Title After words : suicide and authorship in twentieth-century Italy / Elizabeth Leake

Published Toronto [Ont.] : University of Toronto Press, ©2011 (Saint-Lazare, Quebec : Canadian Electronic Library, 2011)

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 250 pages) Series Toronto Italian studies series Toronto Italian studies. Contents Introduction : the death of the author -- The posthumous author : Guido Morselli, Giuseppe Rensi, Jacques Monod -- The corpus and the corpse : Amelia Rosselli, Jacques Derrida, Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kofman -- The post-biological author : Cesare Pavese, Gianni Vattimo, Emanuele Severino -- Commemoration and erasure : Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, Avishai Margalit -- Postscript : learning from the dead Summary After Words investigates the ways in which the suicide of a writer informs critical interpretations of his or her works. Suicide is a revision as well as a form of authorship, both on the part of the author, who has written his/her final scene and revised the 'natural' course of his/her life, and on the part of the reader, who must make sense of this final act of writing.Focusing on four twentieth-century Italian writers (Guido Morselli, Amelia Rosselli, Cesare Pavese, and Primo Levi), Elizabeth Leake examines their personal correspondence, diaries, and obituaries as well as popular and academic commemorative writings about them and their works in order to elucidate the ramifications of their suicides for their readership. Arguing that authorial suicide points to the limitations of those critical stances that exclude the author from the practice of reading, Leake's insightful re-reading of these authors and their texts shows that in the aftermath of suicide, an author's life and death themselves become texts to be read Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes English Subject Suicide victims' writings, Italian -- History and criticism Suicide and literature -- Italy -- History -- 20th century Italian literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism Authors, Italian -- 20th century -- Suicidal behavior Authors and readers -- Italy -- History -- 20th century BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary. LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- Italian. LITERARY CRITICISM -- General. Authors and readers Italian literature Suicide and literature Italy Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781442660243 1442660244 0802092799 9780802092793

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