Paradoxical identities in Levi, Morante and Tomizza

By considering three works of Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, and Fulvio Tomizza, this analysis aims to investigate some examples of composite and paradoxical identities. Regarding the matter in question, I will examine cases in which the elements shaping the subjects, especially language, will be discordant with the proposed identity. In Primo Levi’s La tregua, the author seeks to account his Jewish belonging, despite his lack of knowledge of yiddish. Morante investigates the troubled linguistic identity of Aracoeli’s protagonist, while the extreme hybridism of Stefano in Tomizza’s L’albero dei sogni allows remarkable forms of estrangement to surface. thanks to the support of identity theorists such as Baumeister and Chambers, and of theorists of the monolingual/plurilingual condition such as Fishman and Lepschy, I will employ a more fluid notion of identity in order to contemplate different variables and solutions, which may lead to contradictions. these three authors can, therefore, be considered forerunners of recent literary studies on migration, which deal with the impellent necessity to remove the limits imposed by strict definitions of identity.