality is stronger, but you can also see a
progressive detachment from literal faithfulness to the facts. I would say
that in Asbestos I was obviously telling a true story, but I was using the
strategies of fiction to tell it. Overall, fiction played a small part, which has



partial translations of the first and last chapters from the 2014 edition. See A. Pru-
netti, “From Asbestos. The story of a Tuscan welder”, translated by O. Stransky, New
England Review, 41.2 (2020): 29-38 and A. Prunetti, Like Steve McQueen, translated
by W. Shutt, Asymptote Journal, online (url: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/
nonfiction/alberto-prunetti-amianto-una-storia-operaia/, last accessed on Nov
17th, 2023). A translation of the second volume, 108 metri. The new working class
hero, was published in 2021 by Scribe UK under the title Down and out in England
and Italy. There is no English translation yet of the third volume, Nel girone dei
bestemmiatori (“In The Circle of Blasphemy”). Prunetti’s trilogy has been fully
translated into Spanish and Greek. Amianto has been translated into Catalan and
French. A French translation of the second volume, 108 metri, is forthcoming. In
the present interview, quotations are taken from the English editions where avai-
lable; in all other cases, they have been translated by the editor and proofread by
Dr. Sergio Knipe, whom we thank for his work.


                                                                                     197
Nicole Siri (ed.), Where Ego Was, “We” Shall Be



mostly to do with the dramatic staging of facts. I didn’t write a completely
faithful account of my father’s life: I pushed the emotional load, I dosed the
moments of respite, I selected episodes from his life, sometimes I delibera-
tely misplaced them. I moved some of them, for instance. I’ll give you an
example: I knew that I was conceived in Casale Monferrato, but in the book
I learn this from my mother at a tragic point in the story.
      In Down and Out in England and Italy there is the weird and obviously
fictional inclusion of Baroness Thatcher’s ghost. This Lovecraftian fictional
element, though, serves to talk about the monstrosity of capitalism, which
is a very real thing. So it was ultimately a fictional device meant to deal
with reality.
      The last book of the trilogy is the most complex one from this point of
view: it is clearly the most fictional one, with its introduction of the Circle
of those Damned by Work into Dante’s Inferno.
      As for the disclaimer in Down and Out in England and Italy, I would
say that my strategy is similar to that of Vitaliano Trevisan in the last lines
of Works (where he writes: “Anything that could incriminate me is the pro-
duct of the author’s imagination”) and of Cash Carraway in Skint Estate.
Notes from the Poverty Line (where she writes: “Some names, places and
times have been changed to protect the guilty”), and that this kind of stra-
tegy is typical of working-class literature.
      Having said all that, I think the moment in my trilogy when I strayed
furthest from reality was when I wrote that I was good at playing football.

      When a story is told, especially when it is a true story and someone else’s
story, there are of course facts, there are the fictional adjustments to the facts, but
there is also a part of reality that is deliberately left out. Obviously, the act of writ-
ing always implies a selection, but this selection does not only exclude irrelevant
details (those details that are not considered “functional to the narrative”): there is
also a set of intimate things that one chooses to keep to oneself.
      It seems to me that this problem is addressed subtly in a passage in Asbe-
stos. Describing Renato’s last days, you say that at one point you decide to take a
photograph of him, and then you change your mind:

         As soon as I clicked the shutter, I regretted it, and decided to keep the
      camera without ever developing the negative. From that moment on, the film
      remained in the holder with its image inverted, like a worker’s sacred shroud
      that will never experience the outrage of the last chemical attack. […] It would
      have been very easy for me to print that 6x7 photo, I wouldn’t even have had
      to take such an intimate negative to a photography studio. I could have just



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     gone downstairs to Renato’s garage, which was a cellar one day, a workshop
     the next, or a developing and printing lab, or a welding lab, or whatever
     else came to my mind or my father’s. It would have been done, just like that.
     Instead, I decided that there would be no more exposure to chemical agents,
     not even for Renato’s picture: the mystery of that photograph will remain
     forever wrapped in the darkness of that damned roll of film.

       Photography is a recurrent theme in Asbestos, and, as we have mentioned,
it is generally used to prove that what is being told “really happened”. This is the
case not only with the photographs that are attached to the book, and which doc-
ument the protagonist’s work history, but also with the anecdote about Renato’s
photograph with the singer Nada at the beginning of the book. No one believed
Renato when he said that he had met the famous singer, but then, years after his
death, a photograph is discovered: in a way, this anecdote is a mirror image of that
of the undeveloped photograph at the end of the book. It seems to me that the epi-
sode of the undeveloped photograph is used to convey the idea that there is a story
to be told, but also that there is an equally important intimacy to be protected,
that not everything necessarily needs to be put on the page and exposed, as victim
narratives tend to do. I imagine that you had to deal with this issue several times
while writing Asbestos, and I think that the resulting balance is one of the things
that make the strength and greatness of your book.
       I wanted to ask you if these are actually questions you’ve asked yourself, and
what criteria you use to decide what to tell and what to keep to yourself. Among
other things, you were in a peculiar position. Usually, when someone writes a
biography, they have to deal with the heirs, who decide what can be made public
and what should remain private. When you wrote Asbestos, you were at the same
time a writer telling a true story with a militant purpose, and Renato’s son and
heir: you were always aware that this was at the same time a story that involved
you personally, but also someone else’s story (“This is the story of a man who has
the same surname as me and the same birthday as me, but is not me”).

     First of all, photography is a working tool for me. I have trained as a
photographer, and, especially when I was doing reportages, I would take
photographs to help me reconstruct scenarios, atmospheres, colours, and
so on.
     Photography plays an important role in Asbestos. Whether they are
archive photos, or photos from the family drawers, all the pictures have
great value. Renato’s factory photos show the reality of the career path I
describe, and the premature ageing of his body.
     As regards the anecdote of the photograph that I chose not to deve-


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Nicole Siri (ed.), Where Ego Was, “We” Shall Be



lop, it deals with the problem of refusing to expose oneself completely, to
expose the saddest and most obscene parts of one’s history. I only realised
it later, but it has to do with a risk inherent in narratives that tell the stories
of the vulnerable: the risk of having to lay bare one’s miseries and traumas
(be they illnesses, existential disasters, or gender violence) in order to tell
one’s story.
       On the one hand, telling one’s own story is a form of re-appropria-
tion: writing about the violence that one has suffered allows one to obtain
at least some sort of poetic justice, a form of emotional compensation, and
perhaps it can also become a denunciation that goes beyond one’s own
situation, and speaks of something that is experienced globally. However,
there is also a risk that, once these stories reach a middle-class audience
that reads them from a position of comfort, they will end up contributing
to the demonisation of the lives of the poor: the middle-class audience can
come to think that “if the middle class lives in different conditions, it is be-
cause they deserve it, because they are the makers of their own happiness”.
This risk is very much present in narratives of vulnerability. It is perhaps
less perceived here in Italy, but in the UK, in Britain, many writers (often
working-class women and victims of gender violence) are questioning
whether it is right to keep feeding their bruises to a middle class audience.
       With regard to the choices I had to make in writing Asbestos, the main
issue for me was this. I chose to tell the story of my father, who was dead
and had no chance to respond. Writing his story was a way of feeling that
he was somehow still alive, and that his voice could be heard. On the other
hand, while writing this story, I had to interact with other people: my
mother and my sister. People who are alive, and with whom I have a rela-
tionship. I had to ask myself: what right do I have to tell their stories? In
other words: how could I, of all people, who always say that we must spe-
ak for ourselves so that others do not speak for us, tell my mother’s story?
       This was crucial because my mother explicitly denied me this right:
she explicitly asked me to be kept out of my books. This is, of course, a le-
gitimate decision. But I have also often come across readers — I would say,
especially second-wave feminists — who have asked me where my mother
is, who have complained about the absence of the female figure in my sto-
ries. So I have to start by clarifying this: my mother is in the background
because she asked me to be. I respected her wishes.
       I negotiated her presence in my books, and over the years she allowed
me to represent her a little more. Eventually, in the latest edition of Asbes-
tos, I was able to include a picture of her and Renato. She is also drawn on
the cover of the Spanish edition of In the Circle of Blasphemy (El circulo de los


200
                                          Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



blasfemos). But this negotiation was difficult. In my opinion, this is the other
side of the expectations of bourgeois middle-class readers, who want to see
everything.
      I respect my mother’s wishes: for personal reasons, she doesn’t want
to appear so much in my book. I don’t necessarily agree with all of her re-
asons. I would like to be allowed to tell more of her story, but I respect her
wish to remain out of the picture.

      Just over a month after the release of the third edition of Asbestos, I feel I
must ask you to talk about the book’s ending, which you have been revising over
the years.
      The first edition (Agenzia X, 2012) ended with a passage in which the son, a
“precarious cognitive worker”, turns to his father and, in the “family lexicon” de-
rived from Luciano Bianciardi’s Il lavoro culturale, alludes to the illusion of the
social elevator. While the father’s generation could believe in it, the son contrasts
it with the image of a ladder that is climbed laboriously and, ultimately, in vain:

        These are the last words that I would like to say to him: dad, I did take a bag
     of marble dust up to the second floor. But the bosses have already looted the
     accounting office and there is nothing left for us, the children of the workers
     who tried to climb the stairs. They just took the piss out of us, Maremma
     schifosa.

      In the second edition (Alegre, 2014) you added another chapter, “Like Steve
McQueen”, as a conclusion. This chapter stands out from the rest of the book
because, through “a strange cinematographic projection”, a montage which — as
you yourself explain — follows the logic of a dream, rather than that of a linear
narrative, it inverts the relationships between memory and the imagination, on the
one hand, and documents on the other.
      Like Steve McQueen creates a climax leading to an angry conclusion in
which the “working-class heroes” return “all together, to settle the score”.
      In the latest and very recent edition of Asbestos (Feltrinelli, 2023), the order
of the elements in the ending is once again inverted: the chapter “Like Steve Mc-
Queen” is retained, but the ending of the first edition is restored to its position in
the epilogue.
      I wanted to ask you if you would be willing to explain some of the consid-
erations that led you to this rethinking of the book’s ending. I am reminded of a
saying by Pasolini, who once wrote in one of his tragedies that “everything that
does not end, ends according to the truth”.



                                                                                          201
Nicole Siri (ed.), Where Ego Was, “We” Shall Be



     In the first edition (Agenzia X), I angrily cursed the major way in whi-
ch the protagonist, his generation and his social class had been ripped off,
and the broken social elevator that only seems to go down. I ended with a
very Tuscan swear phrase, “Maremma schifosa”.
     During the year and a half of presentations that then led me to the 2014
reissue (Alegre 2014), I felt the need to include new material in the book,
and so I wrote its most fictional chapter, “Like Steve McQueen”, a sort of ci-
nematographic projection, a miracle in which a group of characters from all
times and places are evoked. The point of this chapter is that these characters
achieve a sort of poetic justice: since this justice does not come from courtro-
oms, these metal-cowboys have come to settle the scores with the bosses.
     Now, with the Feltrinelli reissue, perhaps I felt the need to return to
that curse. It is a partial return to the conclusion of the first edition, as the
chapter “Like Steve McQueen” remains in the book. The 2012 epilogue has
been split in two, with the last two pages of the final chapter of the 2012
edition moved to the very end of the book, after “Like Steve McQueen”.
This is not the only change in the Feltrinelli reissue: I have also reworked
other episodes, but it is the most substantial choice made within the new
edition. It is explained, I think, by the need to return to having a curse at
the end of the book.

      I would also like to ask you some questions about the work you are doing with
the “Working class”series that you are directing for Alegre, the organising of the
Working Class Literature festival together with the GKN factory collective, and
your recent essay Non è un pranzo di gala ( “It’s not a gala luncheon”, 2022).
      First of all, it seems to me that one of the most crucial and recurring ques-
tions in this complex and collective work is the one that Cash Carraway sums
up with the phrase “trying to find your voice as a marginalised citizen”. It is a
central theme of Skint Estate, her extraordinary memoir, which can be seen as,
among other things, a long reflection on the fact that – to quote her again – “pain is
hack”. The risk is that marginalised people may end up trapped in narratives that
ultimately work against them, even if they are the ones speaking. All of Carraway’s
prose, it seems to me, is a long reflection on this problem, and an attempt to develop
an antidote to these rhetorical traps. Similarly, the GKN factory collective writes
in their collective diary Insorgiamo (“Let Us Rise Up”): “But it’s time to stop
talking about these people. We’re not here to say how bad they are. If we talk about
how bad they are, we have already lost our battle. You do not argue about the na-
ture of a vulture”. In the essay Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze describes
some rhetorical and relational mechanisms that can perhaps be applied to working
class narratives and the context of power relations into which they are inserted.


202
                                       Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



He argues that any rhetorical operation that has a“pedagogical” aim – i.e. that is
aimed at reaching an agreement between the parties involved – can end up in a set-
back: one can find oneself asking for recognition from someone who, by definition,
is neither willing nor interested in granting it.
      It seems to me that Cash Carraway’s book, the GKN workers’ collective diary,
and your essay all distance themselves from this risk by assuming from the outset
the idea of a fundamental irreconcilability, by taking conflict as a starting point.
What I want to ask you, I guess, is how you think working-class literature should
position itself in order to be able to speak out in a really effective way, without
falling into the rhetorical traps of the victim narrative.

      I began to reflect upon this theme in the last years of my activism. I
read a number of memoirs, mostly British, but some French, which de-
alt with wounds, scars inflicted by capitalism and patriarchy, memoirs of
working-class women who had suffered gender violence. Both Cash Car-
raway’s and D. Hunter’s works (Chav Solidarity and Tracksuits, Traumas
and Class Traitors) — the best-sellers in Alegre’s Working-Class series as
of today — are very interesting for this very reason: I can’t say that they
manage to avoid victim narratives, but at least they deal with the problem
of victimhood, of the gaze of those who read these stories from a position
of comfort, with the risks of misery porn and the poverty safari. The latter
is a typical format of Channel 5 broadcasting in England: feeding stories of
proletarians to a wealthy London audience. Working-class literature can-
not be the literary translation of this kind of format, which is a neoliberal
format: but it does run this risk. Indeed, the book industry is well aware
of the success of this format and tends to place working-class authors in
the same position. The question, then, is how to avoid this. Carraway does
it with humour, questioning the reader, cornering them, sometimes titil-
lating them, and then — figuratively — slamming their head against the
wall. Hunter has a harder, more argumentative strategy. I think I stand
halfway between the two, between humour and invective.
      The Working-Class Literature Festival is a moment when we establish
the rules, we set the boundaries: in this context, it is easier to tell our own
stories, and to set the conditions under which our stories are valid.
      I must say that the important events in the book industry have not
been very welcoming to us so far. I attended the Salone del Libro with D.
Hunter, and that was the only time in which we had any kind of recogni-
tion in a very important context. In general, we still tend to be excluded
from these contexts, so we’re not particularly worried about not being able
to speak on our terms in a mainstream context yet.


                                                                                    203
Nicole Siri (ed.), Where Ego Was, “We” Shall Be



      We are working on the new edition of the Working-Class Literature
Festival. We hope to be able now to establish relations with other coun-
tries, with working-class literature in other languages.
      I think it is important to reflect on the conditions under which the
Working-Class Literature Festival was created, and our opponents’ re-
actions. Our festival did not only take place within the literary field: it hap-
pened within actual class struggle. We learned from the newspapers that
when the owners of the ex-GKN industrial plant heard about the festival,
allegedly they had a hostile reaction to the fact that we were organising a
literary festival inside an industrial plant. We need to reflect on this: why is
a literary festival more frightening than a street demonstration?
      Perhaps this is because the latter is expected from the workers, but
they are not expected to be able to work on the imaginary. When they do —
they organise a literary festival in a factory, opening its doors to a different
and wider public —, the bosses expect only a few working-class people to
show up. Instead, a huge number of people showed up: researchers, mid-
dle-class people, and teachers mostly from the Florence area, but also from
much further afield — all these people were very interested in our festival.
      What happened at the festival was that there was actually a re-appro-
priation of words and voices. There was a moment when we thought about
inviting great actors to help promote the event, a proposal that came from
the Alegre publishing house. We didn’t succeed, for various reasons —
some couldn’t come, some didn’t answer… — so we did our readings and
performances with the voices of the GKN workers. Something superlative
came out of it. Ultimately, in hindsight, it all worked out: if famous actors
had come, everyone would have thought it was them who had brought
all those people into the factory to talk about literature. Actually no, we
showed that it was the workers who had done it.
      So yes, we must try to make our voices heard, not to have them stolen,
not to have people speak for us, and then end up speaking in our place.
This must be the peculiarity of working-class literature: to tell your story,
so that it is not told by others.

      Another point that seems to me to be recurrent is the attempt to undermine,
in various ways, the conventional means of consuming literature: the book writ-
ten by an individual and designed to be read by a multitude of individuals in the
silence of their rooms.
      From the theatrical adaptations of Asbestos (if I am not mistaken, you put
Renato’s famous car on stage) to your reflections on the factory collective, which,
in contrast to the writer working alone, works collectively on the construction


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of a new imaginary, to Cash Carraway, who in the “Author’s Note” urges us to
read Skint Estate aloud: “The words written on these pages were not intended to
be read in silence. So please say them out loud whenever you can — preferably to
someone who doesn’t want to hear them”, you all somehow seem to be exploring
the various ways in which literature can be enjoyed other than privately.

      Yes, I think that the consumption of a cultural product in solitude
lends itself more to a bourgeois context than a proletarian one. In his Agua-
fuertes asturianas, Roberto Arlt writes that in Spain he saw groups of wor-
kers who met in the evening, after work, in artisan workshops and read
novels aloud. They would read a chapter, discuss it, and then continue
reading. It was a practice which allowed an exchange between the literate
and the illiterate, because reading aloud allowed the illiterate to enjoy the-
se novels.
      Something similar happens with theatre. There is a very strong tra-
dition of popular theatre in the Florence area: every ‘Casa del popolo’ has
its theatre. Performances are a truly effective means of artistic communica-
tion, thanks to their immediacy.
      In fact, we have organised several staged readings and theatrical
adaptations of working-class novels. This was a fundamental element of
the Working-Class Literature Festival itself, and also of the events leading
up to the festival. We organised a series of events in the Florence area to
raise interest in our work, and we hope to do this again next year.
      Having said that, I was unfortunately unable to bring my father’s old
Audi on stage, which still works perfectly even though it’s 33 years old: it
wouldn’t fit through the door of the theatre where we went on stage with
the adaptation of Asbestos, Like Steve McQueen. Maybe there will be a way
to get it on stage in an outdoor event.
      However, I would say that yes: working-class works can obviously be
read in solitude and silence, but I deeply encourage any collective form of
fruition form, any pratice that allows the “I” to become an “us”.

      Can you already tell me something about the next edition of the Work-
ing-Class Literature Festival and your next plans? How is working-class litera-
ture doing today, both in Italy and around the world?

      The last few years have been very positive. Obviously, the glass is
always half full and half empty at the same time. When I think of the situa-
tion in Britain, it seems idyllic compared to Italy. But if you then talk to the
Brits, they will rightly complain about many things that could be better.


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Nicole Siri (ed.), Where Ego Was, “We” Shall Be



       This comparison also reveals certain paradoxes. In Britain there are a
huge number of very interesting works that break through into the main-
stream, become bestsellers. TV or cinema adaptations are sometimes made
out of them. Here we don’t have comparable bestsellers, but we have been
able to join a popular mobilisation. The two traditions are somewhat diffe-
rent. In Britain, people proudly claim to belong to the working class — so-
metimes, a working-class background is claimed even by people who are
not really working class, but romanticize their belonging to the working
class. In Italy, working-class background is somehow less perceived, the
identity component is not as strong. But it has a much stronger political
connotation.
       As of today, I would say that since 2019, and perhaps even a little ear-
lier, a lot has happened. In Spain, there was Luisa Carnés’ Tea Rooms, which
became a longseller, and then also a TV series. In France, many important
works have been published — the crowning achievement being the Nobel
Prize for Annie Ernaux. In Britain, Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize
for Shuggie Bain. And then there’s Sweden, another country where there’s a
lot going on. I am working hard on this front, despite the language barrier:
I can already anticipate that at the second edition of the festival we will
hopefully have a delegation consisting of a Swedish author and a scholar
who are part of the magazine Klass.
       One of the ideas I’m working on is to give the second edition of the
festival a geographical dimension. After all, in the first edition we dealt
with the genealogies of contemporary working-class literature. This time
I’d like to explore its geography: have people from France, from England,
from Sweden. All this is still work in progress, though.
       As for Alegre’s Working-Class series, we will soon be publishing a
new translation of a narrative essay on class violence in the United States.
There will also be the debut of a writer, herself from a working class back-
ground, who will tell a story set in the Florence area and directly linked to
the GKN mobilisation. We will also be publishing another English novel,
which I am translating as we speak: How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by An-
thony Cartwright, a brilliant novel set in the Midlands during the Thatcher
years.
       Let’s keep working, now that we have momentum, and see what we
can build. Our priorities are, on the one hand, to be able to enter the main-
stream and, on the other, to create connections between various national
scenarios of working-class literature. Our aim is to build a working-class
imagery: an imagery of solidarity and conflict, an imagery that is able to
warm the hearts of people and nurture their consciences.


206
                                    Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



                        How to cite this article
      Siri, Nicole, “Where Ego was, ‘We’ Shall Be. A Conversation with
Alberto Prunetti on Working-Class Literature”, Images and representations
of work in literature and visual culture, Eds. V. Serra – R. Calzoni, Between,
XIII.26 (2023): 195-207, www.betweenjournal.it.



                               The Author
     Nicole Siri

       Nicole Siri is currently postdoctoral researcher in Comparative Lit-
erature at ITI Lethica (Institut thématique interdisciplinaire en Littératures,
éthique et arts), Université de Strasbourg. Her main research interests are
literary theory, French literature, and the representation of labour in the
European novel tradition.

      Email: nicolesiri89@gmail.com



                               The Article
     Date sent: --/--/----
     Date accepted: --/--/----
     Date published: 30/11/2023



                        How to cite this article
      Siri, Nicole, “Where Ego was, ‘We’ Shall Be. A Conversation with Al-
berto Prunetti on Working-Class Literature”, Images and representations of
work in literature and visual culture, Eds. V. Serra – R. Calzoni, Between,
XIII.26 (2023), 195-207, www.betweenjournal.it.




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