link to book review: _Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy_

[pynchonoid]

<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=187181053364863>

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi. Fascist Spectacle: The
Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy. Studies on
the History of Society and Culture, vol. 28. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000. xi + 303 pp.
Photographs, notes, list of sources, bibliography,
index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-20623-1; $19.95
(paper), ISBN 0-520-22677-1. 

Reviewed by Federico Caprotti, School of Geography and
the Environment and St. Antony's College, University
of Oxford.
Published by H-Italy (April, 2003) 

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi's book is a significant
contribution to the cultural emphasis which has arisen
in research on Italian fascism in recent years.
Fascist Spectacle traces and analyses the manner in
which the regime's self-identity was dynamically
formulated at home and abroad, and the way in which
its power was produced. This is done by utilising the
concept of aesthetic politics, through which
Falasca-Zamponi focuses on fascism's aesthetic
character and the contradictions and problematic
relationships present beneath the regime's aesthetic
manifestations. Fascism's cultural products are used
to shine a light on its inner contradictions. 

The concept of aesthetic politics which
Falasca-Zamponi develops is largely based on Walter
Benjamin's theorization of the perception of the work
of art in the modern era, explored in his 1936 essay,
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction".[1] Fascism is seen as having preserved
an almost pre-modern auratic distance between the work
of art and the audience, thus inhibiting critical
interaction between the two. Falasca-Zamponi analyses
various forms of fascist discourse--in its linguistic
(speeches) and non-linguistic (images, symbols)
forms--in this light.  [...]






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