Oltre Freud? On dream aesthetics in Italian literary modernity: Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi, Carlo Emilio Gadda

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Marie Guthmüller
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2008 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 73520204

The monograph in progress on the dream aesthetics of literary modernity in Italy pursues a chiastic perspective. It provides a view of the development of dream studies in the 19th and early 20th centuries "beyond Freud" - to this point little researched - as well as a look at the genealogy and the potential of the aesthetic processes of Italian modernity. Central to this endeavor are the prose texts of Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi and, in the context of this renewal request, Carlo Emilio Gadda as well as psychiatric, philosophical, psychological and physiological texts about sleeping and dreaming. Because of the long-delayed reception of Freud in Italian psychology and psychiatry, there is a specific, tense relationship between scientific dream research on the one hand and the ostensibly "Freudian" literary engagement with dreaming on the other.Processing what was known at the time about the psycho-physiological aspects of dreaming allows us to determine the concepts of dreams held by the aforementioned authors historically "beyond Freud" and creates the basis for an analysis of their dream aesthetic. In using the central role that dreaming plays as a theme, topos and narrative model in works by authors such as Svevo, Tozzi, Luigi Pirandello and Alberto Savinio - in other words, by authors who distance themselves from a mimetic-referential concept of literature in their poetic reflection and who work on the development of a 'scrittura moderna' - the project investigates the question of how processes of recording dreams become a model of anti-mimetic writing in Italy's literary modernity.In the context of this renewal application, the analysis will be expanded by including the short stories and novels of Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose relevance for the structure of the project has proven itself in the research done in the last few years. After Tozzi, who never read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and Svevo, who did not know Freud's works during the first phase of his writing, and who in a second phase engaged with it in a way that was simultaneously affirming and ironic, Gadda stands, from the beginning of his oeuvre on, in a critical dialogue with the founder of psychoanalysis. He reflects Freud's conception of dreaming in his theoretical writings before he systematically circumvents them in his literary texts. By focusing on the differential sign structure of dreams and the ambivalent role of language, whose lacking basic reflection, as Jacques Lacan will later emphasize, represents a blind spot of Freudian psychoanalysis, Gadda opens a new poetological dimension, whose significance should be researched. According to my hypothesis, in Gadda's short stories and novels the possibilities and limitations of modernity's dream aesthetic can be paradigmatically demonstrated.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants