Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy

This book explores bodily thinking in avant-garde texts from Spain and Italy of the early 20th century and their relevance to modernist preoccupations with corporeality, examining the body as a locus for various aesthetic and sociopolitical considerations, and challenging the center/periphery frameworks of European cultural modernism. Essays visit the body as it was debated through poetic, literary, and artistic exchange, exploring its materiality and form, sociopolitical representation, relation to Self, cultural formation, spatiality, desires, objectification, commercialization, and aesthetic functions, contributing to Modernism, European Avant-garde Studies, and Comparative Literature.

Nicolás Fernández-Medina is Associate Professor of Spanish at Penn State. He earned his PhDs from Stanford University. He is the author of The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado's 'Proverbios y cantares' (Cardiff: U of Wales P) and Body of Life: Vital Force and the Building of Spanish Modernity (McGill-Queen's UP, under contract). Maria Truglio is Associate Professor of Italian and of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State. She earned her BA (1992) from Wesleyan University and her PhD (2001) from Yale University. She is the author of Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli　(University of Toronto Press, 2007). .

Preface (Nicolás Fernández-Medina and Maria Truglio) Part 1: The Fragmented Body: The Anxiety of Fulfilment 1. A Return to the Body: On Fetishism and the Inscrutable Feminine in Ramón Gómez de la Serna's Senos (Nicolás Fernández-Medina) 2. But who is playing this game? Massimo Bontempelli's La scacchiera davanti allo specchio and Children's Literature (Maria Truglio) 3. Unreadable Bodies and Symbolic Violence in Antonio de Obregón's Hermes en la vía pública (Susan Larson) Part 2: The Borderless Body: Charting the Corporeal and the Discursive 4. 1922: Deterritorializing the Body: Beyond the Mind-Body Dualism in Ramón Gómez de la Serna's El secreto del Acueducto (John McCulloch) 5. Possession Narratives, Partnering, and Massimo Bontempelli's Fascist Magic Realism (Keala Jewell) 6. Purity and Putrefaction: Salvador Dalí's Apparatus and Hand (1927) (Ara H. Merjian) 7. Nature and the Madman: Mysticism and Modernism in Pirandello's Fiction (Luca Somigli) Part 3: The Discovered Body: Knowledge and the Constructs of Resistance 8. The Gendered Body Politic of Maruja Mallo (Shirley Mangini) 9 Women, Sexuality, Politics, and the Body in the Futurist Avant-garde during the Great War (Lucia Re) 10. The Body of Venus: Eroticism and Maternality in José Díaz Fernández's La Venus mecánica (1929) (Rebecca Bender) 11. Eco-futurism? Some Thoughts on Nature, Matter, and Body in F. T. Marinetti (Enrico Cesaretti)