Towards a Hermeneutics of Myth: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Unexplored Philosophical Relationship with Antonio Banfi and His Milanese Entourage

ABSTRACT This study aims to add new evidence to the complex relationship between Gadda and philosophy in the years after his formal abandonment of university study at the Università Statale in Milan in 1929. The examination of published and unpublished material held in the Fondo Roscioni at the Archivi della Trivulziana (Milan) and in the Archivio Contemporaneo Alessandro Bonsanti (Florence) allows us to redefine the chronological limits of Gadda’s philosophical vocation and to outline a previously unknown relationship between the writer and the Milanese academic and philosophical circles of the 1930s and early 1940s (Antonio Banfi; Luciano Anceschi; Raffaele De Grada; Enzo Paci; Elio Vittorini; Giansiro Ferrata; Alberto Vigevani). The last part of this study will focus on the theoretical impact the Milanese academic ‘school’ may have had on Gadda’s aesthetics.