Original scientific paper
Pseudoscientific Conversations on the Occult in Luigi Capuana's Narrative Salon
Tatjana Peruško
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The rich short-story production of Luigi Capuana, an eclectic author, known primarily as one of the most important members of the Italian verismo, includes short stories in which fantastic fiction, influenced by
the positivist paradigm, is joined with epistemological viewpoints. Since the late nineteenth-century, a specific form of fantastic narrative emerges, in which the story based on the alethic transgression and conflict between the natural and the supernatural order is accompanied by a polemical or pseudoscientific commentary which affects the structure and the genological code of the story. Examples of that new version of fantastic fiction are Capuana’s pseudofantastic short stories from the collections Il Decameroncino 1901 and La voluttà di creare 1911, in which the author applies Boccaccio’s model of narrative frame, multiplying enunciative and narrative levels. The framing device by which the “little stories” (“storielle”) of Capuana’s narrator, doctor Maggioli, are told, is represented as a mundane intellectual conversation regarding interactions among natural and occult sciences, science-fiction experiments, psychopathological cases and parapsychological phenomena. Analysing the aforementioned corpus from a genological perspective, the essay shows how in the stratified and polyphonous structure - which differs from the neoromantic pathos of the monological narrator’s digressions in Tarchetti’s stories (inspired by Poe’s model) - the divulging and illustrative function deprives the framed diegesis of the fantastic dominant shifting the emphasis from the narrated events to the act of narration and to the argumentative context in which the characters lay out their ideas concerning relations between science and the occult world, as well as between literature, nature and the supernatural.
Keywords
the fantastic genre and epistemological viewpoint; Luigi Capuana; psuedofantastic short story; science and parapsychology; positivism; occult phenomena; exempla; metanarration
Hrčak ID:
191603
URI
Publication date:
28.12.2017.
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