Dear colleagues,

The 50^th anniversary of ‘gruppo 63’ is approaching, and the online Journal Mosaici is celebrating it with a special double issue.

Please circulate widely also within your School or Department.

Kindest regards,

Dr Clodina Gubbiotti

Mosaici

(www.mosaici.org.uk)

Call for articles:

The Italian Neo-Avant-Garde:

Avant-Garde Art, Literature and Culture in 60s Italy.

and

The Neo-Avant-Garde and the Question of Influence.

Issue 1

The Italian Neo-Avant-Garde:

Avant-Garde Art, Literature and Culture in 60s Italy.

This issue welcomes articles positing the Italian neo-avant-garde within the wider scenario of avant-garde and experimental practices (such as the ‘nouveau roman’, concrete and visual poetry, ‘musique concrète’, electronic music, neo-dadaism, informal art, the 1968 mass avant-garde, etc) that took place in the 1960s. The issue will explore the following topics:

1) ‘Poesia totale’ and the blurring of the boundaries between literature and other arts (such as painting, music, cinema, etc); the merging of genres and the creativity of critical discourse.

2) ‘Gruppo 63’’s relationship with other groups and intellectual milieux operating in the 1960s ( “Tel Quel”, ‘École du Regard’, ‘Oulipo’, Situationism, ‘Noigandres’, ‘Gruppo 70’, ‘Studio di fonologia di Milano’, etc).

3) The relevance of female writers within ‘gruppo 63’ and ‘gruppo 70’: representations of the female body as a site of avant-garde practices (and the relationship of these practices with the strategies deployed by the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s).

4) The cultural politics of “Quindici” and its editorial board in relation to the 1968 mass avant-garde protest; ‘gruppo 63’ as an overall phenomenon.

5) The politics of ‘gruppo 63’.

Issue 2

The Neo-Avant-Garde and the Question of Influence.

This issue focuses on a critical reassessment of the Italian neo-avant-garde‘s relationship with the historical avant-garde and Modernism. It welcomes enquiries investigating the aesthetic and political influence the various avant-garde movements bore upon the neo-avant-garde practices and writing that took place in 1960s Italy, including not only the ‘Novissimi’ and ‘gruppo 63’, but also ‘gruppo 70’ and other related experimentations in visual and concrete poetry and the other arts.   

1)  The influence of Modernism and Modernist writers on the ‘Novissimi’ poets and the writers and artists of ‘gruppo 63’.

2)  The means of appropriation and transformation of techniques such as montage and verbal collage originally practiced by artists and writers of the historical avant-garde.

3) The neo-avant-garde writers’ relationship with the artists of the historical avant-garde and other Modernist writers (Edoardo Sanguineti and Alfredo Giuliani as translators of James Joyce’s poems; the influence of Dadaism on Nanni Balestrini’s techniques; Elio Pagliarani’s elaboration of  Mayakovsky and Brecht’s themes and techniques; Edoardo Sanguineti’s neo-surrealism; Malebolge as ‘gruppo 63’’s surrealist current, etc).

4) Connections and similarities between the neo-avant-garde and the historical avant-garde that have been left hitherto unexplored.

Theoretical investigations into new perspectives on the concepts of the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde are also welcome.

Each article should be accompanied by an abstract not exceeding 250 words and be sent by the 30^th of June 2012. Submissions to Dr Clodina Gubbiotti at the following address: [log in to unmask].

For any queries please contact [log in to unmask]

For information on and style formatting, please refer to http://www.mosaici.org.uk/index.php?sectID=1.