Richard Sennett and ‘the new rhetoric of the People’: a Manzonian Path

This essay aims to analyse the modern relationship between cultural displacement and social narration focusing on Richard Sennett’s references to Manzoni expressed in The Foreigner (2011) from a socio-cultural perspective. According to Sennett, Manzoni’s concept was that a people, a volk, may help in understanding the effects of Italian colonialisms during the Risorgimento: ‘This anthropological image of a volk is an epochal event in modern social imagery and rhetoric’. Hence the opportunity to further investigate the relationship between post-colonialism and displacement in the post-modern age starting from Sennett’s work. His reflection on Manzoni’s conception of ʽpeople’ provided both narrative, symbolic and ethical points of consideration, with particular regard to the development of the historic novel as a significant medium of collective representations.