Modernist Italy: Decadence, Avant-garde, and the Crisis of the Self

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was a period of great hope but also of great anxiety. While nobody could predict the coming of the First World War, pre-apocalyptic restlessness dominated culture, especially in the young nation of Italy. Modernity promised ever greater improvements in living conditions, but it also laid bare its contradictions: social inequalities, political conflict and polarization, and the abyss of existential angst, which afflicted so many and so much. From fiction to poetry, from theater to visual arts, we will study how the great Italian authors of this period like Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Filippo T. Marinetti and the Italian Futurists bore witness to the transformations of the modern era. Some prospected a societal collapse and yearned for a rebirth accelerated by avant-garde aesthetics, while others escaped into individualistic introspection for personal and spiritual actualization. We will explore the tensions of Italian literary Modernism, which live on to this day: progressivism with reactionism, nationalism with cosmopolitanism, regionalism with immigration, capitalism with socialism, pacifism with warmongering, religion with secularization and existentialism, to see why the turn of the century left an indelible mark for the centuries to come. Taught in Italian. Italian 202 is a prerequisite for this course.