Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies – serie

Must poetic form be, as Yeats demanded, "full, sphere-like, single," or can it accommodate the impurities Yeats and his Modernist generation found so problematic? Sixty years later, these are still open questions, questions Marjorie Perloff addresses in these essays.

Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism collects, updates, integrates and contextualizes the critic Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard's topic in all of these essays is the modernist writers', artists', and philosophers' linguistic and visual responses to a changed sense of reality and human nature. Beginning with an overview of the problematics of European modernism, Sheppard establishes the dialectical relationship between the cultural crisis that occurred during the period 1880-1936 and the different responses from European modernists and the avant-garde. With its combination of classic and new essays and its perspective on the theoretical avant-garde/modernism debate in the United States, Sheppard's volume should give the specialist as well as the general reader an insight into the highest sample of European scholarly discourse on this subject.

This is an investigation of modern British poetry and the ""death"" of that poetry in American critical circles. This text explores the complex relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging reductive American views of a British poetry dominated by anti-modernism while discussing the role of rhetoric's of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views. Devoting its most extensive commentary to an eclectic collection of British modernist and postmodernist poets including Joseph Gordon Macleod, Basil Bunting, Mina Loy, Roy Fisher, and Peter Riley, the book attacks the relegation of British poetry to the zones of the quaint and antiquarian, making a compelling case for renewed engagements with fields of British poetry deserving attention they have not received.

This study, first published in 1981, argues that the map of modernist poetry needs to be redrawn so as to include a central tradition that cannot properly be located within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition that dominated the early-20th century. Marjorie Perloff traces this tradition from its early ""French connection"" in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern ""landscapes without depth"" as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.

A critical look at the historical and cultural implications of Alfred Jarry's pseudoscience, pataphysics 'Pataphysics, what Alfred Jarry calls ""the science of imaginary solutions,"" has until now gone largely ignored by literary scholars, due in part to its academic frivolity and hermetic perversity. Nevertheless, this capricious philosophy has inspired nearly one hundred years of avant-garde experimentation. Christian Bok redresses this critical omission by tracing the tangled history of pataphysics, discussing the tension between science and poetics, in order to demonstrate that pataphysics constitutes an intrinsic, but neglected, cornerstone of postmodernity itself. Bok examines the work of Jarry, arguing that it represents a humorous addendum to the philosophy of Nietzsche, while also considering the influence of 'pataphysics upon the poetic legacy of the twentieth century, particularly the work of Italian Futurists, French Oulipians, and Canadian Jarryites. Bok resorts to the radical poetics of such contemporary philosophers as Delauze, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Serres in order to explicate the 'pataphysical relationship between rationalism and its discontents. Bok draws on a wide range of reading in poetry and theory to establish a firm historical ground for understanding the influence of 'pataphysics - all the while making a variety of seemingly difficult or obscure material accessible in a surprisingly charming and poetic manner. A long overdue critical look at a significant strain of the twentieth-century avant-garde, his book raises important historical, cultural, and theoretical issues germane to the production and reception of poetry, how we think about it, how we write it, how we read it, and what sorts of claims it makes upon our understanding.

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.

A poet takes another's text, excises this, prints over that, cancels, erases, rearranges, defaces--and generally renders the original unreadable, at least in its original terms. What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work.In his scrutiny of selected works, and with reference to a rich variety of textual materials--from popular and scientific texts to visual art, political and cultural theories, and experimental films--Dworkin proposes a new way of apprehending the radical formalism of so-called unreadable texts. Dworkin unveils what he describes as "the politics of the poem"--what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, and implicit in the philosophy of language; how it positions its reader; and other questions relating to the poem as material object. In doing so, he exposes the mechanics and function of truly radical formalism as a practice that move beyond aesthetic considerations into the realms of politics and ideology. Reading the Illegible asks us to reconsider poetry as a physical act, and helps us to see how the range of a text's linguistic and political maneuvers depends to a great extent on the material conditions of reading and writing as well as the mechanics of reproduction.

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.

A generous introduction to one of the key literary figures to emerge from Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century, this book offers English-speaking readers an ample selection of this prodigious writer's celebrated poetry and widely influential critical work. As a poet and as a cofounder of the renowned group Noigandres. Haroldo de Campos made a unique and substantial contribution to the theory and practice of experimental writing, particularly the form known as concrete poetry, and to the Latin American avant-garde as a whole. These contributions, acclaimed worldwide by figures such as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Octavio Paz, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, include poetry selections ranging from de Campos' early work before concretism through his most recent production, and theoretical texts that trace his evolution as a critic from an early interest in baroque and modernist writers to his development of an innovative model for reading, translating, and writing. This second, critical section of the book includes de Campos' encounters with the tasks of translating and reading some of the most important texts of Eastern and Western culture - from Ecclesiastes to the No play Hagoromo, from Dante to Paz - thus charting a genealogy of modern literature.

Oyvind Fahlstrom (1928-76), the Brazilian-born Swedish multi-artist, is one of the mid-twentieth century's most intriguing cultural figures. His work, as profoundly political as it is aesthetic, spans two tumultuous decades in the avant-garde world and comprises concrete poetry (his own innovation), manifestos, plays, performance, filmmaking, paintings, multiple prints, sculpture and installations. Initially poorly received in Sweden and little appreciated in the English-speaking world, Fahlstrom's role as one of the creators of concrete poetry is now increasingly recognized worldwide.The first study to give this major twentieth-century artist his due, this book serves as both an informative and entertaining introduction to Oyvind Fahlstrom and a valuable critical analysis of some of his most important works. ""Oyvind Fahlstrom: The Art of Writing"" focuses on how Fahlstrom's early experiments with concrete poetry influenced his later work in the visual arts and offers a close reading of the seminal work ""Bord"", the series of paintings ""Ade-Ledic-Nander"", the radio play ""Birds in Sweden"", the interactive painting ""The Painting"" (based on Natalie Sarraute's novel ""Le planetarium""), and the series of game-paintings based on the board game Monopoly. Bessa's ""Oyvind Fahlstrom"" is without precedent or parallel as an overview of Fahlstrom's art, an assessment of his place in twentieth-century cultural history, and an examination of trends and movements, such as concretism, in which he figures large.

Interruption is often read as the foundational gesture of modernity - the means through which modernity asserts its existence by claiming its discontinuity with the past. Exposing the limitations of such an understanding, this book offers a very different approach: here, modernity is the site that poses the question of how we are to continue when every attempt to think and understand the present is marked by the necessity of an interruption. Through a reading of Walter Benjamin's writings - particularly on interruption, fashion, and Jugendstil (or Art Nouveau) - Andrew Benjamin in this work offers a sustained meditation on the role of interruption in modernity. His book departs from and elaborates an important but overlooked dimension of Benjamin's discourse: the question of style as it bears upon temporality and spatiality. Extending this meditation in exciting and unexpected ways - toward problems of cosmopolitanism, immigration, and the graphically pornographic, for instance - the author is able to translate Benjamin's multifaceted formulations on style, the dialectical image, awakening, temporality, and spatiality into lucid and highly intelligent stylistics underscoring the philosophical notions of Schein and Erscheining, the interruptions of modernity, and the politics of sameness and otherness. Nothing less than a rethinking of the conditions of Western art as it relates to politics, architecture, and time, this study of Walter Benjamin's modernity in temporal and spatial terms is a provocative and original work of philosophy in its own right - a work that suggests that the time has come to revise existing paradigms.

All the time when I lived in Algeria, my native country, I dreamt of one day arriving in Algeria. Born in Oran, Algeria, Helene Cixous spent her childhood in France's former colony. ""Reveries of the Wild Woman"" is her visceral memoir of a preadolescence that shaped her with intense feelings of alienation, yet also contributed, in a paradoxically essential way, to her development as a writer and philosopher. Born to a French father and an Austro-German mother, both Jews, Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crisis. In her moving story she recounts how small events - a new dog, the gift of a bicycle - reverberate decades later as symbols filled with social and psychological meaning. She and her family endure a double alienation, by Algerians for being French and by the French for being Jewish, and Cixous builds her story on the themes of isolation and exclusion she felt in particular under the Vichy government and during the Algerian Civil War. Yet she also concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her a longing for her home country, and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought. A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, ""Reveries of the Wild Woman"" is also a poignant recollection of how a girl's childhood is, indeed, author to the woman.

In this memoir-novel, a narrator who resembles Helene Cixous obsessively recounts an incident - the premature death of her first-born child, a Down syndrome baby left in the care of the clinic in Algeria where her midwife mother works. She uses this event to probe her family history and her relationship with her mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany; her dead father, after whom the baby is named; and her medical-student brother, who takes on some of the duties of a father figure. Cixous's elusive writing bears all the trademarks of her poetic, provocative style, vivid with word play, intense feeling and a stream-of-consciousness that moves freely over time and place. The narrator's mother claims not to remember what happened, and the brother tries to fill in some gaps in the story. By the end of the book we understand the significance of the title: one day Cixous's mother returned to the clinic to find the baby on the brink of death. Rather than attempt to save him she chose to end his suffering. By closing the door to the imaginary clinic at the end, the narrator at last resolves the feelings of guilt and realizes that each human being has a fate they must endure. Informed by psychoanalytical theory, and always brutally honest, ""The Day I Wasn't There"" is above all an intimate study of a woman's inner landscape.

Nazi Germany's book burnings, its campaign against ""degenerate art,"" and its persecution of experimental artists pushed the avant-garde to the brink of extinction. How the avant-garde came back, finding a new purpose in the wake of the war, is the subject of ""Visions of Violence"". An extreme faction of aesthetic modernity intent on bulldozing contemporary life, the avant-garde has regularly employed visions of violence in their push for societal and cultural renewal. But in the shadow of unparalleled war and genocide, such aesthetic violence lost its force. This book explores the reconfiguration of the avant-garde in response to the violent transformation of European reality. Citing the emergence of independent avant-garde practitioners in the place of the previous collective, Richard Langston considers six individual exemplars of Germany's post-fascist avant-garde - works that span the last six decades: painter, writer, and filmmaker Peter Weiss' appropriation of French surrealism in the fifties; writer Dieter Wellershoff's coterie of ""new realists""; artist WolfVostell's mediation and conflation of the experiences of the Auschwitz trials and the Vietnam War; poet and novelist Dieter Brinkmann's collages from the seventies; the multimedia displacements of Alexander Kluge; and the performative engagements of dramatists Christoph Schlingensief and Rene Pollesch. Taking stock of the evolution of Germany's post-fascist avant-gardes, Langston's book shows how the movement from Weiss to Pollesch exhibits the problems that both modernity and postmodernity pose for an aesthetic engagement of Germany's violent past.

Reading and rewriting our understanding of the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, this truly revisionary work identifies a significant counter-tradition in twentieth-century poetry. Postmodernism, Ming-Qian Ma argues, does not so much follow from modernism as coexist with it, with postmodernists employing the anarchic poetics introduced by Gertrude Stein in countering the rationalist method of high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma's book traces a continuity of thought and practice through the very different poetic work of objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and John Cage and language poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and Charles Bernstein. His deft individual readings provide an opening into this notoriously difficult work, even as his larger critique reveals a new and clarifying perspective on American modernist and postmodernist avant-garde poetics. Ma shows how we cannot understand these poets according to the usual way of reading but must see how they deliberately use redundancy, unpredictability, and irrationality to undermine the meaning-oriented foundations of American modernism - and to force a new and different kind of reading.With its unusually clear explanation of the philosophy informing postmodern practice, and its unique insights into some of the more interesting and vexing poets of our time, this book points to a reading of an important strain of postmodern American poetry that is likely to develop well into the twenty-first century.

This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial 'compositions' - verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematic - of the avant-gardes in the period following World War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar avant-gardes and their works. The book's geographical span is primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach, it comprehends an international context of American postwar cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as 'the free world'.The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the so-called neo - avant-garde with its inherent contradiction: an avant-garde whose newness is defined by its seeming reiteration of an earlier historical formation. Concentrating on the rhetorical, contextual, and performative characteristic of neo - avant-garde practice, including its relation to politics, Miller emphasizes the centrality of the example in this practice. John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, and Samuel Beckett are among the artists whose exemplary works feature in ""Singular Examples"".Miller's key readings of these major artists of the period open up some of the most difficult texts of the neo - avant-garde even as they contribute to an eloquent argument for 'artistic politics'. Underlining the relation between material particulars and their thematic implications, between particular works and larger theoretical claims, between avant-garde aesthetics and formalist analysis, ""Singular Examples"" is exemplary in its own right, revealing the ultimate shape and direction of a postwar avant-garde contending with the historical predicaments of radical modernism.

This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial 'compositions' - verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematic - of the avant-gardes in the period following World War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar avant-gardes and their works. The book's geographical span is primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach, it comprehends an international context of American postwar cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as 'the free world'.The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the so-called neo - avant-garde with its inherent contradiction: an avant-garde whose newness is defined by its seeming reiteration of an earlier historical formation. Concentrating on the rhetorical, contextual, and performative characteristic of neo - avant-garde practice, including its relation to politics, Miller emphasizes the centrality of the example in this practice. John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, and Samuel Beckett are among the artists whose exemplary works feature in ""Singular Examples"".Miller's key readings of these major artists of the period open up some of the most difficult texts of the neo - avant-garde even as they contribute to an eloquent argument for 'artistic politics'. Underlining the relation between material particulars and their thematic implications, between particular works and larger theoretical claims, between avant-garde aesthetics and formalist analysis, ""Singular Examples"" is exemplary in its own right, revealing the ultimate shape and direction of a postwar avant-garde contending with the historical predicaments of radical modernism.

The first extensive examination of Stein's notebooks, manuscripts and letters, prepared over a period of twenty years, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises asks new questions and explores new ways of reading Stein. This definitive study give us a finely detailed, deeply felt understanding of Stein, the great modernist, throughout one of her most productive periods. From "An Elucidation" in 1923 to Lectures In America in 1934, Ulla E. Dydo examines the process of the making and remaking of Stein's texts as they move from notepad to notebook to manuscript, from an idea to the ultimate refinement of the author's intentions. The result is an unprecedented view of the development of Stein's work, word by word, text by text, and over time.