Tommaso Landolfi: in Search of a Free Genre Form

This article focuses on genre characteristics of Tommaso Landolfi’s works which the author himself called diaries: “La biere du pecheur,” “Rien va” and “Des mois.” Although formally these three texts are not related and moreover, considerably differ from each other in structure and in content, they are united by a common narrative strategy, due to their genre features. Preserving main characteristics inherent in autobiographical prose, these diaries are at the same time aesthetically organized texts that have an artistic structure and contain artistic imagery as well as, most importantly, elements of fiction. Since the category of fiction is openly present in the diaries and declared as the author’s intention, Landolfi’s autobiographical prose can be defined as a hybrid genre containing elements of many other genres, especially the elements of the novel. The essay introduces the term autofiction to describe the phenomenon in question, namely genre diffusion between the autobiographical writing and the novel.