ManifestAzioni. I manifesti avanguardisti tra performance e performatività
edited by Alessandro Catalano, Massimo Maurizio e Roberto Merlo
ManifestAzioni. I manifesti avanguardisti tra performance e performatività, edited by Alessandro Catalano, Massimo Maurizio e Roberto Merlo, Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2014, re-evaluates, from a comparativist and pragmatic perspective, the avant-garde literary manifesto in terms of theatrality (performance) and its actional rhetoric (performatività). Out of ten chapters, representing communications delivered on the occasion of the homonymous conference organized on the 2nd and 3rd of March, 2012, by the University of Turin, two are Romanian, signed by Rodica Ilie (“Transilvania” University of Braşov) and by Emilia Parpală (University of Craiova). The volume opens with the pluri-perspectival definition of the manifesto and continues with its exemplification in six cultural areas: Latin America (Anna Bocuti), England (Rebecca Beasley), Czech Republic (Alessandro Catalano), France (Eleonora di Mauro), Italy (Barbara Zandrino), Poland (Alessandro Ajres), Romania (Emilia Parpală) and Russia (Sergej Birjukov, Nadia Caprioglio). These contexts define the differences as well as the identity of the manifesto, a species which is characteristic of historical avant-garde.
For Rodica Ilie (The Literary Manifesto – Text, Discourse, Action, pp. 9-23), specialist in avant-gardism within Romance space, the avant-garde manifesto operates in two directions: the polemic imposing of an artistic ideology and the imposing of a new type of literature; consequently, it must be analyzed both from the perspective of doctrine contents, and of effects, as speech act. As specific act of literary communication, the manifesto has an intentional and teleological character, being an autonomous and self-referential event which detaches itself from its author. Ilie maintains the dual perspective in the definition of the manifesto as paradoxical text / discourse, built upon the tension between nihilism and constructive dynamism which re-establishes the order.