Il destino del «povero studente». La figura dello studente universitario tra goliardia e inettitudine nella narrativa dell’Ottocento

If the 18th century was the century of the triumph of the figure of the “bourgeois” also as a literary character, the following century was instead the century of its progressive deconstruction, a reflection of a crisis that affected “the mental and psychic experience” (Battaglia 1966) and called into question its social role. And if throughout the century the image of the child and the young man still remained a model of an ideal artistic-existential dimension (Bani-Gouchan 2015), that of the adolescent and the young man, that is, of those who are approaching the threshold of “bourgeois” maturity, became one of the most significant paradigms of this interior discomfort, the experience of which can in some cases lead to a symbolic death by consumption, as in the case of Hanno, the last of the Buddenbrooks. This malaise is even more evident in the character of the young university student, that is, of the bourgeois who, thanks to higher education, has access to an ideal and artistic dimension in profound disagreement with real life; of the bourgeois, that is, who is also an intellectual in pectore, representative of that narrow elite that can no longer share the values ​​and practices of his own social class. Starting from these assumptions, the contribution will traverse the narrative of the 19th century analyzing the figure of the university student in a canon that goes from Foscolo's Ortis to Chekhov's Trofimov passing through Hawthorne, Balzac, Poe, Turgenev, Dostoevskij, and Nievo.