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Full Description
While many scholars of world literature view national literary traditions as resolved and stable, Kafka's Italian Progeny takes the fluid identity of the modern Italian tradition as an opportunity to reconsider its dimensions and influencers. Exploring a distinct but unexamined Kafkan tradition in modern Italian literature, it brings Italian literary works into larger debates and reorients the critical view of the Italian literary landscape. The book calls attention to the way Kafkan themes, narrative strategies, and formal experimentation appear in a range of Italian authors. Offering new perspectives on familiar figures, such as Italo Calvino, Italo Svevo, and Elena Ferrante, it also sheds light on some lesser-known authors, including Tommaso Landolfi, Paola Capriolo, and Lalla Romano.
Using diverse approaches to explore thematic, generic, historical, and cultural connections between Kafka's works and those of Italian authors, the author argues for a new view of Italian literature that includes talking animals, parental bonds, modernist realism, literary detective novels, and lyrical microfiction. Whereas Kafka has been mobilized in discourses on minor and world literature, Kafka's Italian Progeny investigates the particular nature of the Italian reception of Kafka to reveal the richness and variety of modern Italian literature.
Contents
Introduction
Kafka, World Literature, and the Italian Literary Landscape
The Place of Italian Literature in World Literature Debates
Kafka's Italian Reception: An Overview
Morante and Buzzati: Two Cases of Kafka Reception
Kafka's Italian Progeny: An Overview
1. Amerika in Italy: Kafka's Realism, Pavese, and Calvino
Kafka's Amerika in Italy
The Italian View of Kafka's Realism
Calvino's Realist Kafka
Amerika and The Path to the Spiders' Nests: Finding and Losing the Way, All Over Again
The Americas of Kafka and Pavese
2. Dreams of Short Fiction after Kafka: Lalla Romano, Giorgio Manganelli, and Antonio Tabucchi
Lyrical, Short Kafka
Experimenting with Short, Short Works after Kafka
The Transformations of Romano, Manganelli, and Tabucchi
3. Processi without End: The Mysteries of Dino Buzzati and Paola Capriolo
Kafka, Detective Fiction, and Italy
The Structures of Suspense: Questions, Identity, and Home
Prisons of Analysis and the Pull of Imagination
4. Kafka's Parental Bonds: The Family as Institution in Italian Literature
The Familial Institution in Kafka and Modern Italian Literature
Svevo's A Life and Ferrante's Troubling Love: Societal Stress and the Bonds of Family
Leaving Parental Bonds in Bontempelli's The Son of Two Mothers and Morante's Arturo's Island
5. The Human-Animal Boundary, Italian Style: Kafka's Red Peter in Conversation with Svevo's Argo, Morante's Bella, and Landolfi's Tombo
Italian Literature, Kafka, and Animal Studies
Communication across Species: The Monologues of Kafka's Red Peter and Svevo's Argo
Interspecial Communication: Landolfi's Châli and Tombo, Morante's Belli and Immacolatella
The Language of Animals and Dialects
Animal Bodies and Christian Spirit in Morante, Landolfi, and Buzzati
Epilogue
Calvino's Kafka and Kafka's Italy
