| The dissertation focusses on literary style as a "mode of knowledge," and in particular on the role played by Gianfranco Contini in framing contemporary literary discourse in Italy. Contini claims that the most influential chapter of 20th century Italian literature is to be found in the works of "second-order-writers" ("scrittori in funzione d'altro") like Contini himself. These "Galileian" authors struggle to find an aesthetic embodiment of truth by embracing a performative practice of critical writing. I argue that the main feature of this "Galileian" family is constituted by the attempt to transform criticism into a cognitive tool. It is precisely this transformation that the novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda stages in his works. And in turn, it is precisely Gadda's sort of novel that the art historian Longhi (another champion of "second-order-writers" after whom, I argue, Contini fashioned himself) proposes as the paradigm for the modern critical essay. In the dissertation, I exhaustively study the interlacing of Gadda's, Contini's, and Longhi's poetics both in its textual dimension as well as in its ties to the broader Italian cultural background of the first half of the century. I argue that, well before structuralism arrived in Italy during the 1940, Contini's early version of structuralism is informed by Longhi's distinctive "formalism." So what I am dealing with here is a single literary ambition shared by three authors working in three different literary domains, but at the core of whose undertaking lies what Pierpaolo Pasolini has called the "illusion" of getting to know reality as the never ending story of its forms. I thus demonstrate the extent to which Contini's and Longhi's approaches both shed light on and are illuminated by Gadda's poetic of literature as a "cognitive" enterprise. Their common striving for a "truthful style," intrinsically distant from the Neorealist aesthetic, helps to redefine what literature was in Italy during this time period. |
