The modernist character : a study in the short fiction of Bontempelli, Gadda, Landolfi and Palazzeschi

• Main Author: Polisca, Elena
• Published: University of Birmingham 2007
• Subjects: 850
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.487175

This study seeks to explore the relationsh~ between the short story/racconto genre and the negative representation of the character in Italian modernist literatufe. In the first chapter, considerations regarding the crisis at the tum ofthe twentieth century and the concept and development ofthe Italian racconto are investigated, with the purpose ofhighlighting modernist features within Italian literature around and prior to the 1930s, the time in which my selected authors (Bontempelli, Gadda, Landolfi and Palazzeschi) were writing. Subsequently, the notion ofantihero within these writers' selected raccolte di racconti is explored: the character emerges as an inetto, an essentially negative creature, bearing the signs ofEuropean modernism. These features (alienation, solitude, social anomaly, melancholy, dissolution ofselfhood, anguish, fragmentation) are then considered in the following four chapters, each one dedicated to one author. For each author, the issue of character representation is explored in relation to a different conception ofracconto writing. Bontempelli's objective approach, Gadda's and Landolfi's subjective approaches, and Palazzeschi's return to objectivity are discussed together in the conclusion, where a mapping ofthe negative modernist character is attempted, ultimately revealing, through Palazzeschi's buffo, an unexpected, positive outcome to the problematic representation ofthe modernist antihero.