“Signori non preoccupatevi, la borghesia è immortale.” So reads the epigraph of Luigi Malerba's final, postmodern novel, Fantasmi romani (Milano: Mondadori, 2006; p. 5). The same quote from Joseph Roth could serve equally well to preface the monumental exposition of Italian modernism recently published by Mimmo Cangiano. Both see in the logic of modern cultural production an ingrained effort to sustain and reproduce a social order and system of values that corresponds to the exigencies of bourgeois power. Both offer trenchant critiques of the logics and forms of life that align themselves with that effort. But where Malerba's fiction diagnoses an ongoing cultural malaise that reaches into the twenty-first century, Cangiano reveals how we can reconceive Italian modernism along the lines of a Marxian political critique that aims to establish a new understanding of modern Italy's cultural politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Cangiano's La nascita...
