| Any medieval revival offers an insight into the process of construction of Western culture in its relation to "the Other." To unmask the authoritarian unconscious of traditional visions the Middle Ages, my dissertation singles out the anarchist medieval imagination of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the most controversial intellectuals in post-World War II Italy. The dissertation deals with Pasolini's oeuvre in its entirety, from poetry to films, through a medievalist lens that aims to understand his passion for the Past and for the Sacred. Pasolini's medievalism represents a crucial step to understand the author's legacy and an essential contribution to the debate on the modernity of the Middle Ages.; In the first two chapters, I focus on the author's subversive hagiographies, from the perspective of his distinctive relationship to the sacred, analyzing the reactivation of Christian archetypes in Pasolini's 1968 movie Teorema, as well as the intersection of medieval fantasy with metafilmic reflections in his Bestemmia, a 1967 script in verses on a criminal saint in 12th-century Rome, just recently published. Finally, in the third chapter, I examine Pasolini's infernos: his Dantesque descent into the underworld, from La Divina Mimesis to Salo, creates a medieval "sacra rappresentazione" of the darkest side of Modernity. Moreover, I insist on the role played by presence in Pasolini's revival of the Middle Ages, expressed through poetics of the body and their corollary of an impure and magmatic vision of the literary process, where screenwriting, in its genetic impurity as a genre, acts as the generative matrix of a new approach to literature and to the relationship between the author and his readers.; I compare Pasolini's medieval turn with other modern and contemporary intertextual approaches to the Middle Ages and I investigate Pasolini's appropriation of medieval models of representation, from mimesis to allegory and vision.; In conclusion, my project proves how the modernity of the Middle Ages for Pasolini seems to contest contemporary medieval fantasies at its roots. His intertextuality, far from being a literary game, is rather an act of subversion. |
