Abstract
The relationship between fact and fiction is still a key concern in contemporary research on literary autobiographies. This dissertation turns to the early stages of modern Italian autobiography in order to investigate how the authors themselves dealt with this problem. An analysis of the so-called Venetian novelistic autobiography (late-eighteenth and
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early-nineteenth century) shows a conflict between fact and fiction which indicates the authors’ insecurities as to the very nature of autobiographical truth. In studies on this cluster of Venetian autobiographies (Carlo Gozzi, Carlo Goldoni, Giacomo Casanova, Lorenzo Da Ponte), Gozzi’s Memorie inutili (1797) have been neglected until the critical revival of his work during the last decades. However, as this study demonstrates, Gozzi’s memoirs are a clear example of narrative recreation of life. Moreover, Gozzi expresses his doubts on the nature of truth in a particular way. Novelistic fiction and the ‘objective’ truth of the so-called intellectual memoirs (popular in early-eighteenth century Italy) influenced the Venetian authors: as autobiography became more private and sentimental, they had difficulties to embed a ‘subjective’ truth. This study shows that the expression of their consciousness of the subjective character of truth invites the reader to pay attention to the fictionalizing effects of writing. It examines how this authors’ awareness can be inferred from the presence of rhetorical strategies. The first chapter offers a general overview of the critical debate on autobiography (from the 1970s onwards), while focusing on various methods used to analyze the blend between fact, fiction and writing. The genre is conceived of in terms of a so-called autobiografiction in order to point out all elements (auto, bio and ‘graphy’) that influence autobiographical fiction. Further, this dissertation focuses on the role of writing during the process of generating a personal truth. The second chapter shows that a literary analysis is needed in order to consider the manipulating power of writing in (Venetian) autobiography. From the third chapter onwards, a stylistic approach demonstrates how the reconstruction of a subjective truth is both hidden and revealed. This study examines how, on a meta-autobiographical level, the Venetian authors express a consciousness of the written manipulation of reality. An analysis of the interferences between the rhetoric of truth and that of silence demonstrates that the first is undermined by both an exaggerated insistence on truth and the rhetoric of silence. This thesis argues that this kind of hesitation (communicated to the reader) between indicating and hiding the manipulation is linked to a new form of narrative and to the ever increasing presence of private content. The last two chapters are a case study of Gozzi’s autobiographical love affairs, a typical theme of Venetian autobiography. The fourth chapter demonstrates how, stylistically, a rhetoric of abundance embraces the functions of the rhetorics of truth and silence, torn between a naturalistic and anti-naturalistic representation. The fifth chapter shows how thematic reiteration undermines the true-to-life content. As rhetorical devices are strongly concentrated in Gozzi’s stories about his love affairs, they crystallize the fallacies of writing conceived to induce a personal truth.
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