Writing of the Body in Postwar Italy

The main trajectory of this dissertation is to examine the centrality and ambiguity of human bodies in relation to the crisis of modern subjectivity in literary and critical responses in the Italian cultural milieu after World War II. The paradigm of the body will be considered in its porosity to, and of, the established cultures in which it is inscribed and decoded; by contrast, it also functions as a pole for social and epistemological resiliencies. Thus, following dynamics of re-appropriation and re-signification of the idea of the body, in a dialectic within the history of bodies in Western traditions, this investigation will engage in a variety of discourses on and of the body that emerge during and after the explosive tragedy of World War II. Despite the wide array of studies of imageries of the human body – whether visual or literary, cinematic or poetic – this study intervenes innovatively in the current debate on postwar bodies by looking at three major areas of conflict and bodily warzones: Italian Holocaust narratives (in the accounts of Primo Levi and Liana Millu), Liberation novels through a focus on the cityscape of Naples (by looking at Curzio Malaparte and Domenico Rea’s literary strategies) and the eco-bodily tragedy in the physical and telluric poetic languages of the Northeast (Andrea Zanzotto and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s early poetic interplay between war, nature, and human imageries). This dissertation, therefore, traces the body’s peculiar mode of existence (and persistence) as a ‘human’ trope in the representation of ‘personal’ and ‘collective’ war trauma and the project illustrates how the second world conflict demarks a turning point in the analysis of the human body.Doctor of Philosoph