From: Discourse Boundary Creation. Bordighera Press, 2013 THE LOGIC OF POETIC GENEALOGY ON PAOLO VALESIO’S The Dark Flame Alessandro Carrera University of Houston La ragione (che in grammatica spesso è una cosa coll’analogia)… [Reason (which in grammar is often one with analogy)…] G. Leopardi, Sopra due voci italiane (1817) I. DEFENDING TEXTUAL COHERENCE When I started reading Paolo Valesio’s Gabriele D’Annun- zio: The Dark Flame shortly after it was published, initially I did not go from cover to cover, I focused on the Pasolini chapter instead. I found it intriguing not just because of its innovative approach to Pasolini, but also on account of the elusive methodology underlining the critical discourse. 1 When I went back and read the entire volume, I was struck again by the unusual dissonance that transpired from the book and that I had just glimpsed in my first partial ap- proach. Valesio could have easily claimed to having inocu- lated Italian literary criticism with a highly sophisticated brand of participatory, passionate deconstructionism (and I purposely bring together terms such “passion” and “decon- struction” that usually do not appear in the same sentence). The Dark Flame combined a refined linguistic-stylistic ap- proach, fully reminiscent of Jakobson’s structuralist subtle- ties, with the adventurous mischievousness of the critic who deliberately avoids privileged points of entry to the text ex- 1 Paolo Valesio, Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Dark Flame. From this point on, I will refer directly this text as DF followed by page number.