This doctoral thesis conducts a comparison between two authors seemingly distant from each other: C. E. Gadda and M. Merleau-Ponty. The Meditazione milanese represents a first step of approximation between them: written by Gadda with a view to his eventual philosophy degree, this text is also the point of departure of his more noted and important literary work. The comparison with Merleau-Ponty is based on the relationship between philosophy and literature, as, like Gadda, Merleau-Ponty maintains that philosophy must abandon its conceptual vocabulary in order to broaden its own horizon towards art and literature in particular. Entitled "A Phenomenology", the first part of this thesis analyses above all the contribution of phenomenology to philosophy and literature; subsequently, it concentrates on the analogies between Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body and the theme of corporeality as it is present in Gadda's writings. The second part, "The Baroque", scrutinises the baroque structures evident in the works of Gadda and Merleau-Ponty by examining the ideas of the system and the monad; it then broadens the topic of language on the grounds of F. Saussure's Cours de linguistique; finally, departing from an engagement with cinematic language, it introduces the themes of multiplicity and becoming which the two authors have in common. The final chapter deepens Gadda's concern with the relationship between totality and multiplicity through Merleau-Ponty's figures of the chiasm and the flesh, describing every linguistic and expressive act as a deformation, i.e. as a movement which is both creation and passivity, where silence is the co-substance of words.
