Sala Paparelli-Placanica
15:30

Professor
Giuseppe Bonifacino
Università of Bari

In Gadda literature is never separated from a reflection on knowledge and ethics. For this reason, his narrative is based on a need of realism which, though looking at the great nineteenth-century tradition, from Manzoni to Balzac and Zola, deconstructs them by intertwining this tradition with a modernist vision of the cognitive process, where the subject is deeply involved with his object in a mutual and everlasting “deformation” which nourishes  the narration. Through the analysis of some excerpts from Cognizione and Pasticciaccio this paper aims at showing how, in Gadda’s realism, knowledge reveals itself within the movement of deformation and not beyond it, in a contrastive but untranscendable link between the phenomenal appearances of the world and the “noumenal” truth which inhabits them and can be showed in a modernist way only for negation and in allegory.

Coordinator
Carlo Santoli