Mariagrazia Margarito, Running, walking: a gesture to live, to think, to write

 

Foot race, from jogging to marathon, as well as walking (from city walking to Santiago’s Camino) are issues that are more and more recurring in articles and contemporary publications, not only in the form of magazines and technical manuals (evident procedural perspective, above all in health-injunctions), but also as autobiographical fiction (Murakami, 2009; Rufin, 2013), fictional biography (Echenoz, 2008), sociological and anthropological studies (Breton, 2002, Winkin, 2012) and philosophical studies (Gros, 2009). Through this essay we would like to analyse, in a corpus of heterogenic work whose common denominator is – in addition to the above mentioned issues – French language (also in translation) if the action of step – walking, running. Our theoretical picture, in linguistics, is the one of analyse du discours of French school; the lexical level will be privileged, without omitting the actualization of emotions in discours, their conversational effects, in particular for translated works.
The aim of this study is to verify what is said/written about the gesture ‘step of those who walk’ and ‘step of those who run’. We have already verified that in the materiality of language the moving body is represented with an outside (landscape, meetings..) and an inside, this latter to be intended above all as the crowding and unfolding of thoughts. We wonder if they are a fertile ground for the birth of emotions and most of all if the concept of ‘social representation’ – so prolific in social an linguistic sciences – can be valid for emotions.

 

Published on: Poetics of gesture, N. 19 New Series – Year X 2014