Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Engagement in the Italian Novel: Ungraspable (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

What makes literature ‘literary’? Some theories argue it is a certain degree of ungraspability - openness, vagueness, or ambiguity that invites readers’ active participation in constructing meaning.This book examines five canonical twentieth-century Italian novels (by Tozzi, Landolfi, Vittorini, Gadda, and Ortese) that have consistently been described by critics as particularly “indeterminate” or “ungraspable.” Through these case studies, spanning fifty years of Italian literature, the book investigates how textual indeterminacy functions as a literary strategy rather than a shortcoming.Each novel employs different techniques to create indeterminacy: fragmented punctuation and syntax in Tozzi, fantastic elements and hesitation in Landolfi, dialogic openness in Vittorini, linguistic accumulation in Gadda, and genre hybridism in Ortese.These works challenged readers’ expectations decades before postmodernists like Calvino made such techniques commonplace.By analyzing how these novels man