The New Avant-garde in Italy

The New Avant-garde in Italy PDF

Author: John Picchione

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780802089946

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The debate on literature and the arts provoked by the Italian neoavant-garde (neoavanguardia) is undoubtedly one of the most animated and controversial the country has witnessed from World War II to the present. Comprising the period between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, the phenomenon of the neoavanguardia involved key writers, critics, and artists, both as insiders - Sanguineti, Balestrini, Guglielmi, Eco, and others - and adversaries such as Pasolini, Calvino, and Moravia. In The New Avant-Garde in Italy - the first book in English to document the movement - John Picchione's objective is twofold: to provide a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical tenets that inform the works of the neoavanguardia and to show how they are applied to the poetic practices of its authors. The neoavanguardia cannot, Picchione argues, be defined as a movement with a unified program expressed in the form of manifestos or shared theoretical principles. It experiences irreconcilable internal conflicts that are explored as a split between two main blocs - one that is tied to the project of modernity, the other to post-modern aesthetic postures. This study suggests that some of the contentious views proposed by the neoavanguardia anticipated a wide range of issues that continue to be significant and pressing to this day.

Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy

Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy PDF

Author: Nicolas Fernandez-Medina

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-22

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1317434064

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This interdisciplinary volume interrogates bodily thinking in avant-garde texts from Spain and Italy during the early twentieth century and their relevance to larger modernist preoccupations with corporeality. It examines the innovative ways Spanish and Italian avant-gardists explored the body as a locus for various aesthetic and sociopolitical considerations and practices. In reimagining the nexus points where the embodied self and world intersect, the texts surveyed in this book not only shed light on issues such as authority, desire, fetishism, gender, patriarchy, politics, religion, sexuality, subjectivity, violence, and war during a period of unprecedented change, but also explore the complexities of aesthetic and epistemic rupture (and continuity) within Spanish and Italian modernisms. Building on contemporary scholarship in Modernist Studies and avant-garde criticism, this volume brings to light numerous cross-cultural touch points between Spain and Italy, and challenges the center/periphery frameworks of European cultural modernism. In linking disciplines, genres, —isms, and geographical spheres, the book provides new lenses through which to explore the narratives of modernist corporeality. Each contribution centers around the question of the body as it was actively being debated through the medium of poetic, literary, and artistic exchange, exploring the body in its materiality and form, in its sociopolitical representation, relation to Self, cultural formation, spatiality, desires, objectification, commercialization, and aesthetic functions. This comparative approach to Spanish and Italian avant-gardism offers readers an expanded view of the intersections of body and text, broadening the conversation in the larger fields of cultural modernism, European Avant-garde Studies, and Comparative Literature.

Italian Modernism

Italian Modernism PDF

Author: Mario Moroni

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780802086020

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Italian Modernism was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of Decadentismo and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition. Focussing on the confrontation between these concepts and the broader notion of international modernism, the essays in this important collection seek to understand this complex phase of literary and artistic practices as a response to the epistemes of philosophical and scientific modernity at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth. Intellectually provocative, this collection is the first attempt in the field of Italian Studies at a comprehensive account of Italian literary modernism. Each contributor documents how previous critical categories, employed to account for the literary, artistic, and cultural experiences of the period, have provided only partial and inadequate descriptions, preventing a fuller understanding of the complexities and the interrelations among the cultural phenomena of the time.

Against the Avant-garde

Against the Avant-garde PDF

Author: Ara H. Merjian

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 022665527X

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"This book casts the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in a fresh light: his life and work in relation to the visual and performance arts of his time in both Europe and the US. Lavishly illustrated with both documentary and fine art images, it shows how essentially conservative Pasolini was politically and aesthetically despite his reputation as an avant-garde writer and filmmaker. But it also shows how truly advanced Pasolini was when it comes to interdisciplinary art, making him enormously relevant today"--

Italian Futurism

Italian Futurism PDF

Author: Rosemary K. West

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2015-09-02

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 9781517037796

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The early 20th century is often referred to as an age of isms. There was a great proliferation of political, literary and artistic movements throughout Europe, all aimed at changing some aspect of society. Today we refer to these movements collectively as modernism. But for some people, modernization just wasn't happening fast enough. A group of Italian writers and artists who called themselves Futurists were frustrated by the sense that Italy was stuck in the past. They felt that Italian culture was stagnating, still resting on accomplishments that dated back to the Renaissance. So they decided to shake things up. Equating museums and libraries with cemeteries, calling for the destruction and rebuilding of cities, and demanding the removal of pasta from the Italian cuisine, Futurism was positioned as a total rejection of the past with the goal of replacing nearly all of contemporary culture with a completely original design for the future. Italian Futurism was very much a product of its time and place. The social, political and intellectual atmosphere of Europe was generating excitement, upheaval, and all kinds of creative ideas. The past gave the Futurists something to rebel against. The present gave them motivation. All the different schools of thought that were developing around them were interacting and inspiring each other to go even farther and do even more. Futurism was often crazy and over the top, but it was the first organized avant-garde movement of the 20th century. Although Futurism as an organized movement was over before the end of World War II, its influences on modern culture continue to be seen in product design, publishing, architecture and contemporary art.

New Theatre in Italy

New Theatre in Italy PDF

Author: Valentina Valentini

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-22

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1351267264

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New Theatre in Italy 1963-2013 makes the case for the centrality of late-millennium Italian avant-garde theatre in the development of the new forms of performance that have emerged in the 21st Century. Starting in the Sixties, young artists and militants in Italy reacted to the violence in their streets and ruptures in the family unit that are now recognized as having been harbingers of the end of the global post-war system. As traditional rituals of State and Church faltered, a new generation of cultural operators, largely untrained and driven away from political activism, formed collectives to explore new ways of speaking theatrically, new ways to create and experience performance, and new relationships between performer and spectator. Although the vast majority of the works created were transient, like all performance, their aesthetic and social effects continue to surface today across media on a global scale, affecting visual art, cinema, television and the behavioural aesthetics of social networks.

Futurist Cinema

Futurist Cinema PDF

Author: Rossella Catanese

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789089647528

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Futurism and early cinema shared a fascination with dynamic movement and speed, presenting both as harbingers of an emerging new way of life and new aesthetic criteria. And the Futurists quickly latched on to cinema as a device with great potential to manipulate our perceptions in order to create a new world. In the edited collection Futurist Cinema, Rossella Catanese explores that conjunction, bringing in avant-garde artists and their manifestos to show how painters and other artists turned to cinema as a model for overcoming the inherently static nature of painting in order to rethink it for a new era.

Il Modo Italiano

Il Modo Italiano PDF

Author: Giampiero Bosoni

Publisher: [Montréal] : Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 9788876248757

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Avant-garde Florence

Avant-garde Florence PDF

Author: Walter L. Adamson

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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They envisioned a brave new world, and what they got was fascism. As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the history of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure. The "decadentism" of D'Annunzio, the philosophical ideals of Croce and Gentile, the politics of Italian socialism: all these strains flowed together to buoy the emerging avant-garde in Florence. Walter Adamson shows us the young artists and writers caught up in the intellectual ferment of their time, among them the poet Giovanni Papini, the painter Ardengo Soffici, and the cultural critic Giuseppe Prezzolini. He depicts a generation rejecting provincialism, seeking spiritual freedom in Paris, and ultimately blending the modernist style found there with their own sense of toscanità or "being Tuscan." In their journals--Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba, and l'Italia futurista--and in their cafe life at the Giubbe Rosse, we see the avant-garde of Florence as citizens of an intellectual world peopled by the likes of Picasso, Bergson, Sorel, Unamuno, Pareto, Weininger, and William James. We witness their mounting commitment to the ideals of regenerative violence and watch their existence become increasingly frenzied as war approaches. Finally, Adamson shows us the ultimate betrayal of the movement's aspirations as its cultural politics help catapult Italy into war and prepare the way for Mussolini's rise to power.