To Infinity—And Beyond!

You discussed Italian Futurism with Prof Guendel in Humanities last week, and we all discussed the glamor of industry in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. For class today I’m hoping to interrogate and better understand the rhetorical appeal of Futurism by close-reading the Futurist Manifesto.

Written in 1909 by Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, the Futurist Manifesto looks forward to a new era defined not simply by its embrace of speed and technology but by its rejection of tradition and the past.

After you’ve read the manifesto in full, what do you see as its most striking rhetorical appeal? In a short ¶ that quotes one of Marinetti’s key phrases, discuss who would have found his words inspiring and why.