This article takes the case of the Italian author Dino Buzzati who, parallel to his literary
oeuvre best known for its fantastic qualities, spent forty years from 1928 to 1972 as a journalist and columnist for
Corriere della sera, practising every conceivable sub-genre of journalism and becoming a sort of 'directeur occulte' of the paper. Focusing on
Cronache terrestri, the selection of Buzzati's articles published posthumously, my analysis explores the borderline between literature and journalism
in Buzzati's work for
Corriere, singling out for particular attention the intersection between specific journalistic techniques (in particular his 'leads'
and his titles) and his recourse to the 'fantastic' in the treatment of topical themes and contemporary events (including
war reportage).
Buzzati's 'borderline', I argue, can be posited as an 'in between-area' between literature and journalism, reality and fantasy,
where the signature of Buzzati, as correspondent for an authoritative Italian daily, validates the existence of (apparently)
'impossible' worlds, and where his accumulation of reportorial details and enumerations create fictions of (hyper) reality
and the conditions necessary to the 'hesitation' that Todorov ascribes to the fantastic mode.
This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.