Some Aspects of the Grotesque in the Works of Tommaso Landolfi (Italy).

Tommaso Landolfi is a unique and controversial figure in contemporary Italian literature. The atmosphere and thought that dominated the literary scene in Europe as well as in Italy during the first decades of the twentieth century were bound to lead to violent reaction; in Landolfi's case, to the use of the grotesque as emblematic of the way man might liberate himself from the penetrating fears that now surrounded his own existence. The literary choice of the grotesque, rare in the Italian tradition, well suits the ideology incorporated in Landolfi's writing, and places him more on a broader European plane than in the limited sphere of modern Italy. His vision of an increasingly chaotic world is the key to the techniques and content of his prose. He foresaw the world as we only now perceive it--dominated by violence, alienation and man's seeming helplessness to avert his own destruction. Introductory remarks to the dissertation include a synoptic discussion of the historical development of the word, "grotesque," the concept it has embodied in both past and present, and the influence of psychoanalytic thought transmitted through other European writers who were influential on Landolfi's development and his particular manipulation of grotesque imagery. This imagery is analyzed in several of his short stories and the two novels, La pietra lunare and Racconto d'autunno. The variety of themes and motifs in these works is explicated, as a further indication of the particular forms that Landolfi tends to adopt. Landolfi's particular use of the grotesque describes and defines his writing as part of an avant-garde literature. This description and definition present themselves most forcefully through a two-stage process: first, negation of established philosophical attitudes and , second, assertion and development of a new set of rules established through the fracturing process that is the grotesque. Here, Landolfi evokes a new set of patterns of awareness, and suggests a rearrangement of phenomena in new interpretations of experience. This is the ultimate function of the grotesque as tool and technique in the corpus of Landolfi's writing.Ph.D.Romance literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159347/1/8314246.pd