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This article studies the key concept of ‘life’ within the context of Italian modernism, understood in the broad sense of a network of cultural responses in the period from 1861 until the mid-1930s. Following Roberto Esposito’s suggestion that the transversal category of life is distinctive for Italian “living thought” (Esposito), the ‘living poetics’ here exposed focuses on three key literary moments in which the crucial relationship between life and art is radically redefined. D’Annunzio’s ‘life as art’ aesthetics develops a ‘lifestyle’ with an individualist as well as nationalist dimension with its climax in the First World War. Futurism, starting from the axiom that war is the sole hygiene of the world, develops instead an ‘art as life program’ with which to revolutionize not only present life but also the afterlife. Finally, the young realists of the 1930s bring back absolutist notions of life to their realist and private proportions in order to create a poetics of reconstruction after the trauma of the Great War. A comparison between these literary moments shows how the concept of life not only is a constitutive element of an Italian ‘living poetics,’ but also that literary change entails a constant redefinition of autonomist and heteronomous aspects of the paradoxical tension between art and life.

The German term Literaturrevolution , associated with the modern period in literature, covers various aesthetical ideas and ideologies revolving around the notion of revolution. Concerning revolt, Literaturrevolution entails a radical reinterpretation of the relation between art and reality as it charts the role of art during the socio-political upheavals of modernity. The article traces the variety of readings of the notion of revolution present in francophone and germanophone Jewish literature and meta-literary discussions in Europe from the early 1900s until the outbreak of the Second World War. It accounts for the reception, adaptation, and utilization of revolutionary discourses among expressionists and dadaists of Jewish origin. The motivation to focus on Jewish thought in particular derives not only from its peculiarities but also from its discursive plurality. This plurality is already evident in Gustav Landauer’s Die Revolution (1907), which captures the manifoldness of reformist ideas in East-Central European Jewish thought. In the wake of his book, the aesthetic, religious-ecstatic, and socio-political aspects of revolution overlapped and amalgamated. The multifaceted conceptions of revolt are particularly noticeable in the Jewish manifestations of Literaturrevolution as they placed the aesthetical with the social in parallel, evoking both socialist and fascist conservative opposition.

This article intends to analyse the presence of the window in Blanchot’s fictional work. The window, or window pane, can be considered a central topos in Blanchot’s approach of the literary space, not only because it recurs in different stories but moreover because it relates to the event of the story. I have a double claim as regards this topos. First, the topos foregrounds the importance of the perceptual basis in Blanchot’s approach to the image in his own fictional writings. Second, it functions in the transformation of the narrative in his fictional writings and in this regard reveals the importance of the literary space in Blanchot’s approach to the image. As concerns the first claim, I will show how different meanings of the window metaphor, as understood in the theory of the pictorial image since the Renaissance, remain present in Blanchot’s use of the metaphor. As regards the second claim, I will establish how the meaning of the window pane in Blanchot’s fictional writings is connected to specific narrative constraints, for instance as expression of intentions, or as metaphor for the narrator’s experience, or as means to relate the event of the story. In the first part of this article, I recall the pictorial definition of the image in terms of window and its transformation in Romanticism and Surrealism, and show that it is possible to situate Blanchot’s approach to the image in terms of “fascination” within this legacy. In the second part, I analyse the different meanings associated with the window pane in Blanchot’s fictional work, exploring to what extent they repeat the Romanticist and Surrealist interpretations and how significantly they move beyond this legacy. This comparative investigation leads to an articulation of Blanchot’s theory of the image as evidenced from the perspective of his own fictional writings.