“Ogni segno è pittura”: Carlo Levi\u27s visual poetics

This dissertation explores the relation of word and image in the work of the painter and writer Carlo Levi. Reading Levi\u27s major narratives through the lens of his philosophical and critical essays, the author explores the ways in which the tension between verbal and iconic systems of representations, spatiality and temporality, raised by his visual use of language, becomes an instrument of literary and political subversion, and contributes to the definition of Levi\u27s humanistic cultural program. The interchange of word and image in Levi\u27s work bears directly on contemporary scholarly interest in the inter-relation between verbal discourse and visuality, increasingly revealed as the site of a complex interplay of ideological and aesthetic elements. Partly because of Levi\u27s own emphasis on the necessity of a connection between art and life, this work recognizes itself as part of the ethical current of literary criticism that has recently gained momentum in American academic circles. The first part of the analysis focuses on Christ Stopped at Eboli and The Watch, wherein the ekphrastic quality of Levi\u27s prose introduces a tension between the spatiality of painting and the temporal dynamism of narration. Levi\u27s privileging of the visual over the verbal affirms the value of the marginal culture of the peasant South threatened by a hegemonic intellectual and political system, dominated by the values of the industrialized North. In later works, Levi expands his ekphrastic use of language to challenge the notion of time and history as progressive forces. An analysis of Francesco Rosi\u27s cinematic adaptation of Christ Stopped at Eboli is proposed as an epilogue to Levi\u27s search for a form of expression in which the distance between word and image is conquered. In Rosi\u27s film, Levi\u27s notion of painting as epistemological process becomes a metaphor for the director\u27s filmmaking. Art proves to be an effective instrument of meta-cinematic reflection on the specificity of cinematic language, the role of images, the possibility of realism, and the ethics of representation---all questions that are central to Levi\u27s meditations on art and language