Rainer Rumold – författare

The autobiography of Eugene Jolas, available for the first time nearly half a century after his death in 1952, is the story of a man who, as the editor of the expatriate American literary magazine transition, was the first publisher of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and other signal works of the modernist period. Jolas’s memoir provides often comical and compelling details about such leading modernist figures as Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, Breton, and Gide, and about the political, aesthetic, and social concerns of the Surrealists, Expressionists, and other literary figures during the 1920s and 1930s. Man from Babel both enriches and challenges our view of international modernism and the historical avant-garde.Born in New Jersey of immigrant parents, Jolas moved back to France with them at the age of two. He grew up in the borderland of Lorraine and later lived in Paris, Berlin, London, and New York, where he pursued a career as a journalist and aspiring poet. As an American press officer after the war, Jolas was actively involved in the denazification of German intellectual life. A champion of the international avant-garde, he continually sought translinguistic, transcultural, and suprapolitical bridges that would transform Western culture into a unified continuum. Compiled and edited from Jolas’s drafts and illustrated with contemporary photographs, this memoir not only reveals the multicultural concerns of the man from Babel, as Jolas saw himself, but also illuminates an entire literary and historical era.

Among the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the German movement remains one of the least understood in the current avant-garde and modernism debates. Rainer Rumold fills this gap with a first large-scale reassessment of the heyday and afterlife of German expressionist and Dada productions as a prolonged crisis of literary culture. Mapping avant-garde activity in Germany in a series of critical constellations from roughly 1918 to the post-World War II period, Rumold divides its history into three phases: the ""revolt"" of contradictory discourses in the teens and twenties; the conservative reversal vs. a radicalized anti-art stance of the avant-garde in exile; and the ""post-avant-garde."" The latter is viewed as a unique step toward the postmodern represented in the late (postfascist) work of the once-radical expressionist Gottfried Benn and that of the neo-avant-gardists Helmut Heissenbuttel and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Throughout, Rumold notes a symptomatic oscillation between the avant-garde's wish to abolish ""art"" and the apotheosis of art as a form of redemption - the ""Janus face"" of his title. In highly original readings of Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, George Grosz, and others, he shows us a German avant-garde less opposed to the wholesale destruction of bourgeois tradition than its European counterparts and more committed to finding new ways for artworks to function within the modernist sphere. A major study of material that should be widely known in the U.S., Rumold's work is essential to an understanding of German politics and culture, as well as modern poetry, fiction, and the visual arts.

Brutt, or The Sighing Gardens is the hallucinatory tale of an obsessive writer's love affair late in life as told through the daily journal entries of the writer - a montage of relentless observation interspersed with found materials from newspaper articles, literature, and private correspondence. The process of aging and the process of writing are two persistent and carefully intertwined themes, though it is apparent that plot and theme are subordinate to the linguistic experiments that Friederike Mayrocker performs as she explores them. Mayrocker is known for crossing the boundaries of literary forms and in her prose work she creates a hypnotic, slurred narrative stream that is formally seamless while simultaneously overstepping all the bounds of grammar and style. She is always exploring the experimental potential of language, seeking a re-ordering of the world through a re-ordering of words. Her multilayered texts are reminiscent of the traditions of Surrealism and Dadaism and display influences from the works of Beckett, Holderlin, Freud, and Barthes. Yet, much of Mayrocker's writing simply has no corollary and the experience of reading Roslyn Theobald's brilliant translation grants the English-speaking audience an unforgettable encounter with this completely original work.

Archaeologies of Modernity explores the shift from the powerful tradition of literary forms of Bildung—the education of the individual as the self—to the visual forms of “Bildung” (from Bild) that characterize German modernism and the European avant-garde. Interrelated chapters examine the work of Franz Kafka, Jean/Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein, and of artists such as Oskar Kokoschka or Kurt Schwitters, in the light of the surge of an autoformation (Bildung) of verbal and visual images at the core of expressionist and surrealist aesthetics and the art that followed. In this first scholarly focus on modernist avant-garde Bildung in its entwinement of conceptual modernity with forms of the archaic, Rumold resituates the significance of the poet and art theorist Einstein and his work on the language of primitivism and the visual imagination. Archaeologies of Modernity is a major reconsideration of the conception of the modernist project and will be of interest to scholars across the disciplines.