Abstract: Language is at the center of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s literary vision, an author who reflects on the subject through his entire intellectual activity, which is characterized by a strong metalinguistic component that emerges particularly in what Paolo Desogus (2018) has defined “opere-laboratorio [works-laboratory]”. This article focuses on the linguistic analysis of Teorema to emphasize, on the one hand, the peculiar aspects of lexicon, syntax, and style of the work; and, on the other, the rhetorical and paratextual devices through which Pasolini critically modulates the “discorso libero indiretto borghese [the free indirect bourgeois discourse]”—which he mentions in the introduction to the text—together with the analysis of other mechanisms of stylistic experimentation, including the figurative integration and linguistic contamination between different literary genres. In addition, this article pays particular attention to the study of the figurative system of Teorema, its intertextual network and the artistic and theoretical dialogue that the author maintains with his other works.
Keywords: Teorema, Literature, Language, Twentieth-Century, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Literary Style, Literary Criticism, Linguistic Analysis, The Sixties, 1968.
