Writing and intertextuality in La Cognizione del Dolore by Carlo Emilio Gadda

Abstract

The article is based on an expression of Gianfranco Contini about Gadda, “nostalgia for the lost literature”. The intention is to analyze, through La Cog- nizione del Dolore by Carlo Emilio Gadda, the rise of a textual nostalgia regarding those authors and works of the past in which there wasn’t yet the suspicion and in- comprehension between the literature and the world that characterize the 20th century. The spaces, forms, and ways in which this nostalgia becomes sensitive depend on the complex intertextual play. The author of Cognizione chooses Pastiche, quotation and translation as the main modalities to ambiguously address the discontinuity between the present and the past. Behind the apparent sarcasm and irony with which the au- thors caught in the intertextual vertigo are treated, the reader may have a feeling of distance and nostalgia.