From the description of the sublime to the poetics of myth A study of a passage from a “mistreated” passage of Cesare Pavese’s Diavolo sulle colline

This paper analyses a descriptive sequence in Le Diable sur les collines, the hypotyposis of a storm ravaging the countryside. The syntactic sequences and lexical associations depart from simple style and tend towards literary expressionism. This stylistic choice restores a partial and inadequate perception of the sublime. Through an examination of the intertexts, we propose to consider this description as a stylistic realization of Pavese’s poetics of myth, which often remains theoretical.