Abstract
This paper analyzes challenges to conventional notions of identity in Pirandello’s novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, towards understanding new conceptions of meaning and identity in the early 20th century. The aim is to provide a multi-plural study in the Italian modernist tradition (1890-1945),with the goal of understanding how technological, industrial, and socio-geographical changes of the period were felt across a range of fields, and centered on new ideas of the self in society. A study of how Pirandello’s literary style addresses the complex socio-geographical climate of Italy and Europe in the early 20th century is put in conversation with Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to being, and the alterations of personality and cohabiting identities charted by psychologist Alfred Binet. The complementary and conflicting accounts of selfhood taken from these thinkers and their work is used to understand prevailing notions of identity during the period, what might be responsible for these shifts, and their representation in literature. A synthesis and concluding section is used to assess the takeaways from the study, and what can be broadly understood about identity in Pirandello’s fiction and the period of literary modernism.
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Recommended Citation
McDonald, Roarke K. and Castagnino, Angelo
(2024)
"Studies of Identity in Modernity: Literary, Phenomenological, and Psychoanalytic Approaches,"
DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive: Vol. 5:
Iss.
1, Article 8.
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