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The blending of people and living machines is a central element in the futurist'reconstruction of the universe.'However, prior to the futurist break, a group of early-twentieth-century poets, later dubbed crepuscolari (crepusculars), had already begun an attack against the dominant cultural system, using their poetry as the locus in which useless little objects clashed with the traditional poetry of human greatness and stylistic perfection. The Quiet Avant-Garde draws from a number of twenty-first-century theories – vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and environmental humanities – as well as Bruno Latour's criticism of modernity to illustrate how the crepuscular movement sabotaged the modern mindset and launched the counter-discourse of the Italian avant-garde by blurring the line dividing people from'things.'This liminal poetics, at the crossroad of tradition, modernism, and the avant-garde, acted as the initiator of the ethical and environmental transition from a universe subjected to humans to human-thing co-agency. This book proposes a contemporary reading of Italian twentieth-century movements and offers a foothold for scholars outside Italian studies to access authors who are still unexplored in North American literature.

The debate on literature and the arts provoked by the Italian neoavant-garde (neoavanguardia) is undoubtedly one of the most animated and controversial the country has witnessed from World War II to the present. Comprising the period between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, the phenomenon of the neoavanguardia involved key writers, critics, and artists, both as insiders – Sanguineti, Balestrini, Guglielmi, Eco, and others – and adversaries such as Pasolini, Calvino, and Moravia.In The New Avant-Garde in Italy – the first book in English to document the movement – John Picchione's objective is twofold: to provide a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical tenets that inform the works of the neoavanguardia and to show how they are applied to the poetic practices of its authors. The neoavanguardia cannot, Picchione argues, be defined as a movement with a unified program expressed in the form of manifestos or shared theoretical principles. It experiences irreconcilable internal conflicts that are explored as a split between two main blocs – one that is tied to the project of modernity, the other to post-modern aesthetic postures. This study suggests that some of the contentious views proposed by the neoavanguardia anticipated a wide range of issues that continue to be significant and pressing to this day.