Browsing by Subject "Fascism"
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Item Open Access Erasing the Avant-Gardes: Anti-Modernism in French Art History, Criticism, and Education, 1920-1944.(2019) Luse, Emilie Anne-YvonneArt historians have identified a rightward turn in the artistic climate of France in the interwar period, one opposed to an avant-garde accused of being foreign to national culture, and reflective of a broader cultural and political shift towards the right. However, a study detailing the strength and variety of forces opposed to modernism and the avant-gardes in this period has yet to be written.
Drawing on newspapers, art journals, art history books, and sources from private and national archives in France, my dissertation presents four detailed case studies of reactionary, anti-avantgardeist and anti-modernist critics, art educators and art historians during this period, expanding our understanding of the position and influence of these rightwing intellectuals. Analyzing their aims, the artists they supported, their audiences, their social networks, and finally their links to the French state, the dissertation will reconstitute the multiple and multifaceted platforms of conservative cultural activism, revealing the contours of a powerful, persistent, and often successful cultural and political agenda that sought to undermine or reverse the course of modernism.
Accounting for the strategies through which rightwing art world actors battling modernism and the avant-gardes sought to institutionalize their campaigns, this dissertation complicates and revises our understanding of the substantial challenges posed to modern art in the interwar period, demonstrating the power of these interventions while also pointing to the tacit complicity of the French state with these efforts.
Item Open Access Fascist Fiction: Inventing the Lesser Evil in Italy and Brazil(2019) Ricco, GiuliaMy dissertation, Fascist Fiction: Inventing the Lesser Evil in Italy and Brazil, accounts for the resilience of fascism by tracing the rhetoric of the “lesser evil”—a discursive practice constitutive of fascism—through contemporary politics and literature in Italy and Brazil. By invoking the looming presence of a graver, more insidious threat the rhetoric of the lesser evil legitimizes fascist violence against dissidents and vulnerable populations. Through an analysis of texts by fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile and his Brazilian counterpart Miguel Reale, I reveal that the rhetoric of the lesser evil is a constitutive part of fascist discourse and that in Italy and Brazil this aspect of fascist doctrine met a favorable combination of subjective and objective conditions which has allowed it to thrive within democratic structures. Finally, I argue that when moral claims such as the lesser evil work to obfuscate the understanding of traumatic and violent events within the public sphere, novels––precisely because of their putative fictionality––can offer persuasive counter-histories that re-contextualize fascist crimes and sometimes provoke acts of reparative justice by the State. My dissertation advances scholarship on the transcultural reach of fascist ideology: it contributes to an understanding of fascism’s place within a broader tradition of right-wing thought that continues to shape present-day politics in Europe and the world, and enriches our perception of the powers of literary forms.
Item Open Access Jewish Images and Transnational Histories in Italian Writing, from Elsa Morante to Helena Janeczek(Annali d'Italianistica, 2024) Ziolkowski, SaskiaItem Open Access Performing Fascism: Opera, Politics, and Masculinities in Fascist Italy, 1935-1941(2020) Crisenbery, ElizabethRoger Griffin notes that “there can be no term in the political lexicon which has generated more conflicting theories about its basic definition than ‘fascism’.” The difficulty articulating a singular definition of fascism is indicative of its complexities and ideological changes over time. This dissertation offers fascist performativity as a theoretical lens to better understand how Italian composers interacted with fascism through sustained, performative acts while leaving space to account for the slipperiness of fascist identities.
Although opera thrived in fascist Italy (1922-1943), extant scholarship on this period of music history remains scant, promoting a misleading narrative of operatic decline in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the positions of four Italian opera composers within fascist culture by focusing on the premieres of four operas during the Italian fascist period: Pietro Mascagni’s Nerone (1935), Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Giulio Cesare (1936), Ottorino Respighi’s Lucrezia (1937), and Ennio Porrino’s Gli Orazi (1941). These musical settings of romanità (Roman-ness) were part of Mussolini’s efforts to glorify ancient Rome, a central tenet of fascist ideology.
In fascist Italy, a political society that extolled masculinity and musical composition, experiences of difference were often hidden beneath a guise of hypermasculine rhetoric. Opera composers associated with the fascist regime were almost exclusively men and in a patriarchal society with prescribed gender norms, they performed gender. I situate each composer through an investigation of their relationship with the regime, through musical analysis, and an account of the reception of their operas. While not all the composers included in this dissertation were outspoken fascists, or even confirmed members of the National Fascist Party, they nevertheless performed fascism to obtain favor with Mussolini and the fascist regime.
Item Open Access Reimagining the Baroque in Italian Modernism. From the fin-de-siècle to Lucio Fontana(2016) Moure Cecchini, LauraWhile Italian art of the twentieth century is usually associated with either the avant-garde practices of Futurism or the classicism of Fascist visual culture, the Italian modernists' complex engagement with concepts of the ‘Baroque’ has yet to be explored. Through an extensive analysis of paintings, sculptures, publications, collecting practices, and exhibitions, my dissertation addresses this lacuna by investigating how the Baroque was discursively constructed and visually represented in Italian modernist artistic and cultural debates between 1880 and 1945. I study how artists and critics such as Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio De Chirico, Adolfo Wildt, Lucio Fontana, and Roberto Longhi championed or disparaged the Baroque in the context of heated debates over the import of Italy’s rich cultural heritage, its status in modern Europe, and the potential role of avant-garde art as a catalyst for national regeneration. In contrast to previous scholars I argue that the development of modern art in Italy was actively shaped by cultural perceptions about the Baroque. My dissertation therefore sheds new light on the role of style in the cultural politics of Italy, which in turn will transform our understanding of visual culture in modern Italy, and of twentieth-century representations of the Baroque in art, literature, and aesthetics.