| Summary: | <p>This thesis looks at Giacomo Leopardi’s and Italo Svevo’s works from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. The elusive presence of Leopardi in Svevo is followed and justified via two sets of coordinates: both writers are connected via techniques of hybridization between medical and literary discourse, and via the goal of narrating a shared notion of vita as male or malattia. Through the four chapters of this thesis – focusing on ineptitude as physiological illness (Chapter I), experiments of prolongevity (II), revelations of life as disease (III), and stories of evolution and apocalypse (IV) – the notion of ‘disease’ is posited as a revelation of ‘life’ (physical and medical, metaphysical and cosmic) as a field of contradictory forces and energies, an impasse impossible to justify or cure through scientific or humanistic means. </p>
<p>A rationale is provided for the multifaceted Leopardian presence in Svevo. This thesis interweaves three methodologies: comparable physiological models narrativized into comparable discourses (‘comparability’), literary presences (‘literary’), and late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century medical schools reformulated towards parallel conclusions (‘medical’). These elucidate and redirect to each other, proposing a comprehensive and hybrid perspective on narratives previously never systematically compared. This study expands on Svevo’s medical readings by detecting in his works ‘antiquated’ archetypes that Leopardi had, himself, integrated into comparable narratives.</p>
<p>It is in discourses where life appears as painful and arcane (physiological disease or metaphysical ill – or both) that Leopardi strategically emerges in Svevo’s works. This thesis concluded that Leopardi is – despite a lack of provable readings and clear philological traces as well as Svevo’s reticence in admitting this – a vital author for Svevo’s essays and narratives of malattia.</p>
<p>The methodology proposed in this thesis allows for studies beyond Leopardi and Svevo, hypothesising further interdisciplinary comparisons between Italian and European writers previously not attempted or, in fact, never considered possible.</p>
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