Versions of engagement: A journal, the novel, and postwar Italy and France

This dissertation examines the concept and evolution of political engagement in the literature of postwar France and Italy from the 1940s through the middle of the 1970s. The failure of the Revue internationale, a journal organized by Italian, French, and German authors in the early 1960s, serves as the initial basis for this study. Concerned with maintaining the integrity of both literature and engagement, the founders of the Revue envisioned a collective effort to address issues of both political and literary interest. Their disputes illustrate more general difficulties in establishing the nature of the author's involvement in politics and, more importantly, in defining literature and audience as the postwar period came to a close. Criticism of the French perspective on these issues in particular reflects more general objections to the increasing importance of theory in the late 1960s, as well as to the concept of literature advanced by the French and Italian avant-garde.Given the historical and literary proximity of writers in postwar Italy and France, I focus on the literary works and essays of Albert Camus, Italo Calvino, Maurice Blanchot, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Journalists as well as novelists, each of these authors devises a notion of engagement that both accepts Jean-Paul Sartre's assessment of the responsibility of the writer and rejects the limitations that he places on the novel. Separate inquiries into each author illustrate the importance of political considerations, in their rejection of traditional notions of realism, as well as in their establishment of unique forms of communication with an audience. Pre-war interest in myth, the sacred, and the irrational, as well as the postwar work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Mircea Eliade, are particularly useful in understanding the versions of literature and commitment to the socio-political world that these authors attempt to establish. In spite of their obvious differences, they each navigate a path between Sartrean engagement and avant-garde claims to dissident disengagement, highlighting the importance of myth and story in communicating with and engaging the reader.