Artist-Fiction in an Expanded Field

Avant-Garde Legacies in John Holten’s “The Readymades” and K.D.’s “Headless”

Abstract

The essay focuses on the novels of Franco Cordelli, developed through his engagement with the movement of the Neoavanguardia and the influence of Witold Gombrowicz’s poetics and works. Through Gombrowicz’s model, particularly with Cosmo (1965), Cordelli was able to move toward the novel, by writing Procida, overcoming the ideological obstacles posed by the Neoavanguardia. In Procida (1973) and Pinkerton (1986) it is possible to find those formal, thematic and stylistic characteristics that refer to the category of Modernism and its re-emergence in the late Twentieth Century. The characteristics of Cordelli’s works could also bring his novels closer to the framework of Neomodernism, especially with regard to that “public, social and political twist” (Toracca) that characterized it in the 1970s and 1980s.