Legitimizing the Artist
Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885-1915
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
- Initial publish date
- Dec 2003
- Category
- General, European, Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780802037619
- Publish Date
- Dec 2003
- List Price
- $81.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442659360
- Publish Date
- Dec 2003
- List Price
- $35.95
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Description
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the production of literary and cultural manifestoes enjoyed a veritable boom and accompanied the rise of many avant-garde movements. Legitimizing the Artist considers this phenomenon as a response to a more general crisis of legitimation that artists had been struggling with for decades. The crucial question for artists, confronted by the conservative values of the dominant bourgeoisie and the economic logic of triumphant capitalism, was how to justify their work in terms that did not reduce art to a mere commodity.
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 siécle 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.
About the author
Luca Somigli is an associate professor in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto.
Awards
- Winner, AAIS Book Award, American Association of Italian Studies
Editorial Reviews
‘In considering nascent modern art's uneasy relation to its transformed circumstances through the form of the Futurist Manifesto, Professor Somigli makes a valuable addition to an already cramped field.’
Times Literary Supplement