Alison Cooper (Assistant Professor of Italian, Colby College)
Technology, War, and Literary Apocalissi from Mafarka il futurista to La coscienza di Zeno
Literary apocalissi that appear in such early twentieth-century Italian novels as Marinetti’s Mafarka il futurista and Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno raise compelling questions about the nature of eschatological narratives in an increasingly secular and materialist society. What, for example, are we to make of Christ’s Second Coming in the guise of Gazourmah, Mafarka’s cyborg son? Or of a cataclysm produced by technological devices of our own making, as theorized by Zeno? This paper examines modernist literary apocalypticism in light of changes in the relationship between self and world owed, at least in part, to early twentieth-century technological advances. How, as a literary device, might apocalypticism capture the psychological and spiritual consequences of several decades’ worth of industrialization and modernization in Italy, which had their culmination in the Great War? Moreover, how might apocalyptic narratives of technological innovations that overcome their human creators be considered a materialization of modernist notions of a divided self, particularly those advanced by the likes of Freud and Nietzsche? Extending classic and recent cultural appraisals of the Great War and the period that surrounded it (Eksteins’ Rites of Spring, Gentile’s L’apocalisse della modernità, etc.) through the analysis of seminal Italian texts, this paper locates apocalypticism as a flashpoint in the early twentieth-century confrontation between literature, technology, and culture.
