A Test of Powers

Originally published in 1965, this volume was immediately judged to be one of the main contributions to the intellectual life of the Italian Sixties. Three years later, in 1968, it became clear that it had anticipated many of the themes of the New Left and the student revolt. Ex-partisan, poet, literary critic and teacher, Fortini had been immersed for more than twenty years in the cut and thrust of ideological debate. In these pages, besides discussing problems of cultural organization and the consciousness industry, he described the end of militant anti-fascism and the alliance between progressivism and literature, the end of the social mandate of writers and the beginning of a 'revolution of civilization'. In writing, Fortini did not intend to speak to the young but the young, perhaps in the spirit of contradiction, listened to him. Apart from some of the crucial interventions into the literary and critical debates of the Sixties, the volume includes essays on Kafka, Pasternak, Spitzer, Auerbach, Lukacs, Lu Xun, Proust and Brecht.