Abstract

My dissertation covers the field of what Albert Thibaudet called “the critique of artists” in order to show that, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, this form of criticism has given readers a different perspective on literature in comparison to that of the formalists and the neo-avant-garde. In the first part of my study, I examine the evolution of formalist criticism in the twentieth century, considering the linguistic turn of the 1960s as the natural outcome of a cultural revolution which took place at the end of the nineteenth century. By conducting a comparative study between France and Italy, I attempt to outline a transnational model which shows that the two formalist critiques share the same understanding of the literature postulated by the neo-avant-garde. The second part of my thesis is devoted to the study of one of the main tendencies in the critique of the writers since the Second World War, a tendency that called into question a purely intrinsic study of the work of art. Here, I propose a comparative study of the literary critique of Georges Perec, Michel Tournier, Philippe Muray, Tommaso Landolfi, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pier Vittorio Tondelli, in order to underline that their critical practice has not limited itself to a personal declaration of their poetic views, but it has truly opened up an alternative approach to formalist theoretical positions. They refused to speak of literature as a secluded world, and by doing so they anticipated one of the most important features of the literature of the end of the twentieth century, both in France and in Italy.