The buffoon and the magician: Poetry, spectacle and critical discourse in the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini

This dissertation is a study of the redefinition of authorial identity and critical strategies in Pier Paolo Pasolini's poetry and film in the 1960s, which focuses in particular on Pasolini's shift from avant-garde poet of the page to celebrity poet of the screen. It also considers the influence upon him of American poet and countercultural icon Allen Ginsberg. Overlooked by the rich critical literature existing on Pasolini, his fascination with America and admiration for Ginsberg's poetic and political activity invite reconsideration of his indictment of consumerism, and of his strong authorial presence at a time characterized by the crisis of the humanistic subject. Generally perceived as symptoms of his nostalgic attachment to an inexorably disappearing past, both of these phenomena appear instead as creative devices to maintain a critical function in a culturally homogenized society. By engaging Michel Foucault's theory of disciplinarity, I show how Pasolini's awareness of the hedonistic nature of power in late capitalistic societies imposes upon him the need to voice his critique through the creation of a spectacular self. I argue that Ginsberg's poetic of consciousness and his incorporation of the language of mass-media in anti-war poems, offer a model for Pasolini's theoretical redefinition of the task of the intellectual in late capitalism, and becomes a milestone against which he measures his own poetics. In the late 1960s, unable to effectively express difference in poetry through the communicative language at his disposal, Pasolini assigns the critical function of poetry to a "cinema of poetry." On the screen, particularly in his "elitist" films of the late 1960s, he denaturalizes bourgeois mores and engages the language of consumer culture in a critical dialogue that challenges the false "progress" offered by the new power.