Title

Landscape of forms, forms of landscape in Carlo Emilio Gadda's works

Date of Completion

January 1997

Keywords

Literature, Comparative|Literature, Romance

Degree

Ph.D.

Abstract

The dissertation is an attempt to systematize Carlo Emilio Gadda's descriptive ability and the focuses of his narrative landscape, their symbolical meanings in an intertextual context. Starting from the meaning of the word "landscape" itself for the Italian language and specifically for Gadda--"landscape" as broadly and metaphorically meant by Jean-Pierre Richard--the thesis displays the places and the objects in which such a landscape is articulated, and their meanings: the seas and the shores, as forms of the light; the mountains, as forms of the ascent and of the abyss; the rivers and the lakes, as forms building history by accumulation of layers; the gardens, as forms of time; the representations of the sacred, as moments of the philology unsuccessfully attempting to retrieve an origin; the architecture and the buildings, inside of which a particular attention is dedicated to the living rooms, as social places par excellence; the photographs and the bodies portrayed in them as forms of the death; the mythology and, in specific, Hermes, as the pagan god connecting the human world to another dimension. ^

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