Abstract

This essay focuses on Barthes's and Pasolini's late engagement with the novel as a genre - especially in La préparation du roman and in Petrolio - and tracks the affinities, the ambiguities, and the conceptual tensions informing these works. While mourning the perceived disappearance of aesthetic and ethical unifying models, both works dramatise in complex and dynamic ways the persistence of totalising aspirations in the creative process, formally and conceptually. Yet, at the same time, totalising impulses are critically eroded, simultaneously reinstated and dismantled, and shown to be underpinned by conflicting yet allied psychic dynamics.