EuROpEAN
AvaNT-gARDE
NEW PERSPECTIVES
This collection of critical essays is designed
to lay the foundations for a new theory of the European avant-garde. It starts
from the assumption that not one all-embracing intention of all avant-garde
movements - i.e. the intention of "reintegrating art into the practice of life"
(Peter Bürger) - but the challenge of new cultural technologies, in particular
photography and cinema, constitutes the main driving force of the formation
and further development of the avant-garde. This approach permits the establishment of
a theoretical framework that takes into account the diversity of artistic aims
and directions of the various art movements and encourages a wide and open exploration
of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist
innovations.
Following the theoretical foundation of the new
approach, individual contributions have concentrated on a diverse range of avant-gardist
concepts, trends and manifestations from cubist painting and the literary work
of Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein to the screeching voices of futurism, dadaist
photomontage and film, surrealist photographs and sculptures and neo-avant-gardist
theories as developed by the French group OuLiPo. The volume closes with new
insights gained from placing the avant-garde in the contexts of literary institutions
and psychoanalytical and sociological concepts.
The main body of the volume is based on presentations
and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at Yale University, New
Haven, in February 2000. The research group formed on this occasion has continued
with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde over
recent years.
Please click on the following hyperlinks in order
to view their contents or related abstracts.
Preface
I. Rewriting the Theory of the Avant-Garde
Dietrich Scheunemann
On Photography and Painting. Prolegomena to a New
Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Stephen C. Foster
Dada and the Constitution of Culture: (Re-)Conceptualising
the Avant-Garde.
Bernd Kiefer
Crucial Moments, Crucial Points: Walter Benjamin
and the Recognition of Modernity in the Light of the Avant-Garde.
II. Innovations and Manifestations of the Avant-Garde
Ian Revie
Apollinaire and Cubist Innovation: Resetting the
Frontiers, Changing the Paradigm.
Dietrich Scheunemann
Cubist Painting, Automatic Writing and the Poetry
of Gertrude Stein.
H. Martin Puchner
Screeching Voices: Avant-Garde Manifestos in the
Cabaret.
David
Macrae
Painterly Concepts and Filmic Objects: The Interaction
of Expression and Reproduction in Early Avant-Garde Film.
Mara de Gennaro
The World "Outside of Fiction": Georges Bataille
and Surrealist Photography and Sculpture.
John E. Bowlt
Inside Out: Pavel Filonov and the Anatomy of Fantasy.
Edward Lintz
Difficiles Nuage: Gertrude Stein, OuLiPo and the
Grammar of the Avant-Garde.
III. Avant-Garde in Context
Klaus Beekman
The Selection of Avant-Garde Poetry for Anthologies.
Katherine Swarbrick
Avant-Garde Productions and Psychoanalytic Theory.
The Story of an Encounter.
Ben Highmore
Awkward Moments: Avant-Gardism and the Dialectics
of Everyday Life.
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