Legitimizing the Artist
Subtitle: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885-1915 (Toronto Italian Studies)
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: December 27, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 290
ISBN-13: 9780802037619
Subjects: Literary studies: general; c 1800 to c 1900; c 1900 - c 1914; History; Art & Art Instruction; History: World; Europe; European; History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945); Literary Criticism & Collections / European; Europe - General
First sentence: 'L'etimologia,' Alberto Savinio writes in Dico a te, Clio (74), 'e la sirena degli animi semplici' [etymology is the siren of simple souls].
Description: "In this work Luca Somigli discusses several European artistic movements - decadentism, Italian futurism, vorticism, and imagism - and argues for the centrality of the works of F.T. Marinetti in the transition from a fin de siecle decadent poetics, exemplified by the manifestoes of Anatole Baju, to a properly avant-garde project aiming at a complete renewal of the process of literary communication and the abolition of the difference between producer and consumer. It is to this challenge that the English avant-garde artists, and Ezra Pound in particular, responded with their more polemical pieces. Somigli suggests that this debate allows us to rethink the relationship between modernism and post-modernism as complementary ways of engaging the loss of an organic relationship between the artist and his social environment."--BOOK JACKET.