A New Perspective on Crepuscular and Futurist Avant-Garde
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KNOWLEDGE THROUGH THINGS: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON CREPUSCULAR AND FUTURIST AVANT-GARDE Danila Cannamela A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages (Italian) in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2014 Approved by: Federico Luisetti Dino Cervigni Amy Chambless Valeria Finucci Mauro Novelli © 2014 Danila Cannamela ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Danila Cannamela: Knowledge Through Things: A New Perspective on Crepuscular and Futurist Avant-Garde (Under the direction of Prof. Federico Luisetti) This dissertation provides a first systematic English-language study on Crepuscularism. Challenging the common critical understanding that reduces Crepuscularism to a pre-modern poetic regression while identifying Futurism with Marinetti’s hymn to technological progress, I argue that these two Avant-Gardes share similar reactions to the modern bourgeois paradigm, both at a cognitive and ontological level. Overcoming the ghettoization of Crepuscularism as a provincial Italian phenomenon, the first chapter maps the historical and cultural setting of this movement, illustrating its intersection with philosophy, visual arts, and mysticism. In the subsequent chapter, I borrow from Bruno Latour’s thesis that modernity encounters its limits in dealing with cross-category relationships such as nature-culture and human-thing. Crepuscularism expresses its Avant-Garde role by ushering in an anti-modern discourse on hybridization that Futurism inherits and further develops. The third chapter explores how the two currents envision cognition as immediate intuition and participative immersion that entails also ignorance, understood as maximum freedom of knowing. In chapter four, I enter the field of “thing theory”, using categories introduced by Bill Brown and Remo Bodei, to analyze how the Crepuscular and Futurist “poetics of things” express a pan-animism of matter. Chapter five adopts key-concepts from Julia iii Kristeva’s essay Powers of Horrors, to explore how Crepuscularism and Futurism open the boundaries of the ego to the realm of things, experimenting with new anthropotecnics, characterized by fluid constructions of body and gender. I dedicate the last section to the analysis of relational cognition, understood as a form of uncodified communication, such as Crepuscular silence and Futurist noise. iv To Michael and Felicita v ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank Professor Luisetti, my adviser, for his insightful academic guidance and enthusiasm for this research project. I am also very grateful to Professor Villa and Professor Farinelli of Università Cattolica di Milano, for sharing their deep knowledge of Crepuscularism with me. A sincere thanks goes also to Professor Novelli, my Bachelors and Masters adviser, who inspired my interest in early twentieth-century poetry. I would like to extend my gratitude to the members of my committee for their fruitful comments on my work. In addition, I wish to thank UNC Graduate School for awarding the off-campus Fellowship that gave me the possibility to conduct on-site research in Italian libraries and archivies. Finally, I would like to thank Michael, my family, and Feli for their infinite support during these years of study. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................. III ACKNOWLEDGMENT ............................................................................................................ VI TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................................... VII LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ..................................................................................................... X INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE LOCATING CREPUSCULAR POETRY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT ............................ 14 1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 14 1.2 Crepuscularism in its Socio-historical Context: The Giolittian Era Rising of Nationalistic Ferment ..................................................................................................................................... 16 1.3 The Cultural Ground of Crepuscularism: Latin Renaissance and Neo-Idealism ................ 24 1.4 Crepuscularism: What is Behind a “Critical Label”? ......................................................... 34 1.5 Sergio Corazzini and Guido Gozzano: The Two Souls of Crepuscularism ....................... 44 1.6 From Crepuscular Retreat to the Crepuscular Openness .................................................... 55 CHAPTER TWO A MATTER OF THINGS: MODERNITY, MODERNISM, AVANT- GARDE ........................................................................................................................................ 61 2.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 61 2.2 The Crepuscular Dissidence Against Modernity ................................................................ 62 2.3 Italian Modernism as Modern Religious Crisis .................................................................. 72 2.4 To What Extent Was Crepuscularism Modernist? ............................................................. 76 2.5 Crepuscularism and Futurism(s): Anti-Positivist Reechoing Voices ................................. 85 vii 2.6 “Shouted” Versus “Quiet” Avant-Garde ............................................................................ 98 CHAPTER THREE AVANT-GARDE INTUITION AND ANTIRATIONAL KNOWLEDGE ......................................................................................................................... 110 3.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 110 3.2 Defining the Notion of Knowledge in Crepuscular and Futurist Works .......................... 111 3.3 Passive and Active Creative Destructions ........................................................................ 128 3.4 Ignorance Is the New Knowledge ..................................................................................... 141 CHAPTER FOUR KNOWING THROUGH “THINGS”: MATERIALITY IN THE CREPUSCULAR AND FUTURIST UNIVERSE .................................................................. 157 4.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 157 4.2 From the Poetics of Nature to the Poetics of Things: Crepuscular and Futurist Material Landscapes .............................................................................................................................. 158 4.3 The Invasion of Useless and Dysfunctional Objects ........................................................ 167 4.4 Representing Things: Deceptive Realism and Subtle Animism ....................................... 183 4.5 The Agency of Modern Objects: From Subject to Subjected ........................................... 193 CHAPTER FIVE EXPLORING NEW EGOS: SELF-KNOWLEDGE AS BIO-SOCIAL INVESTIGATION .................................................................................................................... 202 5.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 202 5.2 Overcoming the “Flesh and Soul” Individual: Towards New Modes of the Ego ............. 203 5.3 Being a Sick, Deformed, and Masked Body ..................................................................... 214 5.4 Chameleonic and Fluid Genders ....................................................................................... 227 5.5 Ego as a Traumatic Social Construction: Anti-Promethean Protagonists, Regressive Figures, and Modern Hermits ................................................................................................. 236 CHAPTER SIX KNOWING “THE OTHER”: FUTURIST AND CREPUSCULAR RELATIONAL COGNITION ................................................................................................. 249 6.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 249 6.2 Fighting the Limits of Bourgeois Relational Knowledge: Empty Dialogues and “Passatist” Love ........................................................................................................................................ 250 viii 6.3 Noisy Communication ...................................................................................................... 269 6.4 Relationality and Cognition of “The Other” as Silence and Synthesis ............................. 277 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 286 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 298 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS F1 Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism. An Anthology. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2009.