Futurism (literature)

Futurism is a modernist avant-garde movement in literature and part of the Futurism art movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It made its official literature debut with the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism (1909). Futurist poetry is characterised by unexpected combinations of images and by its hyper-concision (in both economy of speech and actual length). Futurist theatre also played an important role within the movement and is distinguished by scenes that are only a few sentences long, an emphasis on nonsensical humour, and attempts to examine and subvert traditions of theatre via parody and other techniques. Longer forms of literature, such as the novel, have no place in the Futurist aesthetic of speed and compression.^[1] Futurist literature primarily focuses on seven aspects: intuition, analogy, irony, abolition of syntax, metrical reform, onomatopoeia, and essential/synthetic lyricism. The ideals of the futurists expanded to their sculptures and painting styles as well; they were not fond of the cubism movement in France or the renaissance era progression (in their point of view, emasculation) and would often preach going back to old fashioned values in their manifestos and articles as well as their artwork.^[2] Although the movement was founded with manifestos written by men there were responses to Marinetti in particular from women whom considered themselves traditional feminists and did not see the previous renaissance movement as a shift towards emasculation, but relied too much on the traditional titles of "men" and "women" that pigeon holed society into believing they couldn't be empathetic and that a woman couldn't be vigorous.^[3]