L' Ananke dello stile. Doppelleben di Gottfried Benn e la sua controversa inattualità

Confined by critical discourse to the margins of the poet’s body of works, whether due to its discontinuous and fragmentary nature or to its supposedly ‘occasional’ character, Gottfried Benn’s unusual autobiography has continued to challenge every hermeneutic effort with its untimeliness. After reconstructing the vicissitudes of its reception in the post-World War II European context, the essay questions the aesthetic premises of the concept of ‘Doppelleben’, to which this autobiography owes its title, thus showing how its pages, precisely in their desultory and radically irreconcilable prose, represent a confession of Style – that is to say, a confession of Form.