A look at the use of popular language in certain exemplary mid-20<super>th</super>-century French and Italian novels as an index of the transition from modernism to postmodernism.

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to look at a certain tendency in 20<super>th</super> century European modernism, a tendency that consists in adopting or imitating popular idioms and oral forms in order to challenge literary tradition and authority. I intend to trace the transformation of this initial interest in linguistic types or registers into a non-mimetic modality for representing the world. The preoccupation with language as an object of inquiry, rather than as simply a vehicle for transmitting ideas and for representing reality, is one of the prime characteristics of postmodernism. The four novelists I look at---Carlo Emilio Gadda, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino---are representative of this shift from modernism to postmodernism. Popular language, which is the general term I use to indicate variously, spoken language, dialects, lower-class language and swearing, was by the late 1920s an obvious tool for the modernists to adopt in their stated revolt against a stagnant literary tradition, in part because, in the shift from philology to modern linguistics, spoken language took precedence over written language as an object of study. Nevertheless, I argue that novels by the four writers in question reveal a strong interest in examining the role that writing has in constructing reality. This turn coincides, in part, with the turn in linguistics towards a notion of language as a cognitive system that informs all of human activity. Thus language and linguistic self-reference become, in the postmodern era, a focus of novelistic writing. Each of the writers I consider here is at some level concerned with the status of language or languages in writing. I discuss Celine's project with regard to style, poetics and a certain moral hierarchy of language; Queneau's efforts to distill part of the reading experience and maximize its efficacy; and Calvino's refusal of a particular historical and literary situation which led him to postpone his linguistic and formal experiments. With Gadda, language's intersection with form implicates the act of writing itself, for his interest in popular language turns out to be connected to an understanding of writing as gesturality.