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theses

Are the arts an original source of knowledge? Apart from merely providing an aesthetic representation of sensory and reasoned knowledge, to what extent do the arts actively contribute to a deeper understanding of reality? To what extent can artistic creations – whose intrinsic incompleteness involves both the artist and the audience in the production of meaning – help us grasp the structures of knowledge and the essence of linguistic codes? The crisis of positivism, the influence of psychoanalytic theories, and the revolutionary discoveries in Physics and Mathematics shaped twentieth-century Western thought, undermining the principles of objectivity and testability of scientific knowledge, and blurring the subjective-objective distinction. Consequently, the quest for a re-foundation of epistemology arose in many fields, bringing into the limelight a strong interest in self-reflexivity in both the sciences and the arts. While formal and scientific disciplines began to investigate their foundations, the advent of modernism and then the influence of the postmodern turn made self-reference (and its subcategory, metareference) an increasingly prominent trait of twentieth-century arts. To explore the trans-medial and trans-disciplinary phenomenon of self-reference, my dissertation focuses on pertinent twentieth-century Italian works of theatre (Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921-25), literature (Elsa Morante’s novel Menzogna e sortilegio, 1948), and cinema (Carmelo Bene’s film Amleto da Shakespeare a Laforgue, 1974). Although these works differ in terms of historical time, they share the same goal: a critical inquiry into their respective media. As a result, they tackle the epistemological crux of self-reflection, whose problematic and paradoxical aspects have been, and still are, matter of debate in fields of study such as continental philosophy, (post)analytic philosophy, and mathematical logic, to name a few. In this regard, I argue that, while formal and scientific disciplines are entangled in the logical impasse that self-referential investigations often cause, the arts can expose the structure of a code in a metalinguistic mode. Indeed, the artistic device of performativity provides a meta-dimension by which we can gaze into the represented object from an external perspective.

ETD_5900

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Francesco Chillemi

doi:10.7282/T3J38R07

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.