Disrupted Narratives
Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini
Emma Bond
Click cover to enlarge | Legenda 10 October 2012 • 197pp ISBN: 978-1-907975-38-7 (hardback) • RRP £80, $110, €95 ISBN: 978-1-315094-85-4 (Taylor & Francis ebook) If Madame Bovary’s death in Flaubert’s 1857 novel marked the definitive end of the Romantic vision of literary disease, then the advent of psychoanalysis less than half a century later heralded an entirely new set of implications for literature dealing with illness. The theorization of a potential unconscious double (capable of expressing the body, and thus also the intimate damage caused by disease) in turn suggested a capacity to subvert or destabilize the text, exposing the main thread of the narrative to be unreliable or self-conscious. Indeed, the authors examined in this study (Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Giorgio Pressburger (1937-) and Giuliana Morandini (1938-)) all make use of individual ‘infected’ or suppressed voices within their texts which unfold through illness to cast doubt on a more (conventionally) dominant narrative standpoint. Applying the theories of Freud and more recent writings by Julia Kristeva, Bond offers a new critical reading of the literary function of illness, a function related to the very nature of narration itself. Emma Bond is Senior Retained Lecturer in Italian at Pembroke College, Oxford. Bibliography entry: Bond, Emma, Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini, Italian Perspectives, 24 (Legenda, 2012) First footnote reference: 35 Emma Bond, Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini, Italian Perspectives, 24 (Legenda, 2012), p. 21. Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Bond, p. 47. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Bibliography entry: Bond, Emma. 2012. Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini, Italian Perspectives, 24 (Legenda) Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Bond 2012: 21). Example footnote reference: 35 Bond 2012: 21. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)
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