In the first chapter we intend to present, although in a restricted sense, some of the positions of the most recent critics, which will allow us to determine the meaning of our Author. / The next chapter is mainly dedicated to giving information which establishes the relationships between the most important mythological traditions and classical works. Such information will serve to find and establish the components of the Pavesian culture. / Cesare Pavese was born in Piemonte, Italy, in 1908, he lived in the historical period during which fascism and nazism triumphed and through all the horrors of the immediate after-war. Pavese's incapacity to be concretely active in the political field brings him to relive, in his writings, the ancient Italian cult of the Evocativo. This technique of his is a hermetic method of going through with his ethical social mission. To evoke a god in a moment of national crisis is a traditionally Italian ritual; while the invocation to a God or a Muse is also part of the literary tradition. The classicism of Pavese is now recognized by different critics. Their basis for this decision is his work Dialoghi con Leuco. However, our attention is more focused on the romance Il diavolo sulle colline which occupies the central part of the trilogy La Bella Estate. / This text Il diavolo sulle colline contains many meanings which requires different approaches--such as the cultural precedents of other authors, and even those of Pavese himself--to decipher. The many messages in this work can all be traced back to the concept of death and rebirth. Pavese uses themes which are beloved to Dante and the humanists, who were themselves inspired by the great Greek and Latin authors. / And thus, we are left wondering whether Il diavolo sulle colline was conceived according to the norms of the classical tragedy, which was based on the celebrations in honor of the god Dionisus (the Hellenic demon venerated by the Latins under the name of Bacchus, and affiliated with an old Italian divinity whose symbolic name was Liber Pater). Poli, a dominating figure in Il diavolo sulle colline could be the double of this god. Our discussion will therefore be founded on the testimony of mythographers. / From a methodological point of view, our analysis will not take into account the chronological sequences, but rather the themes which imply the operation of segmenting the text.

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Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 472-519).

En nous situant dans un horizon critique qui associe à la considération de la trajectoire socio-culturelle de tout auteur l’étude de ses prises de position artistiques et des propriétés distinctives de son oeuvre, nous proposons dans cette thèse une relecture de la production littéraire précoce de Cesare Pavese, relative aux années Trente. Le choix de cette production - Ciau Masino, Lavorare stanca et Il carcere - sûrement moins étudiée, à l’exception du livre de poésie, par rapport aux oeuvres postérieures, permet de déplacer l’intérêt critique du côté de la genèse stylistique pavésienne. Légitimé par son travail de traduction de la littérature anglo-américaine, Pavese présente déjà, à ce stade, une « vocation mélodique » (Mutterle) originaire et originale, caractérisée par l’interdépendance systématique entre poésie et prose.Cette recherche se pose comme objectif de montrer que l’oeuvre poétique pavésienne entretient des relations étroites d’interaction et de correspondance avec sa prose narrative, à travers la construction d’un possible invariant rythmique. Le dépassement de l’opposition stérile poésie/prose favorise l’établissement d’une entreprise littéraire qui, envisageant le rythme en tant qu’élément unificateur qui structure à la fois la mise en forme, son contenu et sa valeur éthique, serait pleinement du côté du sujet qui l’écrit et de l’auteur qui l’énonce. / In this thesis, we offer a reinterpretation of the early literary production of Cesare Pavese, in the 1930s. We do so by placing ourselves in a critical horizon that considers the socio-cultural trajectory of the author and by studying his artistic stances, as well as the distinctive qualities of his work.Our choice consists of three works - Ciau Masino, Lavorare stanca and Il carcere - which are among the less studied, excepted for the second one, of his writings (as opposed to his later works), and allows us to move the critical interest toward the genesis of the style of Pavese. Legitimized by his translations of Anglo-American literature, Pavese possesses already, at this stage, an original and pure «melodic vocation» (Mutterle), characterized by the systematic interdependence between poetry and prose.This research aims to show that the poetic work of Pavese is in a close relationship of interaction and correspondence with his narrative prose, through the construction of a possible rhythmic invariant. Reaching beyond the sterile opposition of poetry/prose goes in favour of establishing a piece of work that would stand fully by the side of the subject who writes and the author who expresses himself, by taking in consideration the rhythm as an unifying element, structuring at the same time the textual shaping, the contents and the ethical value of that work.

This dissertation articulates the relationship between literary form and unconscious affect in fictions by Cesare Pavese, Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Drawing from contemporary psychoanalytic object-relations theory, including the work of W.R. Bion and the Bionian school, it defines three paradigmatic forms of psychic work — reparation, containment and construction — that structure the intersubjective unconscious responses to specific formal challenges. It claims that the psychic work involved in meeting those challenges is both “historical” — in the sense that it reveals elements of each text’s historicity and political valence within their cultural setting — and “productive,” in the sense that it entails a degree of psychic growth for the reader. This dissertation bridges literary history, psychoanalytic theory and reader-response theory. It seeks to intervene in each discipline’s debates: in literary-historical terms, it argues that the psychic work of reading must be understood as constitutive of the texts’ expression of the context of the postwar and as part of their struggle to move beyond the aesthetic of modernism. In psychoanalytic terms, it joins in the lively discussion about the historical specificity of the mechanisms theorized by object-relations theory. Finally, at the level of literary theory, it seeks to affirm the value of Bion’s model of object-relations in theorizing reading as a transformative process characterized by intense unconscious, intersubjective activity. The dissertation is organized in three literary chapters, followed by a theoretical chapter. Taken together, the first three chapters represent the evidence for the need of a concept of psychic work in reading late modernist fiction and for the potential payoffs of formulating such a concept. Chapter 4 consists of four theoretical “notes,” addressing, in broad terms, the resonance of intersubjective notions of psychic work for reading, criticism and literary theory.

This report examines the ways in which Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino use images of the foreign woman as other. Specifically, both authors inscribe foreign territories onto the bodies of their female characters in order to confront complex cultural differences. Italy is the site of this gendered inscription in Pavese’s Il carcere, while various real and imagined foreign lands are made female in Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and Le città invisibili. In Pavese’s novella, the satyr-like Concia and the overly maternal Elena are embodiments of Southern and Northern Italy, respectively, and the failure of the protagonist to form a relationship with either woman represents his failure to assimilate into the mezzogiorno and his simultaneous rejection of northern society. In Calvino’s two works, female characters and attributes are consciously used to embody various foreign countries so that the protagonists may grasp the unknown, both physically and psychologically. By linking woman and terrain, Pavese and Calvino attempt to dominate distant lands, which are otherwise enigmatic and incomprehensible, in the typical Orientalist fashion. / text