Gabriele D'Annunzio: The Superman

• Gabriele D'Annunzio, born in Pescara in 1863, hailed from a bourgeois family and studied at prestigious schools before moving to Rome at age 18 to attend university.
• D'Annunzio left his studies, choosing the societal life, working in journalism and soon gaining literary fame through verses and narratives which were contentious due to their erotic content.
• During this time, D'Annunzio cultivated the persona of an aesthete, an exceptional individual of refined taste, rejecting bourgeois mediocrity and indulging in a world of pure art while scorning conventional morality.

Superhuman

• The aesthetic phase faced a crisis around the turn of the 1890s, which influenced his literary works and evolved into the myth of the superman.
• The superman was inspired by Nietzsche's theories, focusing on heroic and activist energy rather than mere beauty.
• D'Annunzio sought to create an exceptional life, a "inimitable existence" that shunned common living standards, which fascinated the bourgeois public.
• He lived in the Villa della Capponcina, emulating a Renaissance prince amid art objects, fine fabrics, horses, and prized greyhounds which contributed to his mythical status.
• His love affairs, especially with actress Eleonora Duse, added to his mystique.
• D'Annunzio’s contempt for common life and pursuit of an exceptional existence were closely tied to economic demands.
• His scandalous exhibitions aimed to place him in the public eye to better sell his image and literary works.
• His luxurious lifestyle was costly, so despite making large sums of money, funds were always insufficient.
• Cultivating beauty and "inimitable living" were methods for increasing his wealth and to meet market demands.
• He positioned himself as hostile to the bourgeois world, but became entangled in its rules.

Politics and Theatre

• D'Annunzio ventued into politics in 1897 as a far-right deputy, echoing his books' disapproval of democratic principles and egalitarianism.
• He moved to the left wing in 1900.
• Seeking a more direct way to influence crowds, he found theatre, and from 1898, he turned to theatre with the representation of "the dead city" to extend his message.
• Despite his popularity in the first decade of the 20th century and the permeation of Dannunzianism in Italy's habits, creditors forced D'Annunzio to flee Italy in 1910 and take refuge in France.

War and Fiume Adventure

• At the start of World War I, D'Annunzio returned to Italy.
• He started an extensive interventionist campaign that significantly impacted Italy's entry into the war.
• Post-war, D'Annunzio took on the grievances of a "mutilated victory" among veterans and led a march of volunteers on Fiume, where he established his personal rule in opposition to the Italian state.
• Fascism hailed D'Annunzio as a father of the fatherland but confined him to a villa in Gardone, which he turned into a mausoleum, the Vittoriale degli Italiani, where he died in 1938.
• As a result of his influence in Italian culture and politics, the phenomenon of Dannunzianism arose, which affected the behavior of bourgeois generations.
• He inspired mass production (literary consumption, rarefied aesthetic atmospheres and interpretations for less cultured readers) and cinema.

Aestheticism and Its Crisis

• Started under the influence of two Italian writers, Carducci and Verga.
• His earlier collections, "Primo Vere" and "Canto Novo," reflected Carducci and his "Barbaric Odes".
• Verga's influence is evident in the collection of short stories "Terra Vergine," reminiscent of "Vita dei Campi."
• "Canto Novo" displayed significant features in its use of Barbarian meter.
• D'Annunzio gained from Carducci, developing a Pagan sense that connected healthy and strong things to a natural solar communion.
• He incorporated social points from verismo.
• The narrative in "Terra Vergine," mirrors "Canto Novo" in prose.
• It was inspired by the model of Verga's "Vita dei Campi".
• It showed figures and landscapes from Abruzzo.
• There was no investigation (like in Verga) into the struggle for survival in the lower classes".
• It presented a basically idyllic world.
• The narrator's subjective intrusions expressed complacence for fierceness and barbarity.
• This was considered the opposite of Verga's impersonality.
• Subsequent short stories, such as "Novelle della Pescara," highlighted regional dialect while indicating an ambiguous pleasure for a superstition filled with magical and bloody elements.
• Although these stories appeared to align with verismo, their ideas were disconnected with documentation, social concerns, and positivist visions of verismo.
• Instead, they allied to the irrational matrix of decadence.

Verses of the 1880s and Aestheticism

• Production shifted and moved from the pagan vitalism direction and unveiled the influence of French and English Decadent poets.
• "Intermezzo di Rime" confessed to an exhaustion of the senses, and content from corrupt desires.
• "Isaotta Guttadauro" refined and aesthetic exercise in recovering 15th century poetic forms.
• "Chimera" emphasized themes of perverse sensuality, summed up in depictions of fatal and destructive femininity.
• This resulted in Dannunzian aestheticism, which manifests via the phrase "the verse is all".
• It started a literary cult of art and beauty, with a pursuit of refined elegance and formal artifice.
• The poetic verses are full of literary echoes and classical poets, the contemporary French and English.
• The character of the aesthete isolates himself from contemporary bourgeois reality in a rarefied world and pure art and beauty.
• D'Annunzio dons this mask while noting an ideological response to social processes during the post-unification period which lead to the artist's declining status.
• D'Annunzio’s figure is being removed from the privileged and prestigious position that they enjoyed in previous times or forced to submit to the demands of production and market.
• Having come from middle class, the young D'Annunzio’s refusal of being crushed by objective processes.
• He constructs in literary work the character of the aesthete, creating imaginary restoration and taking advantage of capitalist production, offering a new intellectual image and reviving the condition of being elite.

The Pleasure and the Crisis of Aestheticism

• D'Annunzio realizes that the aesthete no longer has the strength to oppose the rising bourgeoisie.
• He senses its weakness in a brutal and conflicted world; and the cult of beauty became a falsehood ending in a collapse.
• D'Annunzio's novel "Il Piacere" (The Pleasure), focused on the aesthetic; Andrea Sperelli, similar to D'Annunzio that was self-analyzed.
• The crisis is represented by the relationship with women and divided by 2 images.
• Fatal (Elena Muti) symbolizes lust.
• (Maria Herres) pureness is the path to redemption.
• The story contains 19th century realism and verismo.
• They are building aristocratic social figures and corrupted.
• It counts towards inner processes in a Bourget-like model.
• Symbolism also is present.

Phase of Goodness

• After "The Pleasure" there happened a stage of experimentation and fatigue leading to Russian novels.
• It is evident in Giovanni Episcopo, and the influence of Dostoevsky.
• Innocente showed purification and expressed marriage and country life.
• There was the collection "Poema Paradisiaco," was included along with the desire to regain the innocence of childhood, return to simple things, in addition to more ambiguous themes from the French area.
• D'Annunzio captured Nietzsche's mindset of rejecting bourgeois conformism, praising the Dionysian spirit, defying altruism, extolling will to power.
• He interpreted the concept of the superman.
• D'Annunzio highlighted the anti-bourgeois sentiment and the affirmation of artistic life and the worship of beauty.

Superhuman

• The figure does not degrade its previous image.
• Aestheticism will be a display and control the power and reality.
• Myth of the aesthete became a rebellion to compete against social ideas.

Poetics

• The art is in alliance to three parts, from aesthetics to morality.
• During the stage, that art and beauty is subordinated.
• Narrator, Andrea is the ego in D'annuzio
• Second phase "bonta" is stimulated and there human and mind are evaluated.
• Third phrase Is from Nietzsche which is from aesthetics with social activity for the aristocratic.
• D'Annunzio distorted N's complexity which would translate into political that refuses democracy.
• Incarnates the vision of Italian intellectuals who want domination.
• He supported in colonial enterprise.

Triumph of Death

• The death is a novel and explores the characters' struggles for death and life.
• Giorgio is trying to get rid of existence.
• Obsession with beauty of death and reality that intertwined his connections to Ippolita.
• It is being influenced by the concept and he attempts to dominant from death which is tragic.
• In the novel the world is a reflection of struggle with society.

The Virgins of the Rocks

• In this story is art exploring beauty to find a passion with 2 characters.
• The story with Liana set in on top of a hill.
• The novel shows the view between the ideal and reality.
• The hero is searching for his view to be destroyed with obsession that leads to morality.
• Interior is the themes and decadence for internal struggle.

The Fire

• The story is about Stelio, and Elena.
• The passion is to discover the meaning art, beauty, and love.
• It shows how it can deliver aesthetic and the ending.

Perhaps Yes, Perhaps No

• novel about a sports-hero, Paolo Artis, who affirms his will through flight to become a symbol of modern aggression.
• Woman, Isabella, limits the modern world in the story but overcomes a via oppression with an inexpressive route.

New narrative forms

• These all go away from the naturalist model
• The death in a physcioligcal novel centers vision with dynamics from the interior of character in intimate corroded forces.
• There is a symbolic nature.
• "Les virgins" are rarefied and turn into a mythical climate.
• "On fire" are new national theatres, analysiing symbolics.
• "Perhaps" reclaims more romantic methods.

Dramatic Arts

• In theatre superomistic idelogoy goes in place.
• Teatro becomes a dissemination of a superomistic message.
• D'A then attracts Eleonora.
• Rejects the forms and desires a theatre of poetry with exception of exceptional and symbolic themes.
• Like ever the hero finds the lady who limits and frustrates heroic expression to collide again.

laudi

• With bad superomistic, D'A imposes and opposes vulgarism and he beauty of the past.
• He no longer supports the beauty of modern which has a goal to sing a new beauty of the world which goes with a new myth.
• With varies, it shows life in fusion with nature stating there is not deist.symbol.
• The lyric is Pan.

ALCYONE

• in Summer of that year.

• Tone and mood is about consideration.

• It is about metamorphous (io), of this god like state.

• Alcoyne are attenuated with human sensibilities that doesn't last.

• The character has a reflection.

• The language expresses reflection of lyrical freedom.

• Construction of music where the words and sounds.

• Use Ana and epita and rhymes where the music has a song like way

Evening Fiesolana

• Each is autonomous.
• First of divinity to show.

Personification of the evening

• Has firmness and is like a femininity in mythical metaphor.

Second

• Has the game with with what happens with an analytical sense.
• Stanza show a sense of taste in religion.

Third

• Has transitioned to themes and is a sensual contrast and is a transformation and sublime.

The Rain In The Pine Trees

• The poem has a structure from the four sections.
• Distinct from various types to sound that shows musical structure and is a transformation and musical details to poetry.

Central

• There is the identification between humans with vegetal life and is insistently developed.

Instruments

• Poem without the set length and free from regulation.

Procedures

• Has rhetoric.

Methodology

• Has language to the feeling structure and world to the interrior

The Night Time Session

• After 1910, 1913 is more descriptive with prose that is in lyrical memory.

• Author publishes and the style is to move past to the highness the interior.

• Prose displays new form to confess per-plexity and disqietudes

• Defintions states the compotisions in and immobile blindness in an incident.