Leonardo Sciascia: The Writer as the Public Conscience

Abstract

Instead of following the customary cultural approach of their time, there have been authors who have brought widely accepted contemporary cultural values into question: this is what Leonardo Sciascia did by making Sicily a privileged observatory for looking at the world from a mafia perspective. His analyses, investigations and stories do not just give us an insight into Sicily, they are a metaphor of the world. This is the role of the intellectual according to Sciascia. Writers cannot live in a turris eburnea, alone in their own intellectual isolation; they must play a public role of testimony or a role of ‘public awareness’, as defined by Gesualdo Bufalino.