In anticipation for our visiting lecture of this term, Luca Somigli (Italian Studies, Toronto) has asked that we read the first chapter of Lawrence Rainey’s now-classic-but-still-debated Institutions of Modernism (Yale, 1998): a scan of “The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F.T. Marinetti and Ezra Pound” is attached. We have reserved the Silverman Room (Clemens 318) for the late afternoon of Halloween, and we will provide light refreshments.

This reading session is in preparation for the following associated event:

Luca Somigli
Professor, Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto
“The Futurist Contagion: Futurism in the Satirical Cartoons of the British Press”
Friday 8 November, 1:00 – 3:00, in Clemens 306.

Luca Somigli is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. His publications include Per una satira modernista: la narrativa di Wyndham Lewis (Cadmo, 1995); Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915 (Toronto, 2003), which was awarded the prize for best book by the American Association for Italian Studies; and Valerio Evangelisti (Cadmo, 2007). He is co-editor (with Mario Moroni) of Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde (Toronto, 2004); and (with Eleonora Conti) of Oltre il canone: problemi, autori, opere del modernismo italiano (Morlacchi, 2018). He has published essays on F.T. Marinetti, Massimo Bontempelli, Primo Conti, Alberto Savinio, Enrico Pea, Antonio Delfini, Ezra Pound, Italian comics, and genre fiction.