The mediated or forgotten mediating object. Discrimination in twentieh-century Italian literature for transformative or nuclear fantastic linkages

Abstract

The mediating object represents one of the most effective narrative mechanisms for materializing the threshold crossing between distinct diegetic or ontological planes in fantastic narratives (Lugnani 1983), both in those belonging to the generic canon of the nineteenth century and in the modal ones of the twentieth century. Within the Italian literary tradition of the twentieth century, taking as an example texts emblematic of the different types of fantastic constructions (Lazzarin 2015), we can grasp a development of this resource that loses its corporeity to leave space for an indirect presence, mediated by the imagination of the characters, their vital senses, the information they handle during the action, or even its disappearance, leaving the extra-ordinary event without counter-evidence. The analytical scheme derived from apperception theory (Remorini 2023a) also highlights how the presence of the mediating object is indispensable for a change in the apperceptive connections of readings around new referential attractors.