A language for wonder

Textual and rhetorical aspects of ‘Horcynus Orca’

Abstract

The article is dedicated to three fundamental characteristics of the style of Stefano D’Arrigo’s novel Horcynus Orca (Mondadori, 1975): the relationship between the additive syntax and the semantic expansion of the objects of discourse, the thematic stasis, and the rhetorical strategies aimed at conceptualising the referents, narrowing their contours, or extending them by analogy. A brief introduction aims to emphasise the link between these three stylistic instances (active on multiple linguistic levels: syntactic, semantic, and textual) and the thematic dimension of the marvellous.