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This course is dedicated to the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda, the great neurotic polymath sometimes referred to as “the Italian James Joyce,” and his outsize influence on neo-avant-garde and experimentalist literary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We will read selections from Gadda’s two major novels, La cognizione del dolore and Quer pasticciaccio brutto de’ via Merulana, divulgative science writings and other fascist-era journalism, as well as the vitriolic antifascist treatise, Eros e Priapo. Our study of Gadda will include discussions of the critical approaches that ground Gadda studies, from rigorous philology to affect theory, science studies, and new materialism. We will then turn to the “Nipotini dell’Ingegnere”— those named by Alberto Arbasino in his influential essay of that title (himself, Giovanni Testori, and Pier Paolo Pasolini); as well as writers of the neo-avant-garde who sought to continue Gadda’s legacy by emulating his famously “baroque” style marked by wild digressions and the extensive use of regional dialects and neologisms. We conclude the semester with a reading of Carla Lonzi’s 1969 Autoritratto and a study of the circulation of ideas and praxes between literary and visual neo-avant-garde movements in Italy and beyond. Throughout the semester, we will attend to ongoing debates about illegibility, engagement, realism, and the aesthetics of obscenity. Class conducted in English. All Italian texts will also be available in English translation.