"[...] in un giardino d'armida : Il racconto d'autunno di Landolfi

Abstract

The issues however typical of 191h-century fantastic narrative which mark Landolfi's Racco­ nto d'autunno are not sufficient reference for fitting his work with the label of this literary genre. As elsewhere, Landolfi's rhetorical and discursive procedures (breech of illusion complicity, contamina­tion of genres) produce a radical twisting of fantastic narrative's defining features at the peak of the genre's uccess in 19th century as determined by the 20th-century post-war critics including Todorov. The structuring ambiguity of an event apparently inexplicable by the logic of the action's setting is shifted by Landolfi from the level of the story to that of the language (i. e. a fantastic event is no longer experienced by the subject as an epistemological challenge), quite in keeping with the author's poetics set on revealing the unreliability of language.