Carlo Levi filosofo. Evoluzione del pensiero leviano dagli anni venti agli anni quaranta.
Item
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Title
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Carlo Levi filosofo. Evoluzione del pensiero leviano dagli anni venti agli anni quaranta.
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Identifier
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AAI3284381
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identifier
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3284381
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Creator
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Bauzulli, Chiara.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Peter Carravetta
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Date
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2007
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Language
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Italian
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Romance | Philosophy
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Abstract
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The aim of this dissertation is to read the early works of Carlo Levi to evidence the growth of the writer from social critic to a philosopher of history and society. This entails a rereading of his major works from the beginning of his career to the end of World War Two, in order to identify, describe and follow the development of a number of themes which will bring out his deeply philosophical and anthropological conception of history and society.;In order to achieve this the study will place great importance on Levi's immediate familiar and social context in the Twenties and the Thirties, his experience as an anti-fascist militant, the relevance of his eclectic erudition. The study analyzes his initial adherence to Piero Gobetti's liberal socialism, and his interpretation of fascism as "the ultimate expression of the Italian character.".;Subsequently, Carlo Levi undergoes an intellectual crisis that puts him beyond such views. He begins what might be termed a shift from a Kantian to a Viconian approach to man's nature and history. Such turn is at first sketched in Paura della liberta, a philosophical essay that focuses on the dialectics of ratio and irratio as key to man's individual and collective existence. Levi's interpretation of both Nazism and what he perceives as the decline of Western civilization is now explored in relation to the theories of thinkers such as Spengler, Mann, Huizinga, Zweig, Levy-Bruhl, Freud, Jung and Jaspers.;In the final and key chapter, the thesis focuses on Cristo si e fermato ad Eboli, the novel in which Levi narrates of his confinement in a remote, rural village in Basilicata a few years before the war. Particular attention is devoted to the following interlocking sets of forces at play, examined in terms of modern Italy and the broader picture of the meaning of humanity: modern vs. archaic, collective unconscious vs. individual consciousness, history vs. myth, science vs. magic, contractual society vs. organic community. Levi no longer sees these poles as antithetical or mutually exclusive: the magnitude of the war compels him to see that for the proper understanding of the human condition there must be room and a dialectical accounting for elements which rational, dogmatic or transcendental systems tend to dismiss.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
