Call for Papers: Northeast MLA

Call for Papers

Northeast Modern Language Association 40th Anniversary Convention

February 26-March 1, 2009 Boston, MA

Deadlines for abstracts: September 15, 2008

A sample of relevant panels:

Literary Futurism 2009: The Dead Are (Not) Always Right

In his “L’esperienza futurista,” Giovanni Papini wrote against exaggerating our praise of dead writers, a passive affirmation of esteem that grows exponentially with every centennial anniversary: “The dead shouldn’t always be right just because they can’t defend themselves.” Taking Papini’s futuristically provocative statement as its point of departure, this panel seeks to explore the relevance and vitality of underrated futurist writing and its broader cultural legacy in the year of the centennial anniversary of the Italian avant-garde movement. All approaches are welcome. Please submit 250-500 word abstracts (in English or Italian) to Patrizio Ceccagnoli at pc2159@columbia.edu

Italian Literature: From The Twentieth Century Into The New Millennium

The panel invites papers dealing with the Italian literary production of the Twentieth century, including both major and minor authors and the literary movements that have shaped the Italian cultural and artistic scene. Particular attention will be given to proposals that discuss authors and movements from a philosophical or historical perspective, or that delve into the latest cultural debates in Italy, where many young and talented authors have recently emerged. Papers are welcomed in Italian and English. Please e-mail 250-word abstracts to Giovanni Migliara, galiba@hotmail.com

Gallery Talk at MoMA

Thursday, June 5, 2008
11:30 a.m.
Futurism in Italy: Painting a Mechanical Universe
With Laura Beiles

Ms. Beiles gave an engaging and insightful tour of the Futurist works on display in the 5th floor Futurism gallery. The museum has recently reinstalled the space with new works by Severini and Boccioni’s The Laugh (pictured here).

Learn more about Adult Programs at MoMA

View all upcoming Gallery Talks

Noise + Speed: A Comtemporary Dance

Review of “Noise + Speed” by Deborah Jowitt, originally published in the Village Voice, May 20, 2008

Hilary Easton + Company
Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, NYC
May 8 – 10, 2008

Hilary Easton approaches contemporary horrors by devising movement structures that mirror social disintegration. In Noise + Speed, she revisits the Italian Futurists, who, between two world wars, preached the violent disruption of art traditions, embraced technology, and glorified combat. Making use of texts such as F.T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) and seasoning their rants with Doris Humphrey’s prescriptive The Art of Making Dances, Easton attempts to show how oversimplification and institutionalization can corrupt theories so gradually that we fail to notice the malignancy. Noise + Speed may be her most complex and ambitious piece, and, engrossing as it is, it sometimes has a hard time conveying all that it must through dance.

Three of Marinetti’s artworks, enlarged, show black-painted words and letters exploding. Actor Steven Rattazzi delivers the texts, fairly screaming Marinetti’s call to destroy museums and libraries. The choreography focuses on conformity, erosion, and limited violence. Wearing drably handsome gray costumes by Madeleine Walach and eloquently lit by Carol Mullins, Easton’s expert dancers (Alexandra Albrecht, Michael Ingle, Joshua Palmer, Emily Pope-Blackman, and Sarah Young) often pause to check one another, very aware of any deviations from an apparently decreed pattern. Thomas Cabaniss’s terrifically effective original score for string ensemble, keyboard, and percussion underlines the tensions.

In the beginning, confined to corridors of light, the five performers wheel, lunge, and twist in shifting contrapuntal patterns. Everything looks deliberate, except the casual lifting of one person by another that presages more vicious handling. Rattazzi and Easton arrive together—he to articulate Luigi Russolo’s enthusiastic “The Art of Noise” (1913), she to dance. She’d like Rattazzi to understand her, to imitate her bold, sensate movements, and he—nimble, though clearly not a dancer—obliges fitfully. Later, Humphrey’s ideas about well-made dances inhibit Albrecht, Young, and Pope-Blackman—the first two usually in synch and Pope-Blackman exploring new territory. When Young thinks to join the latter, Albrecht calls her to order with an “Ahem!”

The dancing gradually becomes more distorted. The performers wiggle and shake. They turn on one another, and in the appalling duet that accompanies Valentine de Saint-Point’s 1912 manifesto on the righteousness of lust, Palmer attacks Albrecht and hauls her around in painful ways. After this, Easton stares sternly at Rattazzi, like a mother expecting an explanation from an errant child. She demonstrates some curious, wobbly movements, along with echoes of bold affirmative ones. Rattazzi tries to duplicate this deteriorated version of something that was once brave and new. In the end, drums are heard, and the dancers march, although not in lockstep. Marinetti, it must be remembered, embraced fascism. What “ism” do we dance to now?

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Prize Winner for Futurism and the Radio

American Academy in Rome Prizes 2008-2009

Paul Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies

MARGARET FISHER

Video Director and Publisher, Second Evening Art / BMI

Through the eyes of children: a re-assessment of the role of futurism in the development of early Italian Radio under Fascism

Italian futurists who broadcast and theorized about radio from 1929 to 1941 are often credited with an historic role in shaping the style and character of early Italian Radio. Children’s programs offer a stunning view of the progressive agenda of early Italian Radio before futurist involvement with broadcasting, and an excellent vantage point from which to open new lines of inquiry into futurist radio activity and writing. To establish the condition of Italian Radio before the futurists, I will examine Italian Radio’s pioneering phase which partnered children with technology. I will compile a data base of broadcast activities and texts related to both groups, children and futurists, and publish a bi-lingual sourcebook of previously unavailable texts and scripts. With this foundation in place, I will continue with a critical overview and essays on special topics: child protagonists in futurist radio dramas; government policy and futurism; the global vision of early Italian Radio as one prototype for the Internet; and a survey of the embrace of futurism by early Italian Radio to the present day.

Spring ’09 course on Futurism at Wesleyan

Spring 2009 Semester
Graduate Level course at Wesleyan University

“Fascism, Futurism, Feminism: Forces of Change in 20th.-c Italy”

tought by Prof. Ellen Nerenberg

This course investigates three forces at work in Italy in the first half of the 20th century. We explore Italian Fascism, Futurism, and Feminism through a variety of media, including literary, cinematic, and artistic expressions and consider each movement in its socio-historical context. How does the radical annihilation of standard mores and culture proposed by the Futurists help pave the way for Italian Fascism? How does feminism in the first half of the century offer examples of resistance to both Fascism and Futurism? The texts we will consider include the paintings, sculpture, manifestoes and poetry of Futurism; Sibilla Aleramo’s early feminist novel Una donna as well as the writings of other Italian feminists resistant to the ultra violence and misogyny of Futurism and the instrumentalization of gender under Italian Fascism. We explore similarly varied texts representative of the Fascist era: examples of rationalist architecture and urban planning, Alberto Moravia’s novel of social mores during Fascism, Gli indifferenti, selections from political prisoner of the Regime Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere and Lettere dal carcere, and at least one film made under the conditions (economic, industrial and propagandistic) of Fascism. Our goal is an understanding of the ideological dis/connections between Fascism, Futurism and Feminism in the Italian collective unconscious in an historical juncture of profound social, economic, and political transformations. By focusing on the interconnections of these forces we strive for a panoramic understanding of Italy as it moves to embrace modernity in the first half of the last century

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‘Beyond Futurism’ Symposim – Columbia University 2009

Beyond Futurism: F.T. Marinetti, Writer

For the Centennial Anniversary of the Italian Avant-garde

Columbia University – Department of Italian and Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America

November 12-13, 2009

Futurism, thanks to its irreverence and its lack of interest in puristic distinctions, including its capacity to find redeeming value in banality, will survive the process of “touristicization” and fetishization that characterizes a good part of the current approach to this avant-garde movement. But the victim of this process has paradoxically been its founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who has been even too successful in confusing metonymically the movement as a whole and his own oeuvre. The time has come to begin to redress such a confusion, concentrating on the still imperfectly known writings of Marinetti – one of the most remarkable post-symbolist poets and narrators in twentieth-century Italian, and European, literature.

The centennial anniversary of the foundation of the Italian avant-garde movement, which was famously inaugurated by Marinetti in the French paper Le Figaro in 1909, is an auspicious occasion for a renaissance of futurist studies, contemplating the figure of Marinetti as a writer. This two-day symposium will bring together a variety of international critical perspectives. Our admittedly ambitious aim is to begin a general process of redefinition and rediscovery of the Italian Novecento on an international scale, going beyond defeatist clichés.

Book Party – Early Italian Cinema

correction:

Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery

Call for Participation, Futurism Panel

College Art Association Annual Conference 2009 Call for Participation

DEADLINE FOR PAPERS TO SESSION CHAIRS – May 9, 2008

Italian Futurism, One Hundred Years Later

The year 2009 marks the centennial publication of “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” F.T. Marinetti’s bombastic essay that declares the birth of the Futurist movement in Italy. This panel proposes a critical reassessment of Futurism, one hundred years later. Futurism’s art-historical reception has been contradictory: while some dismiss the movement as provincial Cubism, others place Futurists at the center of histories of the avant-garde. Further, situating Futurism within its sociohistorical context has also been challenging. Scholarship exists on the group’s entanglement with fascist modernism, but much research is in fields other than art history. More remains to be said about the relationship between Futurist art and politics – both right- and left-wing – during this period. Papers are welcome on the range of interdiscliplinary issues pertaining to Futurism between 1909 and 1944. Considerations of historiography, intellectual and political history, and underrepresented areas of study such as lesser-known artists are of special interest.

Session chair: Jennifer Bethke, University of Nevada

CAA

Futurism in Film

Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema

This book by Angela dalle Vacche is a thorough study on the nature of the female role in early Italian films and incorporates images, as well as a DVD of film clips. Works discussed include Thasis and Bragalia’s work.

Angela dalle Vacche is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Call for Papers

Announcing a call for papers for volume 27: A Century of Futurism: 1909-2009, of the Annali d’Italianistica of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.