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The thesis on "Calvino and the theatre" attempts to catalogue and examine Calvino's theatrical texts, a task which hitherto scholarship has not properly undertaken. My work of historical, philological and critical reconstruction has been complicated by the fact that the vast majority of the plays Calvino wrote before the war, during the years 1941-1943, when he clearly longed to become a famous dramatist, have disappeared.

This study focuses on Vincenzo Console's narrative trilogy: Il sorriso dell'ignotto marinaio (1976), Nottetempo, casa per casa (1992) and Lo Spasimo di Palermo (1998). This is a trilogy of historical novels set in three distinct periods of Itahan history: the Risorgimento, the years leading to Fascism and postwar Italy up to the present day. Each of these narratives has Sicily, or a textual Sicily, as the locus of investigation.

This thesis examines Primo Levi’s use of metaphor. To date, there has been no in-depth study of Levi’s figurative language. Despite the esteem in which Levi is held as a writer, critical studies have often tended to focus on content over form, and on those works in which he presents and examines his Auschwitz experience over his fictional output. This study is directed principally to more overtly linguistic and literary elements of Levi’s work, and spans his whole career as a writer of both testimony and fiction. The thesis is divided into four main parts; the first part provides background on Levi’s use of figurative language and engages with critical theories regarding metaphor. Part II is dedicated to the Holocaust and begins by looking at polemical issues surrounding Holocaust literature, such as the appropriateness of the employment of metaphor within this genre. The discussion then concentrates on how Levi overcomes the ineffability of the Holocaust via the use of metaphor in his testimonial writing and his poetry. In Part III, the themes of science, creation and writing are explored. Levi’s writing transcends the ‘two cultures’ dichotomy, not only bringing together creative writing and writing about science, but also through sustained metaliterary reflections on the process of writing itself, whether fictional or autobiographical, creative or scientific. Part IV draws together the findings of this thesis, showing that metaphor is essential to what Levi is trying to achieve as a writer, who – in all his work, although in varying ways – deals with events which fall outside the range of normal human conceptualising experience.

This thesis represents the first comparative study of Leonardo Sciascia and Antonio Tabucchi. It examines their literary engagement with socio-political concerns in a climate coloured by the scepticism and uncertainty of postmodernism and post-structuralism. This thesis seeks to counter current literary criticism, which suggests that engagement in Tabucchi's writing is confined to certain key texts, and to' instead show that committed writing underpins all of his work, including texts currently held to deal solely with literary concerns. Previous research asserts that Sciascia's work aims to engage with society, often employing the anachronistic term impegno to describe his writing. This thesis seeks to examine the ways in which Sciascia's engagement counters the political and literary challenges which led to the collapse of impegno by the 1970s. The thesis is structured in five parts. Part one charts the course of committed writing from the post-war era to its problematization during the 1950s and 1960s. It examines the relevance of Sciascia, Tabucchi, and the importance of 1975 as a starting point for this study. It goes on to explore direct engagement with specific events in their writing, and their employment of fictional lenses to factual writing. Part two examines ways in which the writers use the representation of geographical, historical and border spaces to engage with society. Part three considers ways in which Sciascia and Tabucchi view notions of uncertain truths and the inability of language to fully communicate ideas, as means of strengthening, rather than undermining, engagement. Part four investigates ways in which intertextuality, another barrier to engagement, is used by the two writers to dialogue with society as well as with literature. Part five studies the value with which Sciascia and Tabucchi imbue literature, as compared to journalism, and assesses the extent to which they view literature as a valid means of engagement.

The thesis tackles two main issues. Part I explores Levi's engagements with the `two cultures' debate concerning the relationship between literature and `science' in postwar culture. Building on existing scholarship, I provide a more comprehensive view of his project to combat the two cultures divide. I contextualize the literature-science debate in Anglophone and Italophone culture, and then investigate dialogues between Levi and his contemporaries (for example, the writer Italo Calvino; the physicist Tullio Regge). Among other theoretical frameworks, I draw on critical approaches to the literature-science relationship and Bahktinian dialogics. Part II analyzes Levi's portrayals and critiques of science and technology as they impact on human life and freedoms, especially his problematizations of relationships between humans and machines in a post-industrial society. This aspect of Levi's work, particularly his representations of bodies and embodiment in a technologized age, has received little critical attention to date. I evaluate Levi's engagements with such issues, focussing also on gender dynamics in his writing about technologically-mediated embodiment. Given the absence of sustained Italophone critical reflection on these questions, I analyze Levi's work in light of recent Anglopone theorizing on posthumanism. I also refer to psychoanalytic approaches to the self. Considering Levi's approach to a series of perceived cultural dialectics-the relationships between science and literature, science and society, human subjects and machines-I argue that his work is characterized by contradiction. He asserts the need to break down cultural and disciplinary boundaries while simultaneously revealing his personal tendency to conceptualize literary and scientific activities, for example, as distinct practices. I conclude that by embracing such contradictions his work highlights areas of difficulty, and, without attempting to offer falsely universal solutions, reminds us of our capacity to maintain-or reclaim-corporeal and epistemological sovereignty of ourselves and our society.

This thesis offers an interpretative framework of Italo Calvino’s later work (the cosmicomic stories, Le città invisibili, and Palomar), based on the notions of myth, desire, utopia and science. Its aim is to suggest a reading of these texts as a common literary project best described as being deeply influenced by mythological elements and structures, while clearly bearing the mark of enlightened thought. The study exposes both the intellectual implications of such a project, and the aesthetic mechanisms by which it takes its form. The research was informed by Calvino’s own relevant critical work, a network of secondary criticism approaching either the texts which were of interest to this particular work or the themes and notions that were to be explored, and a set of tertiary texts, which helped to consolidate pivotal notions. The latter include the work of thinkers who had a major influence on Calvino as it is known from his essays and his letters (like Charles Fourier or Giorgio de Santillana), but also other figures, such as Anton Chekhov or Albert Camus, who emerged as interesting comparative opportunities for our study. The analysis of the cosmicomic stories explores the relationship between myth-making and individual responsibility. It draws parallels between intellectual commitment and literary projection, and defines Calvino’s utopian project, including it in a reflection on knowledge, myth and the tyranny of abstract thought. Individual responsibility emerges as a prospective and a retrospective activity, which is explained alongside the idea of ‘poetics in the making’. Le città invisibili is studied as an illustration of Calvino’s precise poetics using the image of the city. The notions of the episode and the frame are the central concepts around which the inquiry is articulated. Discussing the ideas of desire and the search for the ideal, it is possible to draw solid links with the cosmological project of the cosmicomics and Calvino’s idea of utopia and myth. With an examination of characterisation in Palomar and a close analysis of the quest for meaning, this thesis also attempts a definition of Calvino’s aesthetics as the ‘aesthetics of earthly transcendence’. It moves on to a comparative study of Palomar and Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Albert Camus, in order to suggest an interpretation of the main character, as a man who lives and observes his life in the face of the absurd; the literary consequence being the immediate confrontation between writing and death, and the presence of silence threatening understanding and communication.

The thesis aims to explore the issue of representation and its limits in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvin. It focuses on the authors' treatments of the relationships between representational practices and the constraining limits of the human condition in perceiving reality. The introduction aims to discuss the methodology of the thesis and the theoretical positions of contemporary theorists regarding these relationships in order to contextualise and place the thesis in perspective. The conflictual tension between representation and the human condition will then be organised around five major themes, i. e. language, cognition, hermeneutics, spatial forms, and games, each of which will be a focal point of a chapter. While the first two chapters set out to describe how language and cognition prevent humans from attaining the real in its absolute state, the next three chapters will mainly discuss the implications and consequences of the unattainable real and human inadequacies. Each of these five chapters, in its different yet interconnected direction, features an extensive discussion of the issue of representational limits and a comparative analysis of what the authors manage to do in face of the issue. A final conclusion will summarise the similarities and differences in the ways both authors deal with the critical interactions between representation and the limits of the human condition.