Contesti, forme, luoghi ed esperienze della letteratura del Sottosuolo

This research investigates the persistence and transformations of the figure of the underground in the Western literary imagination, approaching it not as a mere setting or isolated metaphor, but as a structured and dynamic thematic nucleus capable of traversing different historical periods, literary genres, and cultural traditions. The underground is interpreted as both a physical and symbolic space: a liminal dimension in which epistemological, psychological, social, and historical tensions converge, and as a counter field to the surface, a privileged site of the repressed, the invisible, and the marginal. The study adopts a comparative and thematological approach, integrating the tools of thematic criticism with contributions from anthropology, psychoanalysis, and spatial literary studies. Following a reconstruction of the mythological, religious, and anthropological roots of the underground – from archaic civilizations to katabasis – the research addresses the underground of the psyche: in Nietzsche, who conceives “subterranean thinking” as a critical method of excavation and unmasking; in Freud, for whom the unconscious assumes the symbolic structure of an underground region accessible only through interpretive labour; and in Jung, who conceives the underground as an archetypal and collective space of psychic transformation. The work then traces the principal literary metamorphoses of the underground, identifying the infernal paradigm as one of its foundational models, whose most accomplished formulation is represented by Dante’s Divina Commedia. A crucial turning point in the investigation is constituted by Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, in which the subterranean space becomes interiorized while retaining its concrete topography, and is structured as an existential and psychological condition, giving rise to the modern figure of the “underground man.” This process of interiorization finds a theoretical counterpart in twentieth-century philosophies of depth. The final section of the study is devoted to postmodern reconfigurations of the underground, with particular attention to the works of Don DeLillo and Haruki Murakami. In DeLillo’s novels, the underground functions as an epistemological space and as an archive of historical and technological residue, whereas in Murakami it emerges as a narrative and psychic threshold, a site of access to the individual and collective unconscious, in which descent becomes an act of knowledge and transformation. Taken together, these rewritings demonstrate how the underground continues to operate as a central critical device in the literary representation of modernity: a mobile narrative and symbolic constant that, while changing its functions and meanings, persistently interrogates the limits of representing identity and the crisis of sense.