Escape from Common Sense. The Role of Paradox in Luigi Malerba’s «Le pietre volanti»
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1721-4777/25054Keywords:
Identity, Luigi Malerba, Mathematics, PostmodernismAbstract
This article examines the role of logical paradoxes in Luigi Malerba’s Le pietre volanti (1992), understanding the work not only as a literary attempt to analyse the postmodern world which was emerging at the time, but also situating it in the wake of the crisis of mathematics spurred by Gödel’s infamous incompleteness theorems (1931). This contribution seeks to highlight the significance of paradoxes within literature and to re-frame the failure to discover a system of foundation within mathematics as one of the significant ‘great narratives’ which have been lost in our passage from modernity to postmodernity. The main theoretical source used to track the relationship between formal logic and literature is Gilles Deleuze’s The logic of sense (1969), which offers a rich analysis of Lewis Carroll’s oeuvre. This text will be complemented with readings of later books, such as A thousand plateaus (1980).
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