F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings » (Updated Edition)

F. T. Marinetti was born in Egypt in 1876 and died in Italy in 1944. Günter Berghaus is now a senior research fellow at the University of Bristol in England and the author of more than a dozen scholarly books.

The Futurist movement was founded and promoted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, beginning in 1909 with the First Futurist Manifesto, in which he inveighed against the complacency of "cultural necrophiliacs" and sought to annihilate the values of the past, writing that "there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece." In the years that followed, up until his death in 1944, Marinetti, through both his polemical writings and his political activities, sought to transform society in all its aspects. As Günter Berghaus writes in his introduction, "Futurism sought to bridge the gap between art and life and to bring aesthetic innovation into the real world. Life was to be changed through art, and art was to become a form of life."

This volume includes more than seventy of Marinetti's most important writings—many of them translated into English for the first time—offering the reader a representative and still startling selection of texts concerned with Futurist art, literature, politics, and philosophy.

Publishers Weekly

F.T. Marinetti (1876-1944) famously claimed to have formulated the tenets of the Futurist movement after walking away from a crashed automobile, a story he detailed in his 1909 manifesto. The founding document of this early 20th-century avant-garde artistic philosophy is one of more than 70 pieces Berghaus (Avant-Garde Performance) gathers in this significant update on the 1972 Selected Writings. This new collection expands upon the body of Marinetti's work available in English, with additional critical writings and manifestos reflecting Marinetti's concepts of literature, theater, film and radio; plus introductory essays and notes that further elaborate the historical and cultural context. Futurism called for no less than a modernist aesthetic revolution that would overturn the traditionalist cultural establishment and mirror the era's technological progress. But it also had a complex stance toward feminism and was violent and militaristic, celebrating WWI as a way to rid Europe of its accumulated history. Though these essays bring Futurism's nationalist leanings into sharp focus, Marinetti's 1918 coalition with Mussolini was brief, and by 1939 Fascism had effectively shut down the movement. This thorough collection will interest scholars of Italian history, art history and theater. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.