Dentro la poesia americana contemporanea: gli sguardi opposti di Gene Tanta e Amy Newman

The paper reads Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer as a double-layered palimpsest, in which the first, translucent layer was written by young Christopher McCandless over some of the major contributions to the American myth of the escape from civilization into the authentic life of the wild (Henry David Thoreau, Jack London). The second, opaque layer has been written by writer Jon Krakauer in his attempt to interpret McCandless’ text (as a palimpsest) through his own, modernized conception—and myth—of mountaineering as a pristine form of contact with nature. Thus, ideas that shaped “the American mind”—like Emerson’s praise of solitude and transition, which Thoreau’s texts in their turn subsume—linger in Krakauer’s palimpsest through his inscription of contemporary nature-writings on McCandless’s assumed intentions.