Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: This study has a twofold purpose: on one hand, it aims at confirming the importance of Pier Paolo Pasolini as one of the most relevant representatives of the postmodern trend in Italy and, on the other, it aims at liberating Luigi Pirandello's figure from the accusation of being an innovator only for the content of his works, but not for the language he chose to write them. While analyzing Pirandello's influence over Pasolini's oeuvre, this essay intends to demonstrate how the Sicilian author was certainly a modernist, but not an 'authoritarian modernist'. Indeed, his characters will never cross the threshold his works opened. Nonetheless, they will never return to the established order of things they have irrevocably altered. What is left of their existence will take place in an elsewhere, in a liminal zone near those horizons they helped opening; horizons later to be explored by postmodern narratives. This analysis is mainly based on Pirandello's The Late Mattia Pascal and Pasolini's What are the Clouds?, a short included in the film Caprice Italian Style [1968].
Author: Fulvio Orsitto
Institution: California State University System
Language: English
Subfield: General Arts and Humanities
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2515707641