The Quiet Avant‐Garde : : Crepuscular Poetry and the Twilight of Modern Humanism / / Danila Cannamela.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2019 English
• VerfasserIn: Cannamela, Danila,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Toronto Italian Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (344 p.)

The blending of people and living machines is a central element in the futurist "reconstruction of the universe." However, prior to the futurist break, a group of early-twentieth-century poets, later dubbed crepuscolari (crepusculars), had already begun an attack against the dominant cultural system, using their poetry as the locus in which useless little objects clashed with the traditional poetry of human greatness and stylistic perfection. The Quiet Avant-garde draws from a number of twenty-first-century theories - vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and environmental humanities - as well as Bruno Latour's criticism of modernity to illustrate how the crepuscular movement sabotaged the modern mindset and launched the counter-discourse of the Italian avant-garde by blurring the line dividing people from "things." This liminal poetics, at the crossroad of tradition, modernism, and the avant-garde, acted as the initiator of the ethical and environmental transition from a universe subjected to humans to human-thing co-agency. This book proposes a contemporary reading of Italian twentieth-century movements and offers a foothold for scholars outside Italian studies to access authors who are still unexplored in North American literature.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Poetry at the Twilight -- 1. A Matter of Things: Modernity, Modernism, Avant-Garde -- 2. The Avant-Garde Is Made of Useless Objects -- 3. Being a Living Thing: Towards a New Notion of Body -- 4. Love and the Grand Solidarity of Sound -- 5. Avant-Garde Immersive Onto-Cognition -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index