A leading young Italian semiologist scrutinizes today’s cultural phenomena and finds the prevailing taste to be and “neo-baroque and “–characterized by an appetite for virtuosity, frantic rhythms, instability, poly-dimensionality, and change. Omar Calabrese locates a and “sign of the times and ” in an amazing variety of literary, philosophical, artistic, musical, and architectural forms, from the Venice Biennale through the and “new science and ” to television series, video games, and and “zapping and ” with the remote control device from channel to channel! Calabrese admits that he begins the book with a refusal to distinguish between and “Donald Duck and Dante. and ” Avoiding hierarchies or ghettos among works, he takes his readers on a fast-paced expedition through contemporary culture that closes with an elegant essay on evaluation and classical form. According to Calabrese, the enormous quantity of narrative now being produced has led to a new situation: everything has already been said, and everything has already been written. The only way of avoiding saturation has been to turn to a poetics of repetition. The author shows that pleasure in texts is now produced by tiny variations, and a certain kind of citation from other works has taken on a central importance that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In describing this development, and others shared by both avant-garde and mass media, he makes us aware of the rapid shrinkage in the once ample space between and “highbrow and ” and and “lowbrow. and “

Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (Princeton Legacy Library, 5189) PDF

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