Doctoral Thesis and Book Project: Pirandello's Dramaturgy of Time

Abstract

Luigi Pirandello’s drama, at its heart, deals with the problems of being and becoming, identity, and creativity. His works are centered upon the nature of personal experience and the ways in which we perceive and interact with the world and its inhabitants. But often overlooked is the role that time plays in those dramas’ already complicated and divisive subject matter. While concepts and themes related to time—e.g., memory and narrative—are often at the core of Pirandello’s drama, a cohesive approach to the topic of time and temporality in his work is lacking. This thesis, using three of Pirandello’s majors plays as case studies, will offer an analysis of the playwright’s dramaturgical management of time as a textual theme, as the basis of dramatic narrative, and—in the guise of memory and anticipation—as the ontological foundation of the concept of dramatic character. These plays, written in the midst of the general discourse on time and temporality at work in the early part of the 20th -century, lend themselves to be read in dialogue with 1) the philosophical exploration of the concept of time, memory, and duration developed by Bergson, 2) the phenomenology of internal time consciousness advanced by Husserl, 3) Heidegger’s idea of temporality as the underlying structure of both being and meaning, and 4) Einstein’s consideration of the relativity of mankind’s perception of events in the space-time continuum. In this thesis, I will demonstrate that Pirandello was working at the intersection of trends deriving from each of these philosophical premises, creating a theory of dramatic form that is structured by the very concept it illustrates thematically, namely the relativity of time in man’s experience of the world and the notion of temporality as the foundation of all consciousness.

Book Project

I intend for my book project to account for Pirandello's tendency towards self-adaptation/self-plagiarism between his literary and dramatic work.

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