Between 1949 and 1977 (post-mortem as well), Pier Paolo Pasolini and his works were put on trial more than thirty times on charges of obscenity and contempt of religion, to name only two of the best known attempts to censor him. Italian newspapers and magazines regularly reported on these trials and on his life on their front pages, often with scandal-mongering headlines. This dissertation presents a selection of the more interesting records from the censorship trials.

Through a close reading of the court records it is possible to analyze the differences and similarities between the two epistemological systems of literature (or culture) and law. Pasolini's conflicts with institutions - and vice versa - reveal a nature-culture dichotomy that was a primary issue in the trials. The court records also allow us to draw a portrait of Italian society during the Sixties and Seventies and to evaluate Pasolini's relationship to it.

Throughout Pasolini's statements in the trials, which demonstrate his poetics, through the testimony of literary critics at the trial, such as Giuseppe Ungaretti and Gianfranco Contini, and through the formal examination of his work requested by the judges, there emerges a picture of a violent struggle between Pasolini and the official institutions of society. This struggle illustrates Pasolini's well-developed and forceful ideas about art and communication. He believed that art was not only a function of artistic production, but that the artist himself embodied art through his intellectual positions and his analysis of contemporary Italian society - and even through his role as a scandalous public figure.