War and Language in Italian Futurism, Russian Cubofuturism and British Vorticism (Cognitive-Discursive Approach)

Abstract

The paper explores the conceptualization of war in the texts of different avant-garde movements. The article considers the case of manifestos, articles, journal issues and poetic collections of Italian Futurism, Russian Cubofuturism and British Vorticism, primarily, texts by F. T. Marinetti, V. Mayakovsky and W. Lewis. The war served as a trigger for artistic and language experiments. That is why Benjamin’s conception of “politicization of aesthetics” and Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the “war machine” are relevant for the analysis. The text analysis is based on discourse-pragmatic and cognitive-linguistic approaches. These approcaches make it possible to reveal the specifics of avant-garde experiments aimed at the formation of a new artistic language with the help of a fundamental transformation and activation of cognitive, communicative and linguistic resources. Avant-garde movements formulated the conceptions underlying their communicative strategies: Marinetti’s performance-actional strategy “Art as action” (l'Arte-azione), Mayakovsky’s linguistic-creative strategy “Cacophony of war” as “sermon of new beauty”, and Lewis’s performance-contextual “Blast and Bless-strategy”. Cognitive approach reveals the overcoming of the border between art and reality, artistic and conceptual metaphors, as well as bridging the “source area” and “target area” in conceptual metaphor. In Italian Futurism, the target area can be both Art and War, which affects the choice of source area: Art is War, but War is Medicine, War is Holiday. Russian Cubofuturists formed a special type of “introvertive” (Jakobson’s term) conceptual metaphors: Poetry is War. War is Poetry; Art is War. War is Art. In British Vorticism both “traditional” (Art is War, War is Game) and “introvertive” conceptual metaphors meets: Enemy / Poet is Ally / Soldier. Ally / Soldier is Enemy / Poet.