Quest (ion) of Sense. Tabucchi's Poetics of the Uncanny

This research project originally contributes to the analysis of Antonio Tabucchi's oeuvre by proposing an interpretation of his poetics through the perspective of the uncanny. Existing literature, despite having detected a presence of the Freudian unheimliche in the writer, has not developed this observation into a wider reading and problematisation of Tabucchi's poetics. It has been my aim in this thesis to fill this gap, through a comprehensive analysis of Tabucchi's works and a descriptive interpretation of his poetics. The present research takes its cue from the observation of two undisputable, interrelated facts. First, there is a threefold presence by the uncanny in the works of Tabucchi: diegetic (the uncanny in Tabucchi), narrative (the uncanny through Tabucchi) and theoretical (Tabucchi and the uncanny). Second, this uncanny is not necessarily and solely equivalent to Freud's unheimliche - and this is where/why Agamben comes in. Using Agamben in reading Tabucchi lets surface a philosophical enquiry within his works that would remain otherwise overlooked. Tabucchi's philosophical enquiry is precisely the uncanny emergence of signification itself in literature (the uncanny as poetics), in relation to the ontological (or metaphysical) view of men as creators of sense. Thus, drawing on Agamben's theorisation of the concept, the uncanny is defined, throughout this study, as a signifying function and a process of semiosis, which, far from being reducible to a catalogue of themes and motifs, occurs as the structuring of sense in and through the literary text