Vorschau

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Abstract

Modernist writers are known for having renewed and repositioned the role of the observer in the narration and for having transferred it to the focalizers in their narrative texts. Thanks to their exercise in speculative theory, they understood that it is possible to infer a multiple construction of reality, based on two levels: the first one is the physical world and the second one is the human consciousness. Intensely aware of the fluid character of reality, the Modernists aspired to create and to make use of alternative, innovating instruments of knowledge, in order to take on the challenges posed by the new-fangled century and to comprehend them thoroughly. By exploiting the facets of doubt and subjectivity, they came to terms with those impersonal and standardized values they refused to inherit, thus trying to follow new paths and to reach for the “new truth” of their time. Hence, in a world plunged into crisis, characterized by doubt and uncertainty, truth was likely – Modernists eventually argued – to reach us in a chaotic and protean condition, rather than as a given paradigm of absolute dogmas.

Standing at the intersection of epistemology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, philosophy of language and history, the concept of truth represents a very suitable starting point for an interdisciplinary analysis of the modernist literary production. The present dissertation aims at opening a line of enquiry in the manifold macrocosm of modernist studies and, through the study of such methodological and procedural stances as doubt and subjectivity, at investigating how truth was conceived of and understood in modernist literature.