Fra il ‘tempo di Dio' e il ‘tempo di Greenwich': paradigmi intertestuali e paradigmi esperienziali in ‘Redburn' di Herman Melville

Intertextuality as a privileged "focus" to sift the crossings and contaminations which characterize the best literary production of the American Renaissance. This grand perspective is at the center of the essay as an interpretive key to the works of such artists as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. American culture acquires complexity and identity when applying sophisticated epistemological tools to the relationship between "civilization" and the New World, a pristine resource potentially capable of being easily trapped in the mesh of strict materialism and progressive ideology. On this rich background takes shape the complex “intertextuality” of the fourth novel by Herman Melville, “Redburn”, in which the obvious ideological mechanics of the "American dream" are slowly deconstructed in the encounter/clash with Old World culture. Its essential outcome is that, in the perspective of the protagonist, America does no longer offer herself under the guise of an alleged misleading coincidence between utopia and reality. On the contrary, it becomes a sort of "exemplum” of the irreconcilable separation between "chronometricals" and "horologicals", between the poles of a reality that rejects any form of subordination to the ideological monism of the institutional system, with its implied reductionism and levelling thrust.