Legitimizing the Artist. Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885-1915

Abstract

sagacious variety of narrative techniques, which confer on the fundamental nature of each time period and place, moment and experience a distinguishing light, tex- ture and shade.In its overall structure, the novel follows a circular movement, so common in many Italian-Canadian narratives, following Nickys journey from his troubled inner-self to the world of his ancestors-so distant in time and place and experience-and back.Nicky's experiences are narrated in the first person at the beginning and end of the novel, which allows for an effective layering of intimate and social dynamics.Between these rwo parts set in the present, the transcription of the Tolomesi vìììa^ers story by Nick)' is inserted as the adaptation of his grandfather's storytelling.This meta-linguistic artifice of recording and re-elaborating the grandfa- ther's narration in the grandson's own words allows the author to overcome inevitable hurdles originating from a linguistically realistic rendition of the elder's story, so that metaphorically the narration lets the voices of the young and the elderly overlap and, in the end, blend into one consciousness.The voice of the grandfa- ther becomes the voice of the grandchild and vice versa, in a rare moment of empathy and communion.Recensioni waning decades of the nineteenth-century as new social, pohtical and economic dynamics emerged to subvert Romanticism, and the potent negative effects it had on the artists and the sense of their role and mission.One immediate consequence of this turn of events was that artists had to acknowledge that the "Halo " which they sported with pride since before the rise of Modernity (one can think of Petrarch's coronation as poet laureate) had not only been challenged but had fallen by the wayside, ushering thus a many-sided crisis in the rapport art/world.For