Francesca Rigotti

The essay should give pleasure, as Virginia Woolf would put it, the essay must be «pure like water or pure like wine». Unfortunately, most efforts in this direction are being destroyed these days since writing in a standardized, arid, and academic English is a must if you want your essay to be accepted and taken seriously by the scientific community. Over the last decades the essay in the social sciences received valuable contributions from poetry, literature and philosophy. The contaminatio generum contributes in a positive way to the pleasure on the part of the reader, and of «tired people coming home in the evening» (V.W.), too. This phenomenon happens to occur, for instance, in Gasparini’s sociological writings, where the contributions of his different souls (the poet, the critic, the social scientist) amalgamate in a most agreeable and pleasant «interstitial» writing.