Indeterminacy in the Italian Novel. Five Case Studies from Tozzi, Landolfi, Vittorini, Gadda and Ortese.

This research analyses the manipulation of literary indeterminacy (i.e. the
interpretative openness of a literary work) in the novel. It is based on
reader-response theory and on the notion of literary indeterminacy as
theorised by Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden. Its objective is twofold.
Firstly, it aims to explore how textual strategies manipulate indeterminacy,
and how the latter triggers the reader’s interaction with the text. Secondly,
it aims to examine how indeterminacy is handled in five Italian case-study
novels, which critics have often described with terms belonging to the
same semantic field as “indeterminacy” (for example: “openness” and
“ambiguity”). Consequently, this research does not necessarily study how
indeterminacy is increased or limited but, rather, the effects of its
manipulation. The introductory chapter focuses on the notion of
indeterminacy, its potentiality for textual exploration, and the research
methodology. Moreover, it introduces the Italian context and the analysed
corpus. Subsequently, one chapter is dedicated to each of the novels
examined. Each individual analysis considers indeterminacy as operating
in the text at different levels and with different strategies. In doing so, the
case studies bring to light the different way in which each novel
manipulates indeterminacy, as well as its links with each individual
author’s poetics. In particular, we find: a textual vertigo effect in Federigo
Tozzi’s Con gli occhi chiusi; an interplay with the fantastic mode in
Tommaso Landolfi’s La pietra lunare; an open and dialogical structure in
Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia; the use of accumulative devices
in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore; and an hybrid form
with elements from literary nonsense in Anna Maria Ortese’s L’Iguana. In
the conclusion, comparative remarks are drawn on how these novels
manipulate indeterminacy to cope with the problem of realism in literature
and how they elicit the reader’s intervention.