In particolare si prenderanno in considerazione tre romanzi dell'autrice, che sembrano rappresentare al meglio le caratteristiche di questa nuova tipologia romanzesca e che sono stati pubblicati a cinque anni di distanza l'uno dall'altro: Quando Dio ballava il tango (2002), Ghiacciofuoco (2007-scritto a quattro mani con Nicola Lecca) e Il piatto dell'angelo (2013). La sua cifra stilistica è una scrittura costruita da frammenti e brani stranianti, da una lingua costan-temente in bilico tra altre lingue, con la quale si riferisce al tema dell'emigrazione. Questo contributo focalizza l'attenzione sulla scrittura di Laura Pariani, una fra le autrici italiane contemporanee più sperimentali, con l'intento di evidenziarne quegli elementi che caratterizzano i romanzi della post-postmodernità. © Italian Studies at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Reading 2015. Finally, Pariani’s ethics of self-reflection is discussed as an example of the common ground existing between postmodernism and feminisms, allied in the rejection of hegemonic master narratives and in the choice of plural, partial, and minor narratives. Irony is discarded, in favour of a renewed trust in the ethical dimension of the act of writing, in the role of the storyteller, and in an empathic narrative pact with the reader.

It shows how Pariani uses textual and narrative strategies such as those included under the umbrella-term of self-reflection (typical of postmodern literature, although not exclusive to it), and how, at the same time, her literary project is marked by a strong ethical stance: ‘a moral agenda in postmodern disguise’. It looks at its meta-fictional features (illusion-breaking devices highlighting the constructed nature of fiction as an artifice: deconstructed frames, non-linear narrations, juxtaposition and intertwining of several stories, multiple focalizations, narrative embeddings, multilingualism, and intertextuality), its self-reflexive traits (reflection of the authorial self in the text, in a character with deliberate autobiographical resonances), and the meta-narrative aspects (the female narrator’s pondering on the act of narrating, its processes, its aims). Based on the analysis of an excerpt from the last chapter of L’uovo di Gertrudina (2003), this article investigates the forms, themes, and functions of self-reflection in Laura Pariani’s fiction.

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