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

Author: Nicolas Fernandez-Medina
Publisher: Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature
ISBN: 9780367873363
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
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.

Author: Nicolás Fernández-Medina
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317434072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
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.

Author: Nicolas Fernandez-Medina
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317434064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
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.

Author: Danila Cannamela
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148750506X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The blending of people and living machines is a central element in the futurist "reconstruction of the universe." However, prior to the futurist break, a group of early-twentieth-century poets, later dubbed crepuscolari (crepusculars), had already begun an attack against the dominant cultural system, using their poetry as the locus in which useless little objects clashed with the traditional poetry of human greatness and stylistic perfection. The Quiet Avant-Garde draws from a number of twenty-first-century theories - vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and environmental humanities - as well as Bruno Latour's criticism of modernity to illustrate how the crepuscular movement sabotaged the modern mindset and launched the counter-discourse of the Italian avant-garde by blurring the line dividing people from "things." This liminal poetics, at the crossroad of tradition, modernism, and the avant-garde, acted as the initiator of the ethical and environmental transition from a universe subjected to humans to human-thing co-agency. This book proposes a contemporary reading of Italian twentieth-century movements and offers a foothold for scholars outside Italian studies to access authors who are still unexplored in North American literature.

Author: Nicolás Fernández-Medina
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773554084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The concept of vital force – the immanent energy that promotes the processes of life in the body and in nature – has proved a source of endless fascination and controversy. Indeed, the question of what vitalizes the body has haunted humanity since antiquity, and became even more pressing during the Scientific Revolution and beyond. Examining the complexities and theories about vital force in Spanish modernity, Nicolás Fernández-Medina's Life Embodied offers a novel and provocative assessment of the question of bodily life in Spain. Starting with Juan de Cabriada's landmark Carta filosófica, médico-chymica of 1687 and ending with Ramón Gómez de la Serna's avant-gardism of the 1910s, Fernández-Medina incorporates discussions of anatomy, philosophy, science, critical theory, history of medicine, and literary studies to argue that concepts of vital force served as powerful vehicles to interrogate the possibilities and limits of corporeality. Paying close attention to how the body's capabilities were conceived and strategically woven into critiques of modernity, Fernández-Medina engages the work of Miguel Boix y Moliner, Martín Martínez, Diego de Torres Villarroel, Sebastián Guerrero Herreros, Ignacio María Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Pedro Mata y Fontanet, Ángela Grassi, Julián Sanz del Río, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pío Baroja, among others. Drawing on extensive research and analysis, Life Embodied breaks new ground as the first book to address the question of vital force in Spanish modernity.

Author: Sharon Hecker
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031148169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
This book is the first critical interdisciplinary examination in English of Italian women’s contributions to intellectual, artistic, and cultural production in modern Italy. Examining commonalities and diversities from the country’s Unification to today, the volume provides insight into the challenges that Italian women engaged in cultural production have faced, and the strategies they have deployed in order to achieve their objectives. The essays address a range of issues, from women’s self-identification and public ownership of their professional roles as laborers in the intellectual and cultural realm, to questions about motherhood and financial remuneration, to the role of creative foreign women in Italy. Through critical analysis and direct testimony from new and typically marginalized voices, including an Arab-Italian writer, an Italian-Dominican filmmaker, and a transgender activist, new forms of ongoing struggle emerge that redefine the culturally diverse landscape of female intellectual and creative production in Italy today. The volume rethinks a solely national “Made in Italy” reading of the subject of female intellectual labor, demonstrating instead the wide network of influences and relationships that have existed for Italian women in their professional aspirations.

Author: Anthony Geist
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317944399
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This volume represents a rereading of modernism and the modernist canon from a double distance: geographical and temporal. It is a revision not only from the periphery (Spain and Latin America), but from this new fin de si cle as well, a revisiting of modernity and its cultural artifacts from that same postmodernity. Modernism and Its Margins is an attempt at introducing different perspectives and examples in the theoretical debate, redefine dominant assumptions of what modernism-or margins-mean in our historical juncture.

Author: Enrico Cesaretti
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271088494
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Over the past century, the Italian landscape has undergone exceedingly rapid transformations, shifting from a mostly rural environment to a decidedly modern world. This changing landscape is endowed with a narrative agency that transforms how we understand our surroundings. Situated at the juncture of Italian studies and ecocriticism and following the recent “material turn” in the environmental humanities, Elemental Narratives outlines an original cultural and environmental map of the bel paese. Giving equal weight to readings of fiction, nonfiction, works of visual art, and physical sites, Enrico Cesaretti investigates the interconnected stories emerging from both human creativity and the expressive eloquence of “glocal” materials, such as sulfur, petroleum, marble, steel, and asbestos, that have helped make and, simultaneously, “un-make” today’s Italy, affecting its socio-environmental health in multiple ways. Embracing the idea of a decentralized agency that is shared among human and nonhuman entities, Cesaretti suggests that engaging with these entangled discursive and material texts is a sound and revealing ecocritical practice that promises to generate new knowledge and more participatory, affective responses to environmental issues, both in Italy and elsewhere. Ultimately, he argues that complementing quantitative, data-based information with insights from fiction and nonfiction, the arts, and other humanistic disciplines is both desirable and crucial if we want to modify perceptions and attitudes, increase our awareness and understanding, and, in turn, develop more sustainable worldviews in the era of the Anthropocene. Elegantly written and convincingly argued, this book will appeal broadly to scholars and students working in the fields of environmental studies, comparative literatures, ecocriticism, environmental history, and Italian studies.

Author: Judith Stallings-Ward
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100002847X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Since its publication nearly eight decades ago, the consensus among scholars about Fábula de Equis y Zeda, by the Spanish poet Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) remains unchanged: Fábula is an enigmatic avant-garde curiosity. It seems to rob the reader of the reason necessary to interpret it, even as it lures him or her ineluctably to the task; nevertheless, the present study makes the case that this work is, in fact, not inaccessible, and that what the anhelante arquitecto, intended with his masterpiece was a creation myth that explains the evolution of music in his day. This monograph unlocks the fullness of the poem ́s meaning sourced in music’s mythical consciousness and expressed in a poetic idiom that replicates aesthetic concepts and cubist strategies of form embraced by the neoclassical composers Bartok, Falla, Ravel, and Stravinsky.

Author: Astradur Eysteinsson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027292043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1059

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Book Description
The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, ­all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.