Critical practice is one of the founding aspects of avant-garde. By refusing the coeval literary modes, avant-garde implicitly questions the validity of these models and assesses them negatively. The historical avant-gardes expressed their criticism of the past in extremely polemical and provocative terms (pars destruens). However, the constructive aspect of their discourse (pars construes) was conveyed through the use of manifestos, the language of which was more creative and poetic rather than rigorously critical. This is hardly mere coincidence. Criticism, understood as an opinion based upon ascertained aesthetical parameters, was not part of the cultural background of the historical avant-gardes....

The question of whether postmodernism marks the end of any avantgarde transgression and thus the end of modernity is crucial within the context of contemporary Italian fiction, both for Marxist literary critics and for those with a hermeneutic or poststructuralist orientation. If postmodernism is to be intended as a rupture with modernism, the problem is how to deal with it. Does it mark a new epoch or rather a new phase within the history of modernity? The ‘grand narrative’ of the avant-garde, founded on the absolute value of the ‘modern’ and on a linear-progressive concept of history, enters into crisis...

In this essay I will discussMalebolge, a quarterly journal published in Reggio Emilia from 1964 to 1967. Along with such journals asIl verri,Grammatica, andQuindici,Malebolgewas an essential means for the circulation of texts and ideas of the Italianneoavanguardia.¹ Before dealing directly with specific issues addressed in the magazine, however, I would like to discuss ‘parasurrealism,’ a notion that represented a constitutive critical and theoretical aspect of the project ofMalebolge.

Literary critic Angelo Guglielmi delineated parasurrealism, although indirectly, in hisVero e falsowith reference toL’oblò(1964), an experimental novel by Adriano Spatola...

As is well known, the establishment of the Gruppo 63, which occurred in 1963, is the formal act that acknowledges the existence of an avantgarde and experimental movement whose origins date back to the times ofIl verri, a journal founded in 1956 by Luciano Anceschi but that found identity and unity in 1961 with the publication of the poetry anthologyI novissimi. The Gruppo 63 began to show signs of disintegration in 1965, but it was only between 1968 and 1969 – coinciding with the explosion of political movements and the reappraisal of the role and the social involvement (‘impegno’)...

A remarkable increase in specialist scholarship over the past decade has done much to reveal the originality and complexity of Giorgio Manganelli’s theoretical reflections on literature.¹ A range of recent critical studies have emphasized Manganelli’s interest in questions such as the social role of literature and the origins of literary creativity, as well as his engagement with a surprisingly large number of theoretical models.² While this has rightly established Manganelli’s fame as one of Italy’s most sophisticated and challenging authors of the late twentieth century, it also seems to have drawn attention away from his initial involvement with the Gruppo...

In its various expressions, the avant-garde embodies the most radical and complex endeavour of twentieth-century art to go beyond the conventional boundaries of language and aesthetic forms. Within the context of literature, it consistently presents itself as an adventure in unchartered territories, searching for new ways to expand the spaces of writing. Its objective is that of reconfiguring the internal spaces of subjectivity and of provoking shifts in the collective frames through which we read the world. In this respect, the avant-garde is rooted in the preoccupation to break with uncomplicated representational notions regarding the relationship between the word and...

Like its ‘historical’ predecessor, the Italian neo-avant-garde was essentially male-dominated. Although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where and when the Italian neo-avant-garde was born, the founding of the journalIl verriby Luciano Anceschi in Milan in 1956 is often cited as its starting point, while the publication in 1961 of the anthologyI novissimi, containing excerpts from the work of Nanni Balestrini, Alfredo Giuliani, Elio Pagliarani, Antonio Porta, and Edoardo Sanguineti, is considered its official birth.¹ The all-male group ofnovissimipoets went on to form the core of the larger Gruppo 63, in which women were a...

These words, written in an email by Giulia Niccolai on 15 August 2005 in response to questions I had asked her concerning the Italian neo-avant-garde reveal her widely shared belief in the fragility of any avant-garde that arises out of a specific cultural and political milieu in which renewal and change are felt to be necessary. When the goal of transforming the status quo is fulfilled, the impetus toward newness dies until conditions arise that once more push writers and artists of all kinds to ‘make it new’ all over again. There are those today who argue that avant-gardes are...

In the aftermath of the physical destruction and moral despair of the Second World War, a period during which Europe experienced a deep and dramatic social crisis, the old Continent witnessed the development of an artistic current known as Art Informel.¹ Although it is difficult to give a univocal definition of this term – due to its manifold and heterogeneous nature – it is nonetheless possible to identify some of its main tenets, including an emphasis on spontaneity and irrationality, a rejection of ‘well-made’ traditional art works, and a refusal of the idea of form (abstract and figurative). As Claudio Spadoni has...

The artists and intellectuals of the Italian neo-avant-garde and of the Gruppo 63 in particular were primarily active in the field of literature, in terms of both production and theoretical reflection.¹ Nevertheless, this cultural and aesthetic experience revealed an openness towards and an interest in the entire system of the arts. This essay will attempt to provide an overview, general by force of circumstances and with no claims to comprehensiveness, of the relationship that the Gruppo 63 entertained with music. As we will see, developments in the music world (in both theory and practice) in the 1950s and the 1960s...

When considering the different and interdisciplinary experimental proposals that shaped the debates and the poetics of the Italian neo-avantgarde in the 1960s, one finds a consistency concerning names and motifs between the publications of the 1960s and the critical re-editions done in the last few years. Among the architects and designers who actively collaborated in publications, colloquia, and meetings of the Italian neo-avant-garde in the 1960s, one of the most influential critical voices is Vittorio Gregotti. An examination of critical theory in the field of architecture in recent years reveals a quite insistent reconsideration of an international neo-avant-garde, yet Vittorio...