A Neomodernist Novel: Pinkerton by Franco Cordelli

Abstract

The essay tries to use the category of neomodernism for Franco Cordelli's novel Pinkerton (1986), which falls within it due to a series of elements such as the opacity of the form (a novel structured as a commentary on recorded materials, but also a scrutiny of conscience); the question of the tension to the truth and to the possibility of understanding reality; the problem of the narrator, as a subject of crisis; the political twist – in the forms of the Moro kidnapping – that strongly presses on the plot; the syntactic thickness, dominated by hepanorthosis, which brings the text closer to the novel-essay. Through the single analysis of Pinkerton - and referring to Cordelli's cultural formation and generational affiliation - the aim is to frame his work in the cultural horizon of the persistence of the modernism and in the literary frame of neomodernism.