Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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universities. In 1901 he entered the Vatican Secretariat of State at the beginning of a
brilliant career. Nominated Secretary of Extraordinary Affairs in 1912, he was appointed
nuncio to Bavaria in 1917 and nuncio to Berlin in 1920, where he remained until
appointed Secretary of State in 1929.
As relations between the Vatican and Germany deteriorated, and as Europe became
increasingly polarized between the democracies and the dictatorships, Pacelli established
closer links with the former and also visited the USA in 1936. By the time Pius XI died in
February 1939, Pacelli had clearly become his heir and was quickly elected pope in
March of that year. By 1945, he had steered the Vatican through the vicissitudes of war
and established a close relationship with the USA.
The Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, and the subsequent persecution of the Church
there, led Papa Pacelli to mount an anti-communist crusade. He responded to the
challenge of the communist parties of France and Italy, the two largest outside the USSR,
by a decree of the Holy Office that excommunicated communists and their collaborators.
And though in formal diplomatic terms the Vatican maintained a steadfastly neutral
stance in the developing Cold War, he was dubbed ‘chaplain’ of the Atlantic alliance.
In ecclesiastical matters, Pius XII was no great innovator, though his liturgical reforms
in the early 1950s anticipated the greater changes of the Second Vatican Council. His
encyclical Humani Generis (1950) was a warning against the ‘new’ theology emerging
from France, and his infallible definition of the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady in
1950 estranged non-Catholics further from the Church. Even though the postwar period
saw the emergence of Christian Democratic parties of government in most countries of
Western Europe, Pius XII was initially sceptical of the prospects for the Italian Christian
Democrats (see DC), preferring a more authoritarian mode of government on the
Portuguese or Spanish model. After the DC victory in 1948, Pius XII and some of his
collaborators still sought to keep the party on a short leash, and he never forgave De
Gasperi for preventing the formation of an electoral coalition of Catholics and the
extreme right in Rome in 1952 in order to defeat the communists. And, until the very end,
the pope officially forbade the much hoped-for governmental alliance of the Socialists
and DC, the so-called ‘opening to the Left’.
On the positive side, Pius XII exploited his charisma very effectively among crowds
and on the electronic media. He has frequently been referred to as the last ‘real’ pope,
that is, the last with absolute power.
See also: church, state and society
Further reading
Cornwall, J. (1999) Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, London: Viking (a controversial
study of Pacelli’s relations with Nazi Germany).
Cross, S.L. and Livingstone, E.A. (eds) (1997) The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Falconi, C. (1967) The Popes in the Twentieth Century: From Pius XI to John XXIII, London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson (see ch. 4, the only useful biographical essay in English).
JOHN POLLARD
Entries A–Z 651
population
Beginning at the end of the Second World War, Italy began a phase of major
development that would transform it in less than fifty years from a largely agricultural
country into an advanced industrialized capitalist economy In the process Italy came to
record patterns of both demographic and class structure characteristic of most other
advanced Western nations.
Especially since the 1970s, Italian demographics, once typically Mediterranean, have
come increasingly to resemble those of north Europeans. A rapid decline in birthrate—
from 18.5 per 1,000 in the early 1950s to less than 10 per 1,000 in the late 1990s—has
been reflected in the dramatic slowdown of natural population growth. Resident
population grew from 47.1 million in 1951 to 57 million in 1985, but thereafter slowed
dramatically with the 1991 census recording only 56.8 million. In fact the growth rate,
measured as yearly and national average compound rate, fell to 0.3 per cent from the
1970s to the 1990s in comparison with 0.7 per cent in the previous decades, with the rate
in the northern regions actually becoming negative.
Change in population structure has been even more dramatic. Due to a marked decline
in fertility, the average number of children per woman has fallen from 2.4 in the early
1970s to just 1.2 in the early 1990s on national average (slightly higher in the South), a
value that puts Italy amongst the group of European countries which experts consider
having crossed the ‘danger threshold’ towards negative growth and ageing. As a
consequence, the youngest generations have declined continuously. Under-15s accounted
only for 15 per cent of total population in the early 1990s—a figure below the average of
advanced countries—while the old (over 65) have risen above 14 per cent.
Another major feature of recent demographic change in Italy—traditionally a country
of emigrants—has been its transformation into a country with an active migration
balance. Emigration abroad reached its peak during the 1950s–1960s, when more than
5.6 million people (mostly from the southern regions) expatriated, either seasonally or
permanently. However, expatriations declined substantially in the 1970s–1980s and were
beginning to be offset in the late 1980s by immigration, mainly from eastern European
countries (Poland, Rumania and Albania) and African and Asian developing countries
(Morocco, Tunisia and the Philippines). A large part of such immigrants—named
extracomunitari (coming from non-EEC countries), a term which implies a sense of
exclusion from the national community -remained clandestine. In 1991 there were about
410,000 extracomunitari officially registered at the Ministry of Domestic Affairs, but a
similar number were estimated to be clandestine. Numbers of immigrants living officially
in Italy have risen continuously throughout the 1990s, reaching 1,250,000 at the end of
1998 (to this number should be added nearly 400,000 more who expect to regularize their
position according to the immigration law of 1998). Nevertheless, the total number of
residents from countries outside the European Union still lies below 3 per cent of total
population, a figure well below that of other European countries, such as France or
Germany.
In the years of the ‘economic miracle’, massive internal migration from the South—
which recorded a negative population balance of about 3.5 million—and from rural areas
generally also produced a dramatic redistribution of population towards the industrialized
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northern regions and urban areas all around the country. This trend substantially
weakened from the mid-1980s as an increasing number of people began to move out of
congested, heavily polluted and costly metropolitan areas into more provincial areas in
search of a better quality of life.
Economic development has also determined a profound change in class structure.
Rural classes sharply declined, to such an extent that the traditional basis of rural Italy,
still extremely strong at the end of the Second World War, vanished in less than thirty
years. Peasant proprietors and rural working classes, accounting for 44 per cent of total
working population in 1951 (much higher than any other European countries, excluding
those of the Mediterranean basin), were dramatically reduced to 18 per cent twenty years
later and to just 9 per cent in the early 1990s. Industrial working classes, after having
reached a peak in 1975 with 31 per cent, suffered a substantial reduction during the
restructuring processes of the 1980s and came to account for just 25 per cent in mid-
1990s, since the increasing numbers of medium-sized to small firms could not offset the
effects of massive downsizing of large firms. By contrast, the urban middle classes
emerged definitively as the backbone of the Italian population. Traditional middle class
(shopkeepers and craftsmen) continued to account for a much larger part of the workforce
than in other European countries (17 per cent in the mid1990s). Particularly significant,
however, has been the rapid growth of white-collar employment (from just 13 per cent of
the total workforce in 1951 to nearly 30 per cent in mid-1990s). This trend, though in line
with transformations occurring in all advanced countries, has revealed a strong
peculiarity in composition since, especially from the 1980s onwards, public sector
employment growth has outstripped that of the private sector.
Further reading
Ginsborg, P. (1990) A History of Contemporary Italy, London: Penguin (a good general overview
with a number of extremely useful statistical appendices showing changes in population,
employment patterns and migratory flows).
— (1994) Stato dell’Italia (The State of Italy), Milan: Bruno Mondadori (demographic, economic
and social indices of Italy in the mid-1990s).
STEFANO BATTILOSSI
Porcinai, Pietro
b. 1910, Settignano; d. 1986, Florence
Landscape and garden architect
One of the very few professionally-trained Italian landscape architects of the prewar
period, Porcinai obtained a degree in agriculture from the Florence Agrarian Institute in
1928 and then continued his formal training in Germany (Berlin) and Belgium, since Italy
did not have an academic landscape programme until the 1980s. This resulted not only in
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a network of lifelong professional contacts but also in a certain ‘northern’ atmosphere in
his work, often described as ‘mystical’.
By bringing together the approaches of the Greco-Roman hortus and Persian-Oriental
paradeisos, and by recreating the beneficent tranquillity of Renaissance orti, Porcinai
underlined the profound impact of the garden on the humanities. In over 1,300 projects,
he has covered every aspect of landscape design: private residences, public and
recreational parks, piazzas, highways and ports, industrial and rural complexes. His well-
deserved international reputation celebrates his gift for combining the traditional and the
modern into harmonious creations, enchantingly refined, thoughtful, tactful and witty.
The elegance and propriety of his work stem from the simplicity of his basic design
approach, a belief that the design solution is already contained in the landscape to which
it relates just as a poem is inherent in the words of the language from which it emerges.
Ephemeral spatial elements such as light, and daily and seasonal changes and aromas, are
the fundamental design tools that Porcinai uses with care and mastery to achieve surprise
and delight. An imaginative treatment of pools, ponds, artificial lakes, waterworks and
corresponding aquatic plants became his trademark. While not shunning the occasional
application of ecologically compatible exotic plants (bamboo being his favourite), he
preferred to work with the indigenous, welladjusted, low-maintenance species.
Porcinai acted as landscape consultant on many projects which became famous for
their extraordinary integration of architecture and surroundings and the use of landscape
in design, including Brion Tombs (with Scarpa) and the Brion-Vega factory (with
Zanuso), projects in Saudi Arabia (with Albini-Helg and with Gino Valle), Parco
Sempione (with Viganò, 1954), the garden in Saronno (1958) and Cappo Stella (with
BPR, 1960), the Olivetti plant (with Luigi Cosenza, 1962), the Parco di Pinocchio in
Collodi, Pistoia (with Zanuso, 1964), the Beaubourg (with Piano and Rogers) and the
ecological park in the new headquarters of Mondadori (with Oscar Niemeyer, 1974). His
design for the Villa Apparita’ in Siena is a paradigm of inventive historic landscape
recreation.
In 1948 Porcinai was among the founding members of the Associazione italiana degli
architetti del giardino e del paesaggio (the Italian chapter of IFLA, the International
Federation of Landscape Architecture). In 1957 he moved his office to the prestigious
location of villa Rondinelli in Fiesole, previously a foresteria (guest lodge) of the villa
Medici, with the intention of organizing an international centre for the study of landscape
architecture on the principles of the Renaissance convivium; unfortunately, this project
was never realized.
Further reading
Matteini, M. (1991) Pietro Porcinai: architetto del giardino e del paesaggio (Pietro Porcinai:
Garden and Landscape Gardener), Milan: Electa (the only thorough presentation of Porcinai’s
opus).
Seddon, G. (1991) ‘The Brion Cemetery, S. Vito, Italy 1970–72’, Landscape Australia 13 (2): 146–
53 (a clarification of Porcinai’s role and the symbolic aspect of plants in this celebrated design).
GORDANA KOSTICH
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pornography
Article 529 of the Italian Penal Code defines obscenity as ‘those acts or objects which,
according to general opinion, offend public decency’, although it explicitly excludes from
prosecution ‘acts or objects of artistic or scientific value on condition that they are not
offered, sold, or put at the disposal of minors under the age of eighteen for reasons other
than study’. This wording has allowed widely differing interpretations, which have taken
into account not only the actual acts or objects, but also the context of sexually explicit
material which might be deemed pornographic and the personal conditions of its
consumers.
While the text of the penal law facilitated the emergence of a more tolerant attitude
with respect to pornography in the 1980s and 1990s, in response to a greatly changed
notion of what might be considered offensive to common decency, in the 1940s and
1950s the notion of pudore (public decency) was seen as coinciding with the feelings of
the ‘normal’ law-abiding citizen whom the law needed to protect against a rising tide of
sexual obscenity. According to this view, the law defended a given set of moral values
which, as such, were perceived as an integral part of Italian national identity. Starting in
the 1980s, however, magistrates became convinced of the necessity to adapt the
interpretation of the laws to changes in sexual mores. Prosecution did not stop
altogether, but was based on links between pornography and other crimes such as the
exploitation of prostitution or the corruption of minors.
Notwithstanding severe repression during the 1950s and 1960s, an illegal network
catered for clients interested in the acquisition of porno films in super8 format, often
produced abroad. A more pronounced eroticism also gradually made its way into normal
cinemas, often under the form of sexy documentaries which purported to illustrate the
nightlife or curious sexual practices in foreign capitals, usually in a falsely moralizing
tone. The first of them, Europa di notte (Europe by Night) by Alessandro Blasetti, dates
back to 1959.
New developments also took place in the world of comics and other visual material
aimed at adults. For example, until the early 1960s references to sexuality had been
virtually absent in romantic stories published in fotoromanzi like Grand Hotel, Sogno
and Bolero film. The publication of Barbarella in France in 1962 inspired many Italian
imitations like Selene, designed by Marco Rostagno, Alika and Uranella, and the erotic
possibilities of cartoons were further developed in the second half of the 1960s with new
magazines like Gesebel, Isabella, Messalina and Iolanka, which were overtly
pornographic and which often illustrated sado-masochistic practices. These magazines
were a major commercial success: at the zenith of its popularity, between 1967 and 1970,
Isabella sold as many as 80,000 copies. Interestingly, picture stories like Supersex had
relatively less success.
Among the outcomes of the sexual liberation movement, and coinciding with the
period of radical student and workers’ protest around 1968, was a rapid increase in the
production and consumption of pornography. The appearance of numerous new
magazines per soli uomini (for men only), like Playmen, Ore d’amore and
Supermessalina, made inroads into the market for adult comics without substituting them
completely. Furthermore, the heroes and heroines of the cartoons at times inspired new
Entries A–Z 655
forms of erotic entertainment: for example, Flash Gordon reemerged in a 1974 movie as
Flesh Gordon.
Pornography acquired even more visibility and acceptability in 1977 with the opening
of the first cinemas a luci rosse (red-light cinemas), which specialized in hardcore. These
quickly expanded, and in the early 1980s they numbered more than 200. Most of the
films shown were American, but Italian productions, with directors like Joe D’Amato,
soon followed their example.
The products of the thriving Italian porno industry were characterized by the fact that
they were not ‘all-sex’ and paid some attention to narrative aspects. Another
characteristic was the creation of a star system based on the popularity of actresses like
Cicciolina, Moana Pozzi, and, more recently, Selen, Jessica Rizzo and Eva Henger.
Many of them imitated Riccardo Schicchi, the owner of Italy’s main porno business Diva
futura, in presenting pornography as a form of sexual liberation.
With the rapid diffusion of videorecorders, owned in 1995 by 47.4 per cent of Italian
families, the commercialization of pornography shifted massively to the sale of video
cassettes. The main sales points were video shops and newsstands; the number of porno
shops in Italy remained extremely limited.
Thanks to the gradual disappearance of the social disapproval of pornography, a porno
star like Moana Pozzi (1961–94) could become a regular guest star on television, not only
in the late night talkshow of Maurizio Costanzo, but also in the Saturday evening family
programmes conducted by Pippo Baudo. The gradual blurring of the distinction between
pornography and other forms of eroticism led to an ever greater acceptability of
pornography and opened new markets, where, in some cases, the transgressive dimension
of pornography could be almost completely subsumed by the commercial dimension.
Thus in 1997–8, a winter catalogue for shoes was advertised as ‘a guide to porno and
good shoes’, exalting the qualities of both footwear and porno stars.
In public debate, the anti-pornography position remained weak: while books in
defence of pornography were rapidly translated, the works of anti-pornographic
campaigners like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon attracted little interest. By
the 1990s, the laws against pornography were only being rigorously applied in cases
involving minors. In 1997 a bill was introduced for the more severe punishment of the
production, commercialization and distribution of explicit sexual material involving
minors, such exploitation being defined as a form of slavery. The proposed bill made
special reference to the use of the Internet, but failed to clearly define pornography and
thus left open the continuing possibility of contrasting interpretations.
See also: censorship
Further reading
ISPES (1989) La pornografia in Italia (Pornography in Italy), Rome: Merlo Editore (a
detailed overview of various aspects of pornography in Italy in the second half of the
1980s).
Spinazzola, V. (1995) L’immaginazione divertente. Il giallo, il rosa, il porno, il
fumetto (Entertaining Imagination: Detective Stories, Romance, Pornography, Cartoons),
Milan: Rizzoli (a collection of essays about mass culture).
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Stella, R. (1991) L’osceno di massa. Sociologia della comunicazione pornografica
(Obscenity for the Masses: The Sociology of Pornographic Communication), Milan:
Angeli (an analysis of the production and consumption of pornography in Italian society).
BRUNO P.F.WANROOIJ
Porta, Antonio
b. 6 November 1935; d. 1989, 12 April Milan
Poet, novelist and critic
Born Leo Paolazzi, Porta began his literary activity in the 1950s by collaborating on
important journals such as Malebolge and il verri. He was one of the five ‘experimental’
poets published in the seminal anthology I novissimi (The Very New), edited by fellow
poet Alfredo Giuliani, and together with Giuliani and others he was also one of the
founding members of the neoavantgarde movement, Gruppo 63. He contributed to the
magazine Quindici, edited by Nanni Balestrini, before being amongst the founders of the
cultural journal alfabeta.
Fundamental to Porta’s poetics is a refusal to identify with the lyrical self of the poet,
which has its creative counterpart in the recognition of the importance of the external
event and no longer only the persona of the isolated poet. As well as poetry, Porta also
published several novels and a theatrical work.
Further reading
Porta, A. (1986) Invasions, ed. P.Vangelisti, trans. A. Baldry, P.Verdicchio and P.Vangelisti, San
Francisco: Red Mill Press (last collection of poetry; originally appearing as Invasioni, Milan:
Mondadori, 1984).
ERNESTO LIVORNI
Portoghesi, Paolo
b. 2 November 1931, Rome
Architect
Renowned for combining architectural practice with teaching architectural history,
Portoghesi first trained at Rome’s Scuola Superiore di Architettura. From 1962–6 he
taught History of Architecture and Criticism in Rome, and from 1967–77 he was
professor of the History of Architecture at the Politecnico of Milan. In 1963–4 he won the
Italian Institute of Architecture’s national prize and the Manzù Foundation gold medal. In
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1966 Portoghesi became a member of the prestigious Accademia di San Luca. Author of
a number of monographs, he also contributed to many periodicals, as well as editing the
Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura (Notebooks of the Institute of the
History of Architecture) and running the architectural section of the cultural journal,
Marcatrè. From 1969–83 he directed Controspazio, and in 1983 he became editor of the
journal Eupalino. His fascination for the ‘Orient’ as a recurring architectural theme began
with early research on the Origine group and led to international design work in Sudan
(1973), Jordan (1974) and the Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre in Rome (1976–93).
Further reading
Pisani, M. (1992) Paolo Portoghesi, Milan: Electa (an anthology of his buildings from 1965–90).
FASSIL ZEWDOU
postal services
The Italian preference for the spoken over the written word is illustrated by the contrast
between telephone and mail culture. Italy shows a similar telephone density and use to
Northern Europe. However, each year Italians post only half the number of private letters
per capita that the French, Germans and British post, and they spend only one-tenth of
what Northern Europeans spend on mail-order products. In a public sector renowned for
its inefficiency, the postal service’s indifference to its customers has been as legendary as
the protection enjoyed by its employees. Compared with the EU average, the letters that
Italians do write cost one-third more to send, move towards their destinations at only one-
third of the speed and require significantly more postal workers per item to get them
there. Clientelist and trade union pressures have made the attempts to increase the
productivity of the service conspicuously less successful in Italy than elsewhere.
DAVID MOSS
postmodernism
The term ‘postmodernism’ refers both to the theory that the ‘modern’ period has ended
and been replaced, and to a practice in contemporary art and literature which seeks self-
consciously to generate ‘post’ modern features. Since ‘modern’ is generally understood to
mean simply ‘the present moment’, the term ‘postmodern’ immediately generates some
confusion. To understand how something could be considered more recent than
‘modern’, it is necessary to approach modernism as a relative term, referring to a specific
style and a clearly defined historical period.
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According to most of its exponents, the defining characteristic of modernism was its
novelty. Unlike traditional art, which was valued according to how much it resembled the
work of other accepted masters, modern art was valued by how much it rejected
everything that had come before. This rejection was led by a small elite band, the self-
consciously avantgarde, who courageously ventured into as yet unexplored possibilities
of artistic expression ahead of others, despite lack of approval from the conservative
masses. However, once a new and avantgarde style had gained wide acceptance, it
necessarily became conventional and was therefore rejected as ‘passé’. Consequently, the
history of modernism is marked by a succession of short-lived movements. Moreover,
since the avantgarde made such a point of rejecting the past, many modernist artists were
self-taught, and technical skill itself was not considered necessary.
Modernism, like social Darwinism, claimed a logic of progression. The past should be
rejected because it was the past and therefore, by definition, not as up to date as the
present, whereas the present was valuable of itself and would lead to a better future. At its
extreme, modernism could lead to totalitarianism. So, for example, although Hitler
detested abstract art, the state he created was thoroughly ‘modern’, supported by the
latest technology and guided by scientific planning, stripping away of all superfluous
ornament and traditional (i.e. non-modern) humanist emotion in an overriding adherence
to modern, abstract values.
Yet modernism outlived Hitler. After the Second World War, new suburbs and
apartment blocks sprang up. By the 1960s, major Italian cities had their outgrowth of
residential towers, justified by their designers according to the modernist mantra of
Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus in which ‘form follows function’. Rejection of the past
fitted conveniently with the commercial needs of the developers. Individuality,
craftsmanship and decorative effect were abandoned as old fashioned, in favour of mass
production and uniformity It is ironic that the features of modernist architecture and
design, which at first seemed so rebellious, were cheap to produce and to reproduce and
so came to be repeated everywhere: monochrome concrete, curtain walls, rectangular
forms and an absence of eaves or, indeed, of any relieving detail.
By the end of the 1960s, modernism had reached a crisis point in many of its forms. In
art and literature, it appeared that the possibilities for innovation had been exhausted.
More significantly, the myth of the value of progress was shattered by widespread student
and worker protests. Western culture had delivered material gains, but failed to satisfy
other human needs. In architecture, millions had been housed in the new quarters, but in
conditions which, at their worst, were social disasters. Italy, in the past home to the
world’s greatest architecture, now also boasted some of the poorest. Simplicity and
repetition crushed any sense of individuality out of the occupants. Where planned variety
was introduced, it was sterile, and could not match the organic richness of cities which
had evolved over centuries.
‘Postmodernism’ thus began to be used as term to indicate a new way of thinking in
which style did not have to be new, the past could be revisited, elements from different
codes could be mixed, and progress was not a linear trajectory. Architecture was quick to
articulate such a style, which borrowed at will from many sources. Postmodern buildings
are thus typically eclectic and a pastiche of elements, such as a tower block with a touch
of Greek temple on top. In what Charles Jencks referred to as dual coding, buildings
could speak on two levels: one to the general public, in terms of their immediate appeal,
Entries A–Z 659
and the other to adepts in the field, who could admire the ironic wit of the architectural
references.
The postmodern freedom of expression spread through visual art as a theoretical
approach and range of strategies, not as a single style. Much of the art produced in Italy
after the 1960s displayed postmodernist tendencies, one of which was eclecticism. Artists
such as Clemente felt they could look to the past, and to diverse cultures and media for
their inspiration, rather than reacting only to the latest trend. Another postmodernist
tendency was that of ‘appropriation’, the incorporation of recognizable elements or even
entire works of others into one’s own work. So Paolini, for example, used plaster casts of
classical sculptures and reproductions of old master paintings as his own works, and
Mariani painted in the style of the French neoclassicists. A third aspect, resulting from
eclecticism and appropriation, is pastiche: postmodern works may be formed as an
assembly of pre-existing elements, as in the tableaus of Ontani. One further general
tendency that characterized postmodernism in painting was the rejection of the modernist
notion of ‘unschooled’ art. This led to a renewal of learning and, given the necessity of
training, an understanding of the history of art for the purposes of citation and copying; it
also led to a reappreciation of technique. In painting, the return of figuration, the re-
emphasis on technical skill, and the awareness of the history of art displayed by the
transavantgarde are all indications of the same rejection of modernism and thus marks
of a certain postmodern tendency.
In both literature and the visual arts, however, the postmodernist licence to appropriate
the past also needed to avoid being simply ‘old’ or unfashionable, and this was done
through a constant and overriding use of irony. In his postscript to The Name of the Rose,
Umberto Eco discusses the dilemma of the postmodern lover who is anxious to tell his
beloved that he loves her madly, but realizes that he will sound like someone from a pulp
romance. So he frames his declaration as a quote: ‘As Liala would say, I love you
madly’, thus communicating his feelings at the same time as he signals, through irony,
his own sophistication. In other terms, copy at will, but acknowledge; and Eco was
careful to employ this device himself.
Nevertheless, in spite of all its vigorous rejection of its own immediate past, it is still
uncertain whether postmodernism is in fact completely distinct from modernism or
whether, perhaps, it is no more than an ironic and clever re-utilization of the same
progressive, avantgarde myths of modernism itself.
Further reading
Calinescu, M. (1987) Five Faces of Modernity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (discusses the
features of modernism, and postmodernism as a reaction).
Eco, U. (1984) Postscript to the ‘Name of the Rose
’
, trans. W.Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich (contains Eco’s definition of postmodernism).
Jencks, C. (1977) The Language of Postmodern Architecture, New York: Rizzoli (an early,
defining work).
MAX STAPLES
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