Pavese Between European and American Modernisms

In the last twenty years, the concept of Modernism has grown relevance as a frame to look at Italian literature of the first half of the twentieth century, replacing and/or integrating other, more traditional, categories such as Decadentism. Nonetheless, Cesare Pavese is almost always overlooked by Italian Modernism scholars, who focused mainly on European modernism: with the exceptions of his poetry or Dialoghi con Leucò, his works are considered Neorealist. In this contribution, I reassess the relationship between Cesare Pavese and Modernism arguing that many elements of Pavese’s writings are derived from American Modernists. Many features of his style are of Modernist descent, as well as the preference for loners, exiled main characters. Other features, like the indifference for psychological representations and the prominence given in his works to events, are quite common in American Modernism. At the bottom of Pavese’s works there is the same effort to synthesize, and critically examine, the contrasting features of modernity: while the thematic levels are the same as in European modernists, their rhematic resolution are more similar to those of American modernists.