ABSTRACT

Italo Svevo's writing reveals a programmatic focus on corporeal arrhythmia, an arrhythmia that, time and again, comes to constitute the voice of material embodiment itself. Indeed, Svevo consistently contrasts bodies capable of rhythmic or healthy action with bodies characterized by an irregularity or asymmetry that hinders the possibility of active or potent intervention in the external world. Svevo contrasts his model of predatory animal action with a human existence defined by a discontented soul. Embodied Music the wisdom that allows Zeno to embrace an embodied life and, moreover, to propose a model of culture that contrasts the immanence of an embodied modernist aesthetic with the abstract or transcendent stability of the canon. Despite the fact that Zeno repeatedly returns to the terminology of sickness and health, Svevo is not engaged in a naturalist penetration of bodily mechanism.