EXAMINING MODERN ITALIAN LITERATURE is a Kafkaesque endeavor, because it is not always entirely clear if it exists. Critics have tended to concentrate on movements or smaller trends, such as frammentismo, deca-dentismo, ermetismo, crepuscularismo, and futurismo, or on particular figures, such as Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele D’Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, Italo Svevo, and Carlo Emilio Gadda, or on regional clusters of various authors. While these approaches have offered a minute anatomy of Italy’s various authors and movements, they have also isolated Italian literature from larger comparative studies and necessarily excluded certain authors from consideration. The broader term “modernism,” meanwhile, which has recently been used to describe some modern Italian works, frequently mischaracterizes the Italian picture. This article is part of a larger project that aims to map a distinct but unexamined Kafkan tradition in Italian modern literature, a tradition that encompasses a more diverse and representative group of authors than headings such as frammentismo allow, without assimilating the particularity of the Italian scene to a larger modernist movement.

Reversing the clever conceit of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Kafka and his Precursors,” which finds Kafkan presences in the past, this study examines Kafka’s presences in his Italian successors. Instead of studying direct influence, I use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances to consider the Kafkan qualities these modern Italian authors share. From the use of animal imagery and oppressive spaces to representations of crises, alienation, and repressive bourgeois relations, the disparate themes of Kafka’s fiction are reflected throughout modern Italian literature. By engaging the immense amount of scholarship on Kafka, the project endeavors to revisit and refine the critical understanding of twentieth-century Italian literature. A Kafkan view of Italian literature incorporates some less well known Italian texts that are currently excluded from maps of modern Italian literature at the same time as it provides new perspectives on canonical authors such as Svevo, Gadda, and Italo Calvino. In this article I first outline a distinct but unexamined Kafka tradition in Italian literature, which can reshape the critical understanding of Italian modern literature, and then provide a more detailed example of how reading Kafka with Italian authors enhances the critical understanding of them.