The Avant-Garde in Italy: Theoretical Debates and Poetic Practices (review)

In the opening statement of his preface, John Picchione underlines that the debates on literature and the arts provoked by the Italian avant-garde are undoubtedly some of the most animated and controversial that Italy has witnessed since the beginning of the twentieth century, when T. Marinetti and the Futurists made their presences known.

With the rising popularity of U. Eco's notion of the 'open work,' structuralism, semiotics, and the writings associated with the Tel Quel group, Nouveau roman, Nouvelle critique, Oulipo, and the Frankfurt School, as well as of international cultural gurus such as A. Robbe-Grillet, R. Barthes, M. Foucault, J. Lacan, R. Jakobson, and J.L. Borges, the focus was now on language, signifiers, signs, structures, forms and problems of communication, intertextuality, and, in short, on literariness more than on literature and content.

In Italy critics such as A. Guglielmi, R. Barilli, F. Curi, and F. Muzzioli have documented the new trends and key protagonists of the avant-garde movements such as Neoavanguardia, Neosperimentalismo, Gruppo 63, and Transavanguardia. In the English-speaking world, readers have had to search for articles in journals and collected essays in order to reconstruct the theoretical and ideological debates surrounding literature and the arts in Italy. The debates were published mainly in new literary journals such as Il Verri, Officina, Il Menabo, Quindici, Marcatrè, and Alfabeta – journals not readily available outside of Italy. These debates also saw the old guard pitted against the new, either defending or attacking experimentalism, tradition, political ideology, and old-fashioned realism.

Picchione's text examines all of the above issues and is a most welcome and much-needed critical study that will help English-speaking Italianists, students, and scholars who wish to study some of the most important literary and overall cultural phenomena since the historical avant-garde. The first two chapters, 'Poetry in Revolt' and 'The Neoavanguardia and the Theoretical Debates,' summarize extremely well the key issues surrounding writers, artists, and critics amid debates and experimental works.

Picchione, an expert on contemporary Italian poetry and an authority on Antonio Porta, has chosen to focus almost exclusively on poets and poetic practices, setting aside the presence and role, within the neoavanguardia, of several outstanding fiction writers of the same era. Picchione states in the preface that 'poetry is the area in which the neo-avant-garde was able to obtain its most remarkable results' and consequently he does not treat fiction writers such as L. Malerba, P. Volponi, and G. Celati, nor does he discuss the narrative works of G. Manganelli, E. Sanguineti and N. Balestrini. From the opening pages Picchione illustrates how we are not dealing with a unified movement or school, as he discusses elements of postmodernism as well as the links between art and technology, and culture and mass media, that characterize the writings of the new exponents of Italian literature who often conceived their works in terms of diversity and provocation. Others, such as Sanguineti, saw their writings as verbal manifestations analogous to the visual abstract compositions that dominated painting in the same decades.

English-speaking readers should find the chapters on Giuliani and Sanguineti of particular interest in terms of understanding the central linguistic and ideological issues that either united or divided writers and critics during the early days following the publication of the anthology I Novissimi, and through the novelties proposed by the promoters of the Gruppo 63, during the uncompromising political and ideological issues that saw the end of the journal Quindici, and up to the days when, as Barilli properly states, we see the 'normalization of the avant-garde' in the 1970s. Basically we are dealing with a division between writers like Sanguineti who, as Picchione reminds us, remained loyal to Marxist and revolutionary ethics of literature, and those like Giuliani, who conceived poetry and literature in general as a linguistic experience. Moreover, North American readers will find interesting and informative the remarkably lucid presentations of Porta's own...