Futurist Manifesto Research Articles

Editor’s Foreword

Mission statements—awkward pairings of fine print and bold-faced idealism—rarely attract much attention. Electronic editions of scholarly journals often don’t publish them, even though they could do so without incurring expense, as print editions cannot. I appreciate the irony but wish to point out one section of the EOR’s statement to readers of both media: “Consideration will be given to submissions on topics relevant to but not centrally concerned with O’Neill, such as . . . work on O’Neill’s colleagues and collaborators in the Provincetown Players.” Hmmm. Granted, Bess Rowen’s performance-review section has kept pace with the Metropolitan Virtual Playhouse’s COVID-era streamings of plays by Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, and other pertinent dramatists. Generally, however, the Players have been underrepresented in our pages. EOR 43.2 signals a renewed commitment to their inclusion.The issue opens with eight letters from sometime-Provincetowner Kyra Markham to O’Neill’s biographer Lois Sheaffer, written from Haiti during the reign of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Best remembered for her painting and, trivially, her youthful relationship with Theodore Dreiser, Markham proves a witty, worldly, sometimes wistful, and occasionally caustic commentator on O’Neill proprio, naturally, but also, per our mission statement, on his “colleagues and collaborators.” Among the subjects of her recollections are Djuna Barnes, Mary Blair, George Cram Cook, Dorothy Day, “Fitzi” Fitzgerald, Susan Glaspell, Mary Pyne, and Ida Rauh. Markham is a skilled epistolist, and Sheaffer’s talent for drawing out his subjects is clear from the increasing openness of her letters. Jeff Kennedy, whose Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players is due for publication this fall, expertly introduced and annotated the letters.Of course, there’s more. A strikingly original essay by Gerhart Bleifuss argues for the influence on The Hairy Ape of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s distasteful “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909). (“Such gaudy tulips grown from dung,” one might say, after Swift.) Bleifuss offers a provocative and sobering new perspective on Yank, the past’s assassin. “Substantial” seems a just descriptor of the essay, “durable” a good bet. A spirited and informative conversation between dramaturg Beth Wynstra and director Eric Fraisher Hayes—collaborators on the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s Welded (2022)—transports us from the stokehold of Marinetti’s mind and onto (let’s say) a sun deck of creative coalescence. Welded is a tough play, and I expect more readers than I will appreciate Wynstra’s and Hayes’s elucidations of nuances and potentialities that might otherwise have remained obscure—literally, given Hayes’s fondness for the use of probing flashlights in this production.We’ve “gone long” on the Used Book feature, here expanded from its original 1,500–2,000–word format. David Palmer rises (extends?) to the occasion admirably in his reassessment of Joel Pfister’s Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (1995). That agile, sometimes chewy study benefits equally from Palmer’s talents as exegete and as hermeneut. Shorter reviews of newer books, commissioned by Zander Brietzke, appraise Patrick Chura’s Michael Gold: The People’s Writer (David Roessel) and Bess Rowen’s The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (Jennifer Buckley). We close with reviews of productions virtual, actual, and filmic by Marla Del Collins, Eileen Herrmann, William Davies King, Dan McGovern, Sheila Hickey Garvey, and yours truly.Sincere gratitude is due to Anabel Cole, Barbara Cole, Lisa Ruddick, and Kyra Markham’s other grandchildren for their genial correspondence and their permission to publish that fascinating woman’s letters. Thanks as well to the representatives of the International Susan Glaspell Society, whose collegiality augers well for the EOR’s future. And, as always, thanks to you, our readers.

The Life and Death of a Futurist Poet: Speculations on The Hairy Ape

ABSTRACT What might O’Neill have made of futurism, the Italian movement that had been creating a sensation in the artistic world since 1909? The Hairy Ape perhaps provides the answer. In that play O’Neill arguably transformed Marinetti’s prose “Manifesto of Futurism” into a dramatic text that presented futurism as destructive, misogynist, and inherently bound to fail. An intertextual examination suggests that one might profitably read The Hairy Ape as O’Neill’s negative answer to Marinetti’s ideas about poetry and art. If the futurists had a free rein, O’Neill seems to imply, they would reduce cultural life to a new level of primitiveness. This, in turn, suggests a critique of the futurists’ affinity with fascism.

“Every human action is anthropophagic”

The Freudian theory and the era of acceleration announced by the Futurist Manifesto arrived in Brazil in 1899 and 1909, respectively. Afterwards the concrete reception of these two significant events became more than the symptomatic revelation of the shocks provoked by industrial modernity and its powerful undercurrent of anxieties. The poet, „clown“, writer and major figure of the Brazilian modernist avant-garde, Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) absorbed Freud and the Futurist Manifesto at once, re-pragmatized and re-semantized them. Oswald's concept of Cultural Anthropophagy (1928) as a central interpretative strategy, to be exact, an hermeneutic approach is defined by Haroldo de Campos aptly: “Oswald's ‘Anthropophagy’ [...] is the thought of critical devoration of the universal cultural heritage” (Campos,1986). The introduction of the anthropophagic trope inspired by Native Americans’ metaphysics leads the poet to a subversion of the Gestalt/Behavior psychological theories: “The anthropophagic function of the psychological behavior is reduced to two parts: 1) totemiser the external taboos; 2) create a new taboo in exogamic function” (Andrade,1929). From 1928 to 1950 the Anthropophagy approach on the interaction between the individual and the environment gained philosophical consistency. Oswald's thesis is a conceptual alternative that attempted to bring answers through the amplification of our ethical becoming. As an epistemological perspective attentive to the different modes of existence, the proposition of Oswald is a field of transformative practices having the power to overcome the techno-industrial paradigms. I will examine the contribution of Oswald de Andrade to theoretical psychology and to the issues that arise in an “Era of Acceleration” where the symbolic field is replaced by a cybernetic field.

The Institution as Infrastructure: The International American Chamber of Commerce and Transatlantic Trade

In a 1913 pamphlet, F. T. Marinetti, best known for his “Manifesto of Futurism,” attributed the twentieth century’s “complete renewal of human sensibility” to a series of technological innovations, including “the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, [and] the

>Louise Hornby, Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film

‘We are told [modernism] strives exclusively, excessively, toward motion’, Louise Hornby writes in Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film – ‘we see motion by not seeing clearly’ (pp. 190, 21). Hornby’s study into the very antitheses of modernism, principally the ideas of stillness, stagnancy and the fixed image, is predicated on this notion of flawed perception. Modernism, we are constantly reminded, is an aesthetic cultural mode in which motion, motility and speed inhere. Hornby’s refreshing study pulls the airbrakes on such preconceptions and, through attentive consideration of early photographic luminaries such as Anna Atkins and Julia Margaret Cameron, as well as a focused collection of literary sources from Marcel Proust to Virginia Woolf, argues that modernism is only ever as swift-moving as we allow it to be. It can be held fast, she suggests; it can be paused, rewound and scrutinized frame-by-frame. From the macro, fascistic ideals put forward in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) to the nuanced narrative innovations of stream of consciousness, motion has defined how we read, write and think about modernism as a genre. The quick-fire relation of psychologies in Woolf’s prose, the frenetic polygons of the Cubists, the poster-ready platitude of ‘Make it New’, all point towards modernism’s ‘kinetic drive’, a truism across modernist texts both literary and visual that Hornby takes to task in this new publication (p. 1). She is interested in seeing stillness as a ‘formal polemic’, in probing further the immanent potentiality of photography to disrupt ideas of ‘technological determinism’ (pp. 3, 9). Whilst the rest of modernity appeared to rally against literary realism, their throttling towards progress buffeted by two world wars, Hornby privileges the figures and their mediums who brought such momentum to a halt, if but for a second, and let the light in.

Traditions of Classicism in the European Architecture of the XX Century

Analysing the architectural theory and practice of the XX century, many researchers focus on currents and directions, united by the name “modern”. The beginning of this approach was put by Manifesto of Futurism (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909), which proclaimed the need for each generation to create his own living environment. This type of thinking was characteristic of most architects of the XX century, who created “new traditions”. In parallel, artistic trends developed, based on regionalism, the traditions of neoclassicism or historicism. The variety of the phenomena of architecture of the XX century can be placed between two poles. The first pole defines “The spirit of time” (Zeitgeist), i.e. caused by the needs of our time social, technical, aesthetic and other problems, realized in theory and practice in the corresponding architectural forms. Toward another pole, architectural solutions gravitate due to the search for the Ideal of Architecture, Hegel’s “perfect being,” not related to time and the cause of its emergence. One of the options for such searches was the use of classic forms. An analysis of the use of the traditions of classicism in the architecture of the XX century is devoted to this publication.

Editor’s Introduction

Welcome to Pharmacy in History ’s special issue, The Future! In 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti first published his “Manifesto of Futurism” in the newspaper Le Figaro . It led to the development of a full-blown Futurism movement, initially based in Milan. The Italian

«Figlio di una turbina e di d’Annunzio»: Marinetti edipico?

From the 1900s to the 1930s Marinetti’s attitude towards d’Annunzio gradually changed from blame to unconditional praise. The steps of this evolution and the reasons behind it emerge from an analysis of a number of Marinetti’s texts dealing with d’Annunzio’s life and works. In his early French writings (1903-1908) Marinetti had mixed feelings about d’Annunzio, whereas in his first Futurist manifestoes (1909-1915) he despised d’Annunzio as a prominent symbol of passatismo. This hostile attitude changed with the Great War and with the seize of Fiume, as after these events Marinetti increasingly represented d’Annunzio as a Futurist man and writer. He traced heavy Futurist influences in the Notturno (1922), and in a number of later writings (1937-1938) made frequent references to d’Annunzio’s undoubtedly Futurist fibre. Through these declarations Marinetti aimed at seizing d’Annunzio’s literary legacy, thus elevating the contemporary Futurist poets as his legitimate successors.

Futurism, Futurology, Future Shock, Climate Change: Visions of the Future from 1909 to the Present

This essay charts a brief intellectual history of the futures – both utopian and dystopian – conceived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It traces perspectives on the future since 1909, when the term ‘futurism’ was coined in the publication of the ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’. The essay maps changes in the vision of the future, taking a chronological approach in noting developments in the discourse on the future. A prominent theme in pronouncements on the future is technological progress, first in relation to industrial technology, later in the context of post-industrial or information technology. A turning-point in this discourse can be isolated around 1973, when ideas of technological progress begin to be challenged in the public sphere; from that date, environmental concern becomes increasingly significant in discussions of the future.

A vanguarda florentina de Lacerba e Portugal Futurista: afinidades e divergências

RESUMO O objetivo do artigo é evidenciar os elementos do futurismo italiano, em particular do futurismo florentino da revista Lacerba, encontrados, mutatis mutandis, em Portugal Futurista, que se pode considerar o manifesto propagandista mais completo do futurismo em Portugal. A revista portuguesa denota claramente um conhecimento profundo, por parte dos portugueses, do futurismo italiano, visto que os textos de Portugal Futurista foram realizados, em boa parte, por extrapolação e reelaboração de conteúdos desenvolvidos sobretudo na revista Lacerba e, a partir dela, já divulgados e conhecidos em todos os grandes países europeus.

“Futurism in Latin America.” Special Issue, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies by Mariana Aguirre, Rosa Sarabia, Renée M. Silverman, and Ricardo Vasconcelos

Reviewed by: “Futurism in Latin America.” Special Issue, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies by Mariana Aguirre, Rosa Sarabia, Renée M. Silverman, and Ricardo Vasconcelos Laura Moure Cecchini Mariana Aguirre, Rosa Sarabia, Renée M. Silverman, and Ricardo Vasconcelos, ed. “Futurism in Latin America.” Special Issue, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Volume 7. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017. Pp. xlii + 570. $182.00 (cloth). What was global about modernism? For years now we have seen academic positions, conferences, and books urging correctives to the Eurocentric historiography of modern art and literature and challenging us to think about modernities and modernisms.1 Whether analyzing “alternative” modernities, as in Dilip Gaonkar’s terminology, “multiple” modernities, as proposed by S. N. Eisenstadt, or “modernism at large,” as per Arjun Appadurai and Andreas Huyssen, modernism now is seen as a global but contradictory phenomenon with profoundly different temporalities and manifestations in its multiple locations. Yet the challenge for these studies is to address both the particularities of local responses to modernity and what they might have in common, to emphasize the cultural, historical, and geographical specificity within a global landscape. Furthermore, it is urgent to complement an expanded view of modernism outside of Europe and North America with analyses that de-Westernize the historical avant-gardes themselves, studying how the various centers of modernist activity interacted with each other. This special issue of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, edited by Mariana Aguirre, Rosa Sarabia, Renée M. Silverman, and Ricardo Vasconcelos, intervenes in this debate by exploring the circulation and reinterpretation of futurism in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America during the 1920s. The International Yearbook has already devoted special issues to futurism in Eastern and Central Europe (2011) and to Iberian futurism (2013). This transnational approach has the aim of complicating the analysis and assessment of futurism, a movement that is all too often (especially in Anglo-American scholarship) reduced to a series of clichés about violence, technophilia, and hatred of women. The International Yearbook operates as a “medium of communication amongst a global community of Futurism scholars,” and indeed this issue includes contributions from scholars based in Latin America, North America, and Europe—a variety of perspectives and intellectual locations that is unusual for a publication on futurism. [End Page 415] Since the 1909 publication of the “Manifesto of Futurism,” which appeared contemporaneously in multiple languages, futurism aspired to establish a globalized avant-garde. Yet by analyzing the networks of communication between Latin American intellectuals as well as the cultural specificities of Hispanophone and Lusophone America, the contributors to this volume transcend the model of “center-periphery” implicit in F. T. Marinetti’s concept of “world futurism” and still present in many studies on the global avant-garde today. As Günter Berghaus observes in his Editorial, instead of appealing to outdated notions of “influence” or seeing non-Italian versions of futurism as derivative, this volume reveals “heterogeneous forms of Futurism” (x) and the “appropriation and transformation” (xv) of futurist principles and aesthetics throughout the 1920s. As is typical for the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, contributions to this volume are interdisciplinary, covering—as cannot be otherwise for a movement that since its inception had the totalizing ambition of penetrating every sphere of life and culture—literature, fine arts, music, and mass media. As in the United States—for instance in the infamous press response to the 1913 Armory Show—in Latin America too “futurism” often did not stand for a specific, Italian-born avant-garde movement but for a generic “modern.” As news about the movement arrived sporadically to Latin America—often mediated by the agendas of intellectuals living in Europe at the time—futurism was seen as equivalent to “avant-garde,” “experimental,” and “fascinated with technology.” The lack of precise knowledge about the movement allowed for a freer interpretation of futurism and for its engagement far beyond the parameters of Italian futurism. This is clear in Mirhiane Mendes de Abreu’s article, in which she analyzes the correspondence and memoirs of the Brazilian modernists to unpack the multiple meanings associated with the word “futurism” during the 1920s. Mendes de Abreu concludes that Mário de Andrade, Oswald de...

Stratigraphy of Andromeda: Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Origins, and Originality

Stratigraphy of Andromeda: Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Origins, and Originality Alessandro Giammei (bio) vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit —Ovid, Amores1 A large, cropped wheel with six bolstered spokes is bolted, firmly, to nothing (fig. 1). It looks ready to transfer the energy produced by a grounded pneumatic apparatus (an engine? a plinth?) to some other invisible mechanism, out of view to the right. It is impossible to understand how the slender system of pistons and levers is meant to work. While an aesthetic fascination for the absolute plastic quality of machinery is undeniable, this image does not represent actual technology. It seems that to produce it Francis Picabia used an engineering illustration as an objet trouvé and painted over it, highlighting some details while obliterating most of the functional context with his brush.2 As a result, the machine has no evident function. The two dominant hues underline the artist’s estranging gesture. The metallic body of the mechanical object is green, like the patina that surrounds antique bronze statues, while the background evokes the same ineffable golden flatness that abolishes space and time in Byzantine mosaics, Gothic altarpieces, and icons. Its two-dimensional, yet infinitely profound splendor isolates and absolutizes the enigmatic subject, eradicating it from history. Such a visual oxymoron is encapsulated by the title: Fille née sans mère (“girl born without a mother”).3 Critics agree on the material source of this title, which appears among the locutions latines et étrangères of the early twentieth-century encyclopedic dictionary Petit Larousse Illustrée: another [End Page 21] objet trouvé, a readymade-locution that echoes the modern dream of non-biological birth expressed in Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s early science fiction or in F. T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste (1909). However, I believe that its literary origin—Prolem sine matre creatam, a line from book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—should be considered more carefully. The same Ovidian line is also the epigraph of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and therefore opens the foundation of modern political theory with the same bold implications (this work is unprecedented, there are no comparable models or sources) that informed Picabia’s title. Exactly in the same year in which Picabia painted his Fille, 1917, Guillaume Apollinaire coined the very term “surrealist” for the rewriting of an episode of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Les mamelles de Tirésias. Another episode of the Metamorphoses gave the title, a year later, to Alberto Savinio’s multilingual and vanguardist literary debut, Hermaphrodito, while Giorgio de Chirico had been obsessed with the sleep of Ariadne (book VII of Ovid’s poem) since at least 1912.4 Even Marinetti, right before the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, blended his modernist imagery with the mythical one of the Metamorphoses by naming his own car after the winged horse born from Medusa’s blood: mon Pegas, “my Pegasus.” In the prime of Europe’s avant-garde, decades before Picasso’s famous illustrated edition, Ovid’s myths were a privileged interlocutor for modernity: a paradoxical influence that is perfectly visualized in the green bronze patina of Picabia’s machine, eternalized on its gilded untimeliness. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born without a Mother), 1917, gouache and metallic paint on printed paper, 50 × 65 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 2016. Photo © Antonia Reeve, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK. [End Page 22] Within the wide field of studies related to modernist reception of the classics, this article intends to interrogate the paradox embodied by the motherless mechanomorphic girl envisioned by Picabia: a fetishized emblem of modernity rendered as an ancient statue in an iconizing background, a work that claims to escape genealogies through a quotation from ancient poetry. The aim is to overcome the temptation of historicizing late modernity as the theater of a binary opposition between classicism and vanguardism, tradition and newness. Through Ovid, I will explore the problem of origins and originality in the multimedia work of Giorgio de Chirico...

A Translation of Whitman Discovered in the 1912 Spanish Periodical Prometeo

UNTIL NOW, the first substantial Spanish translation of Whitman was believed to be the 1912 Walt Whitman: Poemas, published in Valencia by the Uruguayan writer Armando Vasseur. But I have now discovered the publication of an earlier, fifteen-page Spanish translation of Whitman's poetry, including a full translation of his long poem Salut au Monde. In addition to pushing back the date of print entry for Whitman's poems into Spanish, this discovery represents a very early point of print contact between Whitman and the inception of the Spanish- language vanguardias, or avant-gardes. Furthermore, both the text and the context of the translation help explain why the avant-gardes in Spain and Mexico tend to imagine Whitman in Futurist terms. Finally, the Prometeo translations reveal that even Whitman's ostensibly transamerican appropriations may occur through a transatlantic- and in fact a heavily global-network of circulation.These newly-discovered poems appear in a mostly-prose translation at the beginning of 1912 in the Spanish literary and cultural journal Prometeo.1 Since it was the first of eleven issues published in 1912 (Prometeo was basically a monthly periodical), we can assume this translation predates or is at most simultaneous with Walt Whitman: Poemas, since Vasseur dates his preface as February, 1912, suggesting an even later publication date for his book-length translation.2 Either way, we can see this earlier translation as independent from Vasseur's textual influence. But more importantly, the Prometeo publication marks or colors Whitman's reception in a particular way, by locating the American poet within an increasingly avant-garde context.First published in 1908 with a modernista3 bent, the journal Prometeo was not always linked with the avant-garde;4 but in 1909, the journal made a radical endorsement of the new aesthetics of Italian one of the originators of the global avant-gardes. When the Italian movement's founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, published his bombastic The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Prometeo's editor, Ramon Gomez de la Serna, published his own translation of the avant-garde text, alongside a piece celebrating Marinetti-making Prometeo the first Spanish periodical to bring Italian Futurism to Spain. Marinetti's performative text, a hybrid of prose narrative and manifesto, proclaimed the inauguration of a new era, as it celebrated rebellion, violence, the power and aesthetics of machines, and the vitality of industry.5 Then, in 1910, at Gomez de la Serna's personal request, Marinetti even wrote a Futurist address directly to Spain, Proclama Futurista a los Espanoles, again translated by Gomez de la Serna, and for exclusive publication in Prometeo. In it, Marinetti railed against what he perceived as the lassitude of Spanish culture, and called for a revitalization of Spain through radical social change and the development of industry. We see Futurism taking hold in Spain: Gomez de la Serna channels Marinetti's language in his own enthusiastic preface to the Proclama:. . . intersection, spark, exhalation, text like a wireless telegraph or of something more subtle flying over the oceans and over the mountains! Wing towards the North, wing towards the South, wing towards the East, and wing towards the West! Sturdy desire for height, expansion, and speed! Healthy spectacle of aerodrome and oversized runway!6It is the early language of the avant-garde in Spain-global, techno- industrial, and fixated upon the aesthetics of speed and power.The spread of Futurism in Spain would have far-reaching effects, influencing Rafael Cansinos Assens (who would himself later publish poetry in Prometeo's pages) to found Spain's first avant-garde movement, Ultraismo. Cansinos Assens would go on to promote the work of the important Chilean avant-gardist Vicente Huidobro, and the ranks of his own movement would include none other than the young Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. …

Cultural Revolution: Mykhail Semenko, Ukrainian Futurism and the “National” Category

This paper examines Mykhail Semenko’s Futurist manifestos that developed an opposition between “national” and “international” art, and specifically called “national” art provincial and retrograde. In promoting the international European avant-garde, Semenko’s essays demonstrate how consistently he championed a contemporary and modern Ukrainian culture in the face of home-grown conservatism.

Art in weightlessness: From outer space to virtual worlds

Abstract Space art and art within virtual worlds share conceptual and even ontological commonalities. There are three issues that can be examined in relation to these: the ‘problem of gravity’, the extensions of the body and the issue of scientific abstraction. Several art projects will be discussed relating to these themes including the Futurist manifestos of aerial art, space poetry, Babeli’s Come to Heaven, and Živadinov’s Biomechanics Noordung and Noordung:: 1995–2045.

La acción sonora como reivindicación social: Una intervención artística en el Barrio Espíritu Santo de Espinardo (Murcia)

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar una práctica colaborativa de intervención artística, llevada a cabo por alumnos de la asignatura optativa de Grado de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Murcia, “Intervenciones escultóricas en el espacio urbano y natural”. En un barrio marginal de Murcia, los estudiantes y las familias, tras una serie de encuentros, acuerdan por consenso remodelar una de las calles. Inspirados en el manifiesto futurista de Russolo (1913), ponen especial atención en la escucha de sonidos, ruidos y palabras habladas de las calles. Las propuestas resultantes convergen en la seña de identidad ligada al cante, toque y baile flamenco que materializan en rehabilitación de fachadas, mejora de infraestructuras y pintura mural como lugar en el que se hibrida la idiosincrasia étnica y la práctica artística.

‘The Language of the Future’ and the Crisis of Modernity: Mina Loy’s ‘Aphorisms on Futurism’

This paper focuses on Mina Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism,” written in Florence while she was involved with Futurist leaders F.T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini, and first published in 1914 in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work. In Loy’s “Aphorisms” emerges the utopian idea of a poetic “language of the Future,” which reflects the Futurist project to destroy language, replacing a traditional syntax that has become obsolete with a telegraphic language of modernity. On her own copy of “Aphorisms,” Loy later replaced the word “Futurism” with the word “Modernism,” suggesting, perhaps with a certain irony, that the project of a poetic “language of the Future” extends beyond the aesthetics of Italian Futurism to the Modernist movement as a whole, yet pinpointing the problem of Modernism as a chain reaction of “isms,” each with its own agenda of radical experimentation in search of a new poetic language of modernity. Taking this key later revision as its departure point, this paper reads Loy’s text with a double focus: on the one hand, situating it in the context of its composition and reading it through the prism of Futurism’s incendiary rhetoric, and on the other, within a broader definition of Modernism, tracing how this violent call for destruction of traditional discourse later collapses into a poetics of silence, whose dimensions are both aesthetic and historical. The ironic ambivalence of “Aphorisms” is already inherent in its strategic generic ambiguity: it reads both as a Futurist manifesto and as a series of aphorisms, oscillating between the revolutionary rhetoric of the manifesto and the ironic silence of the aphorism, which becomes a key vehicle for reflecting ambivalently on the crisis of modernity. Finally, this paper also suggests that the aesthetic principles outlined in Loy’s “Aphorisms” can be used as an interpretative lens through which to examine her poetic strategies of extreme concision and density.

Review of Maureen Carr,After the Rite: Stravinsky’s Path to Neoclassicism (1914–25)(Oxford, 2014)

[1] After the Rite: Stravinsky's Path to Neoclassicism (1914-25) is Maureen Carr's second book tracing the evolution of Stravinsky's compositional process through lengthy and extensive study and analysis of his musical sketches.(1) Moving chronologically from "Jeu du rossignol mecanique" (1913) in Le Rossignol to Serenade in A (1925), this volume investigates the development of Neoclassicism in works immediately following The Rite of Spring (1913).(2) Many of these pieces, including Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920), Pulcinella (1919-20) and Octet (1919-23), are frequently discussed in the literature;(3) others, such as Renard (1915-16) and Etude pour Pianola (1917), are less well known. Carr's study shows the importance of analyzing the sketches of these lesser-known pieces, arguing that they foreshadow later pieces in significant ways.[2] In the introductory chapter, Carr explores influential movements in various art forms prominent in 1914 St. Petersburg. These movements aimed to reject the past, with a shared focus on the aesthetics of futurism and formalism. Carr's argument clarifies how those artistic manifestos relate to each other and to the development of Neoclassicism. Several concepts presented here are valuable to investigate because they are directly connected to Stravinsky's Neoclassicism.(4) In literature, Viktor Shklovsky promoted futurism in poetry through his essay on "The Resurrection of the Word" (1914) (8), which led to the idea of "defamiliarization" appearing in "Art as Technique" (1917) (23). The notion of "defamiliarization" plays a crucial role in Stravinsky's departure from his "Russian" pieces.(5) For example, the abrupt fragments and multiple ostinati seen in earlier works from the Russian period become more prominent, evolving into discrete strata and blocks. Aspects of Stravinsky's formal design provide another example of "defamiliarization." Although the composer models the sonata form of eighteenth-century music, Carr reveals that, in works such as the Piano Sonata, he gives new meaning to the form through defamiliarizing the archetype of the formal structure (271).[3] The effort to change the perspective from subject to object is essential to understanding Neoclassicism. Composer Arthur Lourie contributed to a futurist manifesto promoting Eastern art, entitled "We and the West," which states "the art of the West is the embodiment of a geometric world view proceeding from object to subject; the art of the East is the embodiment of an algebraic world view proceeding from subject to object" (quoted in Carr, 8). Carr's critique of this manifesto, describing it as a false dichotomy and being too divisive of the East and West, is reasonable (11). However, it is true that Russia is in a unique position between Europe and Asia, making it a likely location for artistic movements that spring forth from cultural ideologies of both the East and West.[4] Stravinsky's objective approach to his compositions relates to Lourie's manifesto as well as to Michael Fokine's new principle of the ballet. Fokine, the groundbreaking choreographer and dancer, outlined his "Five Principles" for the "New Ballet" to the editor of the Times (London). The fourth principle in his article concerns objectivity in dance. Fokine asserts that the new ballet should advance from subjectivity, with "the expressiveness of the individual body," to objectivity, with "the expressiveness of a group of bodies" and "the combined dancing of a crowd" (21). Like these artists, Stravinsky tried to compose from an "objective stance."(6) Throughout Carr's analysis, the reader can witness how the composer establishes and maintains objectivity in his compositions.[5] There are basically three stages in the development of Stravinsky's Neoclassicism, as Carr explains: (1) Stravinsky begins to use "blocks" more apparently than he did in the pieces of his Russian period; (2) he appropriates different musical idioms such as ragtime for his compositions; and (3) he abstracts musical models from the past and assimilates them into his compositions. …

Progress and Reaction in Early Italian SF

The publication of Paolo Mantegazza’s The Year 3000: A Dream [L’anno 3000: Sogno, 1897] should be viewed within the context of a recent reevaluation and growing interest in Italian science fiction, as demonstrated by the current issue of SFS and a 2014 issue of the online journal Reading Italy. Moreover, the significance of this particular volume is that it represents the first translation of Mantegazza’s novel into English. Even in Italy, only two contemporary editions of the original text exist: one from 1988, published by Lubrina, and the second (published by Lupetti) which appeared in 2007. The English edition of the novel is preceded by a detailed introduction written by the volume’s editor, Nicoletta Pireddu. According to Pireddu, the polymath Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910)—with publications in science, politics, pedagogy, and aesthetics—was a popular figure in the Western world during his lifetime, quoted by such luminaries as Darwin and Freud. Pireddu views Mantegazza as a prominent contributor to Italian science fiction, which, although less conspicuous and compact in comparison to its foreign counterparts, had been decisively stimulated by a variety of causes in the latenineteenth century. In fact, Pireddu cites three factors that contradict the popular theory that the slow pace of Italian industrialization, compared to other European nations, delayed the development of Italian science fiction, which by the end of the nineteenth century appeared in a substantial output of novels and short fiction and subsequently became an authentic cultural phenomenon. First, numerous translations of foreign works—such as those of Verne and Wells—encouraged a growing number of eager young Italian authors to experiment with the genre. Second, the production of Italian science fiction was also inspired by scientific discoveries of the period, such as Schiaparelli’s 1877 observation of the “Mars channels.” Third, Italian science fiction indubitably felt the impetus of the rapid industrialization that, especially in Northern Italy, led to other crucial cultural repercussions, such as the first Futurist Manifesto. Even Emilio Salgari—best known for penning exotic adventures set in the South Seas—made forays into science fiction—e.g., with Le meraviglie del Duemila [The Wonders of Two Thousand, 1907], an implicit reference, in Pireddu’s opinion, to Mantegazza, with whom Salgari was undoubtedly familiar. At a time when Italian science fiction did not yet have a longstanding tradition, Mantegazza was very much aware of the genre’s established topoi, situations, and structural elements that had appeared in previous works of

Aesthetics of Theory in the Modernist Era and Beyond

“What is the productive tension between ‘poetics’ and ‘poetry’ as these terms are currently used?” asks critic Maria Damon. In much the same way, this issue of Transatlantica intends to focus on the tensions, frictions, and contradictions between poetic writing and aesthetic discourse, between practice and theory. In The Futurist Moment, Marjorie Perloff shows how “[t]he novelty of Italian Futurist manifestos […] is their brash refusal to remain in the expository or critical corner, their und...