Contact Information
Annali d'Italianistica
CB 3170
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3170
Fax: (919) 962-5457
Upcoming Volumes
Vol. 27, AdI 2009: A Century of Futurism: 1909-2009
Call for Papers
The Futurist movement marked a crucial moment of rupture within European literature and art, whether one considers it “l‘epilogo negatore di quel romanticismo astratto che si è chiamato decadentismo,” as Franco Ferrarotti put it in a recent essay (Arte d’avanguardia e società, ed. Ilaria Riccioni, 2006), or as “the first truly formed […] truly international avant-garde movement,” as Charles Russell states (Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud to Post-Modernism, 1985). For all its political and cultural contradictions, Italian Futurism called into question all aspects of literary and artistic production, from the sacrality and eternalness of the work of art to the privileged role of the artist and the passivity of the reader and the spectator. Before Dada and Surrealism, according to Peter Bürger’s classic definition of the avant-garde’s distinguishing feature, Futurism is the first artistic group to negate “not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men” (Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1984).
As manifest in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated statement, however, the critical reception of Futurism has often been conditioned by its entanglement with Fascism: “‘Fiat ars — pereat mundus,’ says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expect war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’ […] This is the situation of politics that Fascism is rendering aesthetic” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936). While in Italy the marginalization of the movement, especially in literary studies, ended with the early 1970s, significantly the great amount of critical work produced since then could not prevent the questionable exploitation of the connection between Fascism and Futurism in the new political climate of the 1990s. Also in Anglo-American scholarship Futurism is likewise often approached as an almost paradigmatic example of Fascist modernism, in spite of a number of important studies — such as Cinzia Blum’s The Other Modernism, 1996, and Emilio Gentile’s The Struggle for Modernity, 2003 — that have attempted to call into question such simplistic readings. With the 2009 issue, Annali d’Italianistica sees the one-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Futurism as an opportunity to re-assess the current state of scholarship on the movement and to identify new lines of research.
The volume will be articulated in four sections. In the first section, the volume’s editors are interested in contributions that consider Futurism in relation to the broader cultural, political, and social context of the first half of the twentieth century. While welcoming traditional studies on the reciprocal influences between Futurism and other cultural, political, and social movements (including those that preceded its foundation, such as symbolism or Spanish modernismo), the editors are especially interested in essays that consider the responses of Futurism to specific aspects of modernity — e.g., technological advances, new forms of political organization, the loss of authority of the work of art, feminism, etc. — vis-à-vis those of other modernist groups and authors.
The second section will seek to provide original interpretations of the most representative figures of the Futurist movement, such as F. T. Marinetti, Palazzeschi, Boccioni, and Severini. This section’s methods of inquiry may vary from close textual readings to culturalist and philosophical or philological approaches.
The third section will aim at opening up the Futurist canon to contributions of other figures associated with the movement. As in the previous section, essays may include readings of specific texts and authors, but may also address themes that have been comparatively neglected, such as, for instance, the close relationship between Futurist fiction and genre fiction — Volt, Corra, Rosà, and Folgore, among others, wrote works that can be described as science fiction or detective fiction — or the later poetics of the movement (aeroplastica, poesia sonora, etc.). This third section may also include essays on the interdisciplinary dimension of Futurism and its contribution to fields such as visual arts, music, architecture or cooking, to name just a few.
The fourth section will be dedicated to the cultural and theoretical legacy of Futurism. This section welcomes in particular essays that explore the new expressive and conceptual territories opened up by Futurist practices such as happenings and manifestos, political interventions, and parole in libertà. Other themes worth exploring are the relations between Futurism and machine-aesthetics, biopolitics, and the “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord).
Prospective contributors are invited to contact either editor of this volume: Luca Somigli (luca.somigli@utoronto.ca) or Federico Luisetti (luisetti@email.unc.edu). Deadline for submission is December 1, 2008. Publication is expected by fall 2009. All contributions will be refereed. Essays, not to exceed 25 double-spaced pages, will conform to the MLA style if written in English; if they are written in Italian, they should conform either to the MLA style or to the style posted on the journal’s website.
Vol. 28, AdI 2010: Capital City: Rome, 1870-2010
The twenty-eighth issue of Annali d’Italianistica, to be published in 2010, will devoted to the city of Rome from 1870 to the present day.
For the past century and a half, as for the rest of its long history, Rome has been both the product of the imagination and one of its more prolific and enduring agents; Rome is a material, geographical place, but it also occupies the space of cultural representation. “Rome was not built in a day,” it is commonly said; less frequently does one realize that Rome was, and continues to be, built with words, images, and sounds as much as with bricks, stone, and cement: no clear boundary may be drawn between the real and the imagined Rome, between the city of myth and the city on the map. Thus, the volume intends to investigate Rome’s presence since 1870 in texts, films, events, works of art and architecture, popular culture, and more.
The volume will be articulated chronologically into four parts: 1. Across Two Centuries; 2. Fascism and World War II; 3. The Postwar Period; 4. Into the Third Millennium.
1. Across two centuries. With the “Breach of Porta Pia,” Rome was freed from the political authority of the pope and, shortly thereafter, made the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Because it promised balance and mediation, in addition to its considerable historic weight, Rome was designated as the symbolic center of the young nation, through an active manipulation of both its urban outline and its less tangible urban culture: literature, politics, the arts, and those events that eventually formed the text of Rome’s history between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. All this was placed on top and in the interstices of a city already some twenty-five hundred years old, an urban palimpsest whose past never gets completely erased before the present is built to take its place.
2. Fascism and World War Two. Viewing Rome’s recent past as a decadent failure, Mussolini notoriously refashioned the capital so that it might better reflect his grandiose ideals of a new Italy; his approach was a mixture of reverence for Rome’s ancient past and ruthless desecration of its legacy. Artists, writers, and filmmakers have reflected on the novelties and the shortcomings of the regime’s myth of a monolithic capital, their critiques often veiled so as to avoid censorship—though the Duce’s demise and the traumas of the Second World War brought about copious and far more diverse representations of Rome in all available media.
3. The postwar period. The traces of its fascist experience rethought and rewritten (with the names of streets changed, the significance of monuments altered), Rome underwent further transformations during the second half of the twentieth century. But continuity prevailed over breaks with the past, and the city did not lose its long-standing significance as a place of mediation and circulation with respect to the rest of the country. Rome’s physical and allegorical contradictions, and its social and political role for the Italian peninsula as a whole, are expressed in the city’s art and architecture, literature and poetry, but also its cinema and its popular culture.
4. Into the third millennium: Along with the urban face-lifts inspired by the 2000 Jubilee and the cultural politics of Rome’s recent mayors, the late twentieth century and the new millennium have marked Rome with a multicultural stamp. From the immigrants inhabiting both center and periphery, and peopling contemporary films and books, to the visible presence of foreign architects and artists, to the building of the largest mosque in Europe, Rome’s provincial face is changing rapidly. Rome was chosen as the capital of united Italy because it signaled a mythical view of a nation unified in the past, while pointing to a unified future. One of the many questions contemporary Rome invites us to ponder, then, concerns the ways in which Rome’s 1870 promise of unity has been and is being fulfilled, betrayed, or, rather, whether such a view should be re-examined altogether.
For each section we welcome scholarly investigations on any aspect of the city of Rome from 1870 to 2010.
Essays are due to the editor by May 1st, 2009, with final versions due no later than December 1st, 2009. Essays must be in English, not exceed 25 double-spaced pages, and conform to the MLA style; they need to be submitted electronically, using Microsoft Word, and should include a list of works cited. Interested scholars are invited to contact the volume’s editor as soon as possible.
For further information or to submit an essay, please contact Guest Editor Cristina Mazzoni, Dept. of Romance Languages, University of Vermont.