What’s in a Name: On some Historiographic Categories and/in Italian Modernism

Abstract

In introducing a special volume of the journal Annali di Italianistica on post-modernism in Italy, the editor Dino Cervigni noted the difficulty of dealing with a such a category from the perspective of a cultural tradition in which modernism remains at best a vague and underdetermined notion. Obviously, the question is not that Italian culture has not gone through a “modernist” phase – though the terms of that “Modernism” are precisely what needs to be addressed – but rather that the word, if not the thing itself, has had until recently very little purchase in the context of Italian arts and letters. In fact, it is arguably because of the “importation” of Post-Modernism first via the discourse of architecture, and then that of philosophy that it has been necessary to thematise in relation to what post-modernism can be said to be post.