Stretching the standard: Philosophies of style in the work of Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Pier Paolo Pasolini

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\u27 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\u27s infamous, “scrivere male,” this chapter considers the author\u27s 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\u27s 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\u27s 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

Stretching the standard: Philosophies of style in the work of Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Pier Paolo Pasolini

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\u27 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\u27s infamous, “scrivere male,” this chapter considers the author\u27s 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\u27s 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\u27s 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

Neo-Capitalism, Acedia and Non-Style in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Petrolio

In his final novel, Petrolio, Pier Paolo Pasolini offers a dismal portrait of neo-capitalist Italy. Focusing on a programmatic referencing of sloth or acedia, this article explores a series of parallels between the symptomatology of the sin and what Pasolini saw as the unreality of consumerist culture. Conferring a central importance on Pasolini's declared intent to compose his final novel in a type of "non-style, " the article posits a stylistic implementation of the symptoms of acedia in Petrolio as part of a reconfiguration of intellectual engagement. This reconfigured engagement with neo-capitalist Italy is based on the provocative negation of the conventional author figure as purveyor of style and the related attempt to insert the living voice within the confines of literary artifice

Gadda’s Pasticciaccio and the Knotted Posthuman Household

The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel, “Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana”, find detective Ingravallo pursuing a clue as he investigates the brutal murder of Liliana Balducci, an upper-middle-class inhabitant of an apartment on the street of the novel’s title. The location for the book’s concluding showdown is a dilapidated house, or an “oikos”, to borrow from the Greek, into which the Investigator, an outsider, is introduced. “Oikos”, which became the prefix “eco” in both “economics” (literally, law of the house) and “ecology” (or, study of the house) here provides a dynamic lens for the final scenes of the Pasticciaccio, and for viewing its unremitting tension between singularity and generality, interiority and exteriority, anthropic and geological time, human and posthuman. Our article proposes the space of the impoverished Roman household as a key to entering the Gaddian narrative architecture, a space that resonates with what Jeffery Jerome Cohen describes as “the tangled, fecund, and irregular pluriverse humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and forces” (Prismatic Ecology, xxiii). The dwelling on Via Merulana, and even more distinctly the house (or hovel) in which the novel ends, challenge our notions of domestic spaces, their porosity, and their proper inhabitants. In fact, in the narrative’s exploration of these two houses and their occupants, we find intriguing portraits of the tensions that trouble the supposed borders of the human and the posthuman. The “Pasticciaccio”, as we argue, closes (or opens) the door on a narrative architecture of polarity, where material and ontological tensions lead to both human and posthuman conclusions

Animal Humanities, or, On Reading and Writing the Nonhuman// Humanidades animales, o sobre la lectura y la escritura de lo no-humano

Guest editor section editoria