The Actor and the Legislator

The Dramatic Paradigm in Linguistic Education from Lombardo Radice to Gramsci

Abstract

This article explores the roots of a perspective that, before converging into modern democratic linguistic education as shaped by De Mauro, passed through the phase of neo-idealist pedagogy and Gramsci’s prison reflections. At the heart of the inquiry lies not only a philological recovery, but the exploration of a dramatic model of education – a space of mediation between language-as-life (the dialect, the actor) and language-as-law (the norm, the legislator). By tracing a path that begins with Lombardo Radice and moves through Gramsci’s early journalistic writings to his Prison Notebooks, the study investigates the conception of grammar not as a dry precept, but as a political and historical act. The analysis of a specific episode in theatrical history, viewed as a center of irradiation, transforms the language question into a barometer of hegemony in the making, where the word embodied on the theatrical stage becomes a necessary precondition for the emancipation and subjectivation of subaltern groups.