SOURCE: "A Displacement of Plato's Pharmakon: A Study of Italo Svevo's Short Fiction," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter, 1975-76, pp. 564-72.

In the essay below, Champagne finds the ancient Pharmakon 's dual quality in Svevo's short fiction and discusses the author's use of language as an alternate order to time and space.

"Il caso Svevo" bears witness to the displacement of Italo Svevo's corpus in time and place. It has not been until the 1950's, some twenty years after his death, that Svevo's work has begun to receive the attention it is due. This attention has been especially productive in university communities in and out of Italy—environments quite different from the Triestine settings of Svevo's fiction. Such a displacement of time and place has also formally and thematically existed within Svevo's short fiction. In reaction to the documentary needs for localized details so characteristic of...