| This dissertation constitutes an investigation of the stylistic policies of Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Pier Paolo Pasolini, authors who, in very different ways, have cast doubt on the normative linguistic model of literary Tuscan imposed from on high by the institutions of Italian cultural tradition. Using the authorial treatment of standardized national language as a springboard to discuss the philosophies which inform the authors' poetics, this project focuses principally on a programmatic subversion of the traditional model of a fixed and individuated subjectivity. Arguing for a functional rationale behind Svevo's infamous, "scrivere male," this chapter considers the author's erratic style as a Deleuzian "stuttering" of canonical literary style, a strategy by means of which the author proposes a subjectivity of process founded upon a principle of ill-health and nicotine, an authorial programme in which Zeno as incurable smoker comes to embody the Svevian ethical project. Carlo Emilio Gadda constructs his characteristically macaronic linguistic network in order to posit a logic of multiplication that places matter in a state of necessary and ever variable relation. In this fluctuating reality, an investigative logic which replaces the traditional process of rational elimination with a capricious proliferation proves incapable of providing a unilinear account of the events surrounding the crime in question, a procedure which parallels the author's conviction that language necessarily constitutes an unpredictable and inescapable system of proliferation. The final chapter on Pier Paolo Pasolini focuses on a new Pasolinian style which emerges in the final decade of the author's life and which, in his most controversial novel, Petrolio, marks the creation of a declared non-style which serves to posit an ethic of non-productivity and self-abnegation at the heart of consumerist Italy. |
