Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde (review)

This collection of essays is the first in English to attempt a comprehensive overview of Italian literary modernism. Its fourteen contributions concern themselves with the Italian literary scene from Decadentismo and aestheticism, through the avant-garde, to the post-war Novecentismo, and on to early soundings of the postmodern.

In the foreword by Paolo Valesio, and in the editorial introduction, the problems in constructing an account of Italian modernism are carefully worked through. In addition to the well-rehearsed issues associated with the instability of literary terms such as "decadence," avant-garde, and modernism itself, there are specific secondary difficulties with applying these terms to Italian literature. The relative isolationism of Italian writers and critics is felt to problematize any attempt to map developments in Italy on to the international scene; a backward-looking and defeatist attitude to its own literary history has resulted in a peculiar displacement of Italy from accounts of developments in England, France, and Germany. This volume aims to place Italian modernism within its proper European context, but also to provide an adequate account of the national scene, with its highly complex groupings and movements. It is perhaps significant that the contributors to the book teach Italian literature in predominantly North American universities; the effort of opening up the territory to an English-speaking readership is clearly being made by scholars whose teaching of the literature is necessarily comparative.

The essays are arranged along chronological lines. Whilst the introductory essays by Paolo Valesio, the editors, and Remo Ceserani attempt to provide overviews of the period and the issues at stake, most of the contributions are concerned with very specific aspects of Italian artistic and intellectual life from the 1870s to the 1930s. The best work in the volume (and here I would single out the essays by Walter L. Adamson, Enrico Cesaretti, and Manuela Gieri) approaches in a fresh and informed manner the nature and significance of places, movements, and writers already familiar to Anglo-American scholars of modernism. Adamson considers the importance of Florence as the site of avant-garde activity in the first decades of the twentieth century, primarily by focusing on the Florentine journals Leonardo, La Voce and Lacerba, which acted as sounding-boards for debates around a cultural resistance to commodification, and the birth (or rebirth) of various forms of spiritual nationalism. Cesaretti reconsiders Futurism's disavowal of the past by showing the extent of Marinetti's concern with nostalgia and his continual engagement with the three time perspectives; Futurist simultaneity is compared to Bergsonian duration, and avant-garde poetics are felt to share with modernist poetics "a rediscovery of diachrony, an attempt, to paraphrase Eliot, to retrieve the distance of the past and tradition by re-inventing and modifying them" (251). And Gieri compares Pirandello's use of laughter as a tragi-comic reminder of internal division to the similar idea of humor discussed in Baudelaire's little-known essay of 1855, "De l'essence du rire."

The problem with the volume lies in its ambitious intention to draw together a cohesive account of its subject. Where the best contributions can reflect in informed ways on localized topics, the introductory and editorial essays seem committed to finding patterns even as they warn us about the impossibility of sustaining them. Remo Ceserani's opening essay is a case in point. He starts by stating the historical and taxonomic difficulties involved in defining modernity, but in the process of replacing difficulty with hypothesis he stumbles between terms, borrowing from Paul de Man and the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg before the essay peters out into a discussion of the critic Giacomo Debenedetti. Ceserani likens the modernist tension between internal rupture and self-assertion to the formation of the Italian nation itself, whose unification attempted to bring together widely dissimilar regions and states. In his own words, "it would be difficult to find another country in nineteenth-century Europe that...