«Mi sono alzato, sono ricaduto / nel fondo dove il secolo ਠil minuto». Ràªve et onirisme dans la littà©rature de tà©moignage (Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Jorge Sempràºn)

This dissertation explores how the dream †" as a literary theme †" is conceived, illustrated and conveyed in testimonial literature, focusing on the works of Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo and Jorge Sempràºn. While retracing the philosophical and literary history of the dream, we address this phenomenon in its textual specificity and various forms and functions. Two specific issues have been considered: 1) the use of the dream as a literary device for contrasting/reversing the conventional “realistic” framework of testimonial narrative; 2) the representation of the dream as a cornerstone, a sort of metadiscursive strategy for reinventing and reorganizing the narrative of the self and the writing of history. The oneiric process, as seen in the works examined, does not seem to be influenced by the usual, symbolic, Freudian hermeneutics; rather, it is suggestive of a more philosophical and morphological approach to writing/interpreting the dream, based on what Binswanger and Foucault referred to as an “affective” and “existential” experience of the self. Being at once a biographical experience, a literary artifice and a philosophical mark, the literary dream represented by the testimonial authors is never confined to a minor, sporadic, ornamental role, but has the qualities of a real microcosm: it reflects the entire universe of the work of art in which it originates, featuring its stylistic as well as semantic and ideological connotations in detail.