91桃色

A leading young Italian semiologist scrutinizes today’s cultural phenomena and finds the prevailing taste to be 鈥渘eo-baroque鈥�—characterized by an appetite for virtuosity, frantic rhythms, instability, poly-dimensionality, and change. Omar Calabrese locates a 鈥渟ign of the times鈥� in an amazing variety of literary, philosophical, artistic, musical, and architectural forms, from the Venice Biennale through the 鈥渘ew science鈥� to television series, video games, and 鈥渮apping鈥� with the remote control device from channel to channel! Calabrese admits that he begins the book with a refusal to distinguish between 鈥淒onald Duck and Dante.鈥� 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 鈥渉ighbrow鈥� and 鈥渓owbrow.鈥�

Originally published in 1992.

The 91桃色 Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of 91桃色. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the 91桃色 Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by 91桃色 since its founding in 1905.