Studi novecenteschi | 2018 | N. 2

Forse che sí forse che no: notes on D’Annunzio’s last novel · Gabriele D’Annunzio’s last novel, Forse che sí forse che no, is the most fictional of all, given its plot with many coup de théâtre and a multitude of characters. The writing is full of recursive elements, thus foreshadowing the technique of the last phase of his prose-writing, the «notturno». Among the characters, for the first time women are presented not as mere counterparts to the central male figure, but with different traits, embodied in Isabella, Vana and Lunella, each one an artist in a different sense and of her own accord. Their art uses recursive elements to join opposites and builds a web that envelops Paolo Tarsis. His flight at the end, especially after the revision of the novel’s ending for its last edition, resembles more a failed escape than a triumphant victory.

In this paper, I will analyze the theme of fog in Carlo Michelstaedter’s poetry · I will show how fog, far from being a sporadic occurrence in the author’s production, is a constant presence that permeates his corpus, and possesses a distinct allegorical meaning. To do so I will mainly rely on a number of poems, and, secondarily, on passages from La Persuasione e la Rettorica and Il Dialogo della Salute – this double approach will allow me to demonstrate the philosophical weight of the fog’s poetical presence. I argue that fog is an entity that represents the dull and sterile homogeneity which characterizes both individuals devoid of individuality, and the social structures that these individuals, in getting together, constitute – from this perspective, fog is deeply connected with what Michelstaedter
defines as rettorica.
To conclude, I will briefly address the presence of the wind in Michelstaedter’s poetry, and I will highlight the contraposition between fog and
wind, in what the author describes as “ciclopica lotta dell’etere” – the two
meteorological conditions thus create a mythopoesis which allegorizes the
two fundamental poles of Michelstaedter’s philosophy.

From Biography to Narrative: Un anno di scuola through Giani Stuparich’s Unpublished Literary and Private Writings · First published in 1929, Un anno di scuola is one of the most famous short stories by Giani Stuparich and met meaningful approval from Italian critics, from Eugenio Montale to Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo. This paper focuses on the different drafts of the text, from the first one, written when Stuparich was deployed as a soldier in World War I, to the last and final version of 1929. The paper also analyses other literary works and unpublished documents (such as letters and diaries) by Stuparich. Through the evidence provided by these texts, the paper traces the genesis of Un anno di scuola and highlights the remarkable differences between its various drafts, from both a narratological and a stylistic point of view. It is thus shown how Stuparich’s narrative technique evolved over time.

The article wants to explore the ways of reusing of the biblical text of the apocalypse in Gadda’s works. Especially in friction with historical thematics, the author seems to find in this text an important reference for his expressive laboratory and of his conception of writing.

The continuous bass played by the reminiscence of a particular Lombard culture, both literary and artistic,can be easily found in Luigi Santucci’s most famous novels. The writer never forgets Milan, his hometown (which Carlo Emilio Gadda defined as «disparsa»), whose picture is especially drawn in the pages of Il velocifero and Orfeo in Paradiso. The novel Il velocifero takes place in the first fifteen years of the XXth century whereas in Orfeo in Paradiso Santucci goes back to the last decade of the XIXth century. The flavors of an almost lost Milan come back alive through the stories and are also enriched by the use of dialect. Apart from an unquestioned originality, a shrewd reader can easily identify in these novels echoes of Emilio De Marchi as well as many other nineteenth Milanese writers. Nevertheless, anecdotes and fine sketches do not divert the attention away from the plot of the story; rather, they enrich it. Due to some reasons gathered in this paper, Luigi Santucci mayberegarded as a prosecutor of the famous «linea lombarda» already defined by Dante Isella in which he could be fully inscribed both in terms of literary identity and in terms of style.

The psychoanalytic method and its attraction towards the twentieth-century writer is visibly present in two novels published in different continents but in the same period and cultural climate: Alberto Moravia’s Io e lui and Philip Roth’s The Breast. In this essay the author analyzes the events that involve the two unfortunate protagonists of the novels, underlining their similarities. From the hermeneutic comparison of the two novels, by the Freudian instrument of sublimation, emerges the divided characterization of the twentieth century unsuitable man and the pre-eminence of the sexual element in the artistic construction of the author/inventor binomial, paradoxically embodied in the literary expedient of metamorphosis.

This article examines the presence of the Persephone-Kore myth in Giuliano Scabia’s Le foreste sorelle, in particular in the episode of the kidnapping of Suor Gabriella. The analysis of documents today still unpublished and preserved in the author’s personal archive provides useful information to retrace the genesis and the developing of the episode and to clarify the deep connections with the figure of Aphrodite, goddess of love and powerful vis generandi. Myth, in this reading, is a consciously embraced worldview that grounds on metamorphosis the fundamental and pivotal law of life.

The first part of the paper focuses on the ways in which Walter Siti (Modena, 1947) has abandoned the autofiction technique, typical of his first novels, in his latest work, Bruciare tutto (2017), in order to prevent the author from entering the narrative as a character. The second part thoroughly analyses the new stylistic and narrative solutions that the late Siti has adopted and confronts them with his “reality effects” distinctive of his more recent work, with the aim of understanding the complexity and problematic nature of the “transgressive realism” that the author presents. The last part seeks to place Siti’s point of view within the debate on the so-called “return to reality”.

Amongst the voices that have narrate the so-called ‘Nordest’ (Norh East of Italy) and, more generally, those that have engaged with socially relevant themes in the last twenty years, that of Romolo Bugaro’s is probably one of the most interesting. Although his stylistic choices and his philosophical perspective make his work undoubtedly outstanding, only a very small number of academic articles have discussed it. While this small body of literature focuses on the representation of the geographical area of Veneto in Bugaro’s novels, in comparison with other authors’ works set in the same area, this essay tries to provide a comprehensive analysis of Bugaro’s works from his early publications until Effetto domino (2015). Departing from the general trend of analysing the representation of the ‘Nordest’, this essay explores in detail the role of destiny, how Bugaro puts it in dialogue with the two concepts of war and responsibility, tracing the development of these themes in his novels following a chronological approach.