Steven Lee
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231173520
- eISBN:
- 9780231540117
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231173520.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination ...
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During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called “the magic pilgrimage” to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. The Ethnic Avant-Garde draws on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an “ethnic avant-garde.” These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an “Afro-Cuban” voice; Langston Hughes’s translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway’s first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.Less
During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called “the magic pilgrimage” to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. The Ethnic Avant-Garde draws on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an “ethnic avant-garde.” These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an “Afro-Cuban” voice; Langston Hughes’s translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway’s first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.
Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784991500
- eISBN:
- 9781526115003
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784991500.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting ...
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Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.
Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.Less
Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.
Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.
Barnaby Haran
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719097225
- eISBN:
- 9781526109705
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719097225.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Watching the red dawn charts the responses of the American avant-garde to the cultural works of its Soviet counterpart in period from the formation of the USSR in 1922 to recognition of this new ...
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Watching the red dawn charts the responses of the American avant-garde to the cultural works of its Soviet counterpart in period from the formation of the USSR in 1922 to recognition of this new communist nation by USA in 1933. In this period American artists, writers, and designers looked at the emerging Soviet Union with fascination, as they observed this epochal experiment in communism develop out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. They organised exhibitions of Soviet art and culture, reported on visits to Russia in books and articles, and produced works that were inspired by post-revolutionary culture. One of the most important innovations of Soviet culture was to collapse boundaries between disciplines, as part of a general aim to bring art into everyday life. Correspondingly, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach by looking at American avant-garde responses to Soviet culture across several media, including architecture, theatre, film, photography, and literature. As such, Watching the red dawn considers the putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ by examining the interconnected ways in which Constructivist works were influential upon American practices.Less
Watching the red dawn charts the responses of the American avant-garde to the cultural works of its Soviet counterpart in period from the formation of the USSR in 1922 to recognition of this new communist nation by USA in 1933. In this period American artists, writers, and designers looked at the emerging Soviet Union with fascination, as they observed this epochal experiment in communism develop out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. They organised exhibitions of Soviet art and culture, reported on visits to Russia in books and articles, and produced works that were inspired by post-revolutionary culture. One of the most important innovations of Soviet culture was to collapse boundaries between disciplines, as part of a general aim to bring art into everyday life. Correspondingly, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach by looking at American avant-garde responses to Soviet culture across several media, including architecture, theatre, film, photography, and literature. As such, Watching the red dawn considers the putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ by examining the interconnected ways in which Constructivist works were influential upon American practices.
Allan Pero and Gyllian Phillips (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813054421
- eISBN:
- 9780813053165
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813054421.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Edith Sitwell was a key figure in the establishment of a British avant-garde “scene” and in the development of a unique literary expression. Taken together, each of the contributors gives body to a ...
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Edith Sitwell was a key figure in the establishment of a British avant-garde “scene” and in the development of a unique literary expression. Taken together, each of the contributors gives body to a serious reconsideration, even resurrection, of Sitwell's important place in British modernism. Overall, this book makes a place for the lost story of Sitwellism in modernist history. It shows how her place in that history depends on a continual public and private remaking of self. Further, this book gives substance to the type of avant-garde that she (and her brothers) worked to craft—ornamental and baroque—by exploring the affective traces it produced in melancholic camp and her notion of female poetry. Finally, it demonstrates some ways in which that effect also includes and even invites engagement with socio-historical discourses of class, gender, and empire. Altogether, this volume opens the way for a long and rich reconsideration of this crucial, central figure of British modernism.Less
Edith Sitwell was a key figure in the establishment of a British avant-garde “scene” and in the development of a unique literary expression. Taken together, each of the contributors gives body to a serious reconsideration, even resurrection, of Sitwell's important place in British modernism. Overall, this book makes a place for the lost story of Sitwellism in modernist history. It shows how her place in that history depends on a continual public and private remaking of self. Further, this book gives substance to the type of avant-garde that she (and her brothers) worked to craft—ornamental and baroque—by exploring the affective traces it produced in melancholic camp and her notion of female poetry. Finally, it demonstrates some ways in which that effect also includes and even invites engagement with socio-historical discourses of class, gender, and empire. Altogether, this volume opens the way for a long and rich reconsideration of this crucial, central figure of British modernism.
Benjamin R. Levy
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199381999
- eISBN:
- 9780199382019
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199381999.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Theory, Analysis, Composition
In the 1950s and 1960s György Ligeti went through a remarkable transition from writing music in the style of Bartók to working at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. Through careful study of the ...
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In the 1950s and 1960s György Ligeti went through a remarkable transition from writing music in the style of Bartók to working at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. Through careful study of the sketches and drafts, as well as analysis of the finished scores, Metamorphosis in Music takes a detailed look at this compositional evolution. The book begins with Ligeti’s synthesis of folk music and modernism in Musica ricercata and continues through the turn of the 1970s, examining nearly every major work as well as numerous unpublished studies. It shows Ligeti’s early discovery of twelve-tone technique, the influence of electronic music on his orchestral writing, and his involvement with the absurdist Fluxus group, and it argues that the repertoire of techniques he developed in this experimental period was incrementally codified into the composer’s personal style in the mid- and late 1960s. The conclusion looks at Ligeti’s approach to form and expression at the turn of the 1970s, when one phase of his metamorphosis had run its course, and the new challenge of composing an opera loomed on the horizon. Throughout the book, sketch study works alongside comments from interviews—counterbalancing the composer’s crafted public narrative, revealing hidden influences, lingering attachments, and insights into the creative process, and ultimately helping complete the picture of how he found his voice in a generation straddling the divide between the modern and postmodern eras.Less
In the 1950s and 1960s György Ligeti went through a remarkable transition from writing music in the style of Bartók to working at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. Through careful study of the sketches and drafts, as well as analysis of the finished scores, Metamorphosis in Music takes a detailed look at this compositional evolution. The book begins with Ligeti’s synthesis of folk music and modernism in Musica ricercata and continues through the turn of the 1970s, examining nearly every major work as well as numerous unpublished studies. It shows Ligeti’s early discovery of twelve-tone technique, the influence of electronic music on his orchestral writing, and his involvement with the absurdist Fluxus group, and it argues that the repertoire of techniques he developed in this experimental period was incrementally codified into the composer’s personal style in the mid- and late 1960s. The conclusion looks at Ligeti’s approach to form and expression at the turn of the 1970s, when one phase of his metamorphosis had run its course, and the new challenge of composing an opera loomed on the horizon. Throughout the book, sketch study works alongside comments from interviews—counterbalancing the composer’s crafted public narrative, revealing hidden influences, lingering attachments, and insights into the creative process, and ultimately helping complete the picture of how he found his voice in a generation straddling the divide between the modern and postmodern eras.
Adrian May
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786940438
- eISBN:
- 9781789629118
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786940438.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Lignes is introduced as the most useful review through which to provide a narrative of French intellectual culture and the preservation of French Theory (or la pensée 68) since the 1980s. After a ...
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Lignes is introduced as the most useful review through which to provide a narrative of French intellectual culture and the preservation of French Theory (or la pensée 68) since the 1980s. After a brief introduction to both intellectuals and reviews, a history of the significant developments in French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century is provided. The methodological approach to Lignes and its editor Michel Surya is then delineated, and the book is situated between intellectual, cultural history approaches and previous studies of periodical publications before a summary of the coming chapters is provided.Less
Lignes is introduced as the most useful review through which to provide a narrative of French intellectual culture and the preservation of French Theory (or la pensée 68) since the 1980s. After a brief introduction to both intellectuals and reviews, a history of the significant developments in French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century is provided. The methodological approach to Lignes and its editor Michel Surya is then delineated, and the book is situated between intellectual, cultural history approaches and previous studies of periodical publications before a summary of the coming chapters is provided.
Regina Galasso
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941121
- eISBN:
- 9781789629354
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941121.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This part studies the New York prose and poetry of José Moreno Villa, one of the most overlooked cultural figures of twentieth-century Iberian Studies. As a gateway to the context surrounding Moreno ...
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This part studies the New York prose and poetry of José Moreno Villa, one of the most overlooked cultural figures of twentieth-century Iberian Studies. As a gateway to the context surrounding Moreno Villa's New York, this part begins with a prefatory discussion of Federico García Lorca and his epistolary writing in which he assesses travel to New York as one of the most useful experiences of his life while also repeatedly noting the continuous linguistic negotiations surrounding him while in the city. Then, this part introduces Moreno Villa and the fruits of his transatlantic travel: Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) and Jacinta la pelirroja (1929). Overall, it argues that Moreno Villa's past experiences coupled with his vulnerable linguistic position, as a result of travel, tuned him in the languages of photography, jazz, and the careful use of Spanish, English, and other languages. In doing so, this part proposes that Moreno Villa's literary New York brought his readers more than a superficial experience but one that introduced new discourses and considerations of language and its relationship to other media.Less
This part studies the New York prose and poetry of José Moreno Villa, one of the most overlooked cultural figures of twentieth-century Iberian Studies. As a gateway to the context surrounding Moreno Villa's New York, this part begins with a prefatory discussion of Federico García Lorca and his epistolary writing in which he assesses travel to New York as one of the most useful experiences of his life while also repeatedly noting the continuous linguistic negotiations surrounding him while in the city. Then, this part introduces Moreno Villa and the fruits of his transatlantic travel: Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) and Jacinta la pelirroja (1929). Overall, it argues that Moreno Villa's past experiences coupled with his vulnerable linguistic position, as a result of travel, tuned him in the languages of photography, jazz, and the careful use of Spanish, English, and other languages. In doing so, this part proposes that Moreno Villa's literary New York brought his readers more than a superficial experience but one that introduced new discourses and considerations of language and its relationship to other media.
Barnaby Haran
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719097225
- eISBN:
- 9781526109705
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719097225.003.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter sets up the book by considering another of introductory themes. ‘The red Atlantic’ involves an American-Russian transnationational interchange across several media in relation to the ...
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This chapter sets up the book by considering another of introductory themes. ‘The red Atlantic’ involves an American-Russian transnationational interchange across several media in relation to the aesthetic of the machine as a signifier of the influence of American technology on Soviet communism. For the Soviets, America represented the means to construct communism in the USSR, albeit without a capitalist economy. It asserts the need to think beyond the Franco-American paradigm as a means of figuring the emergent radical culture of the 1930s. The putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ mainly involved cultural interrelations of American communists and Soviet counterparts. Finally, there is a consideration of methodology including assessments of transnationalism, Interdisciplinarity, and the avant-garde.Less
This chapter sets up the book by considering another of introductory themes. ‘The red Atlantic’ involves an American-Russian transnationational interchange across several media in relation to the aesthetic of the machine as a signifier of the influence of American technology on Soviet communism. For the Soviets, America represented the means to construct communism in the USSR, albeit without a capitalist economy. It asserts the need to think beyond the Franco-American paradigm as a means of figuring the emergent radical culture of the 1930s. The putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ mainly involved cultural interrelations of American communists and Soviet counterparts. Finally, there is a consideration of methodology including assessments of transnationalism, Interdisciplinarity, and the avant-garde.
Leah Modigliani
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526101198
- eISBN:
- 9781526135957
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526101198.003.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
The central argument of the book is introduced; that the counter-tradition Jeff Wall helped develop with other artists in Vancouver has included a gendered bifurcation of space since its earliest ...
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The central argument of the book is introduced; that the counter-tradition Jeff Wall helped develop with other artists in Vancouver has included a gendered bifurcation of space since its earliest incarnation in 1970 as the "defeatured landscape." The introduction contains brief descriptions of Wall and his peers’ early work in relation to Wall’s international position as leader of the Vancouver School of Photo-Conceptualism; a brief discussion of existing theory about the development of avant-garde movements; and the necessity of understanding the avant-garde in the context of wider social contests of power, in particular settler colonial control over land and male control over women’s bodies and representations of them. The introduction also summarizes the need to intervene in current histories of avant-garde practice, dominant narratives that continue to frame male artists achievements in formal terms divested of the power dynamics that engender them or result from them.Less
The central argument of the book is introduced; that the counter-tradition Jeff Wall helped develop with other artists in Vancouver has included a gendered bifurcation of space since its earliest incarnation in 1970 as the "defeatured landscape." The introduction contains brief descriptions of Wall and his peers’ early work in relation to Wall’s international position as leader of the Vancouver School of Photo-Conceptualism; a brief discussion of existing theory about the development of avant-garde movements; and the necessity of understanding the avant-garde in the context of wider social contests of power, in particular settler colonial control over land and male control over women’s bodies and representations of them. The introduction also summarizes the need to intervene in current histories of avant-garde practice, dominant narratives that continue to frame male artists achievements in formal terms divested of the power dynamics that engender them or result from them.
Phil Ford
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199939916
- eISBN:
- 9780199354467
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199939916.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, Popular, History, American
In “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer gave hipness a philosophy and a manifesto. Mailer, along with many other figures in the 20th-century avant garde, believed that sound not only represents but ...
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In “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer gave hipness a philosophy and a manifesto. Mailer, along with many other figures in the 20th-century avant garde, believed that sound not only represents but embodies concrete experience, and that it has a unique power to actualize the energetic processes of human life in its listeners. “The White Negro” and his novel An American Dream articulate a strain of postwar radical critique for which it is abstraction from life that has resulted in the totalitarian horrors of modernity, and they outline a program of Existential liberation in which sound is the medium for the exchange of human energies. For Mailer, writing is a quasi-musical project, an attempt to create a literary “sound” that, like a musical performance, issues from risky endeavors whose outcomes are never known in advance.Less
In “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer gave hipness a philosophy and a manifesto. Mailer, along with many other figures in the 20th-century avant garde, believed that sound not only represents but embodies concrete experience, and that it has a unique power to actualize the energetic processes of human life in its listeners. “The White Negro” and his novel An American Dream articulate a strain of postwar radical critique for which it is abstraction from life that has resulted in the totalitarian horrors of modernity, and they outline a program of Existential liberation in which sound is the medium for the exchange of human energies. For Mailer, writing is a quasi-musical project, an attempt to create a literary “sound” that, like a musical performance, issues from risky endeavors whose outcomes are never known in advance.
Sarah M. Pourciau
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823275625
- eISBN:
- 9780823277179
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823275625.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Five unfolds the startling consequences of this Wagnerian harmony theory both for the development of avant-garde poetic principles (particularly in France and Russia), and for the concurrent, ...
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Chapter Five unfolds the startling consequences of this Wagnerian harmony theory both for the development of avant-garde poetic principles (particularly in France and Russia), and for the concurrent, late-19th century emergence of a new discipline called “psychophysiology” (a forerunner of modern-day experimental psychology). It argues that the widely received theories of Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, and their followers, strive to translate the nature-philosophical “energy” of Wagner’s sounding spirit into a natural-scientific dialect of countable psychic vibrations and measurable psychic “tones.” The result is a new model of language science and a new understanding of poetics, which together both fulfill and pervert the thrust of their early 19th century predecessors.Less
Chapter Five unfolds the startling consequences of this Wagnerian harmony theory both for the development of avant-garde poetic principles (particularly in France and Russia), and for the concurrent, late-19th century emergence of a new discipline called “psychophysiology” (a forerunner of modern-day experimental psychology). It argues that the widely received theories of Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, and their followers, strive to translate the nature-philosophical “energy” of Wagner’s sounding spirit into a natural-scientific dialect of countable psychic vibrations and measurable psychic “tones.” The result is a new model of language science and a new understanding of poetics, which together both fulfill and pervert the thrust of their early 19th century predecessors.
Christophe Wall-Romana
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245482
- eISBN:
- 9780823252527
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245482.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
How have poets writing in French reacted and adapted to cinema? This book answers with original analyses of over a century of remediation experiments among poets ranging from Mallarmé to Alferi, ...
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How have poets writing in French reacted and adapted to cinema? This book answers with original analyses of over a century of remediation experiments among poets ranging from Mallarmé to Alferi, Hillel-Erlanger to Isou, and Cocteau to Damas and Gleize. ‘Cinepoetry’ names a disseminated but insistent practice of writing poetry under the inspiring warp of films, movie culture, the scenario form and cinema as actual or imaginary apparatus. Poets were struck by the essential feature of cinema--automorphosis—making it the first artificial form capable of reshaping itself like fluids and organic bodies. Far from marginal, cinepoetry forces us to reassess central tenets of modernism and the avant-garde, such as the inception of Surrealism and Lettrism, or the relation of Symbolism to visual technologies. Arguing that the mutation of the Romantic imagination into the ‘imaginary’ was hastened by cinepoetic thought, the book provides a new genealogy for poetry in the age of new media based on what is often lacking in remediation studies: close analyses of a large and diverse corpus of works, and the identification of a specific set of cross-medium operations. This book reconfigures key binaries within the interdisciplinary landscape of today's humanities: the canon and the margins, literature and cinema, text and image, close reading and post-technological hermeneutics, old vs. new media, prose poems vs. visual poems, text-based poetry vs. digital poetry. It also engages with the place of cinema in the thought of Jean Epstein, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault among others.Less
How have poets writing in French reacted and adapted to cinema? This book answers with original analyses of over a century of remediation experiments among poets ranging from Mallarmé to Alferi, Hillel-Erlanger to Isou, and Cocteau to Damas and Gleize. ‘Cinepoetry’ names a disseminated but insistent practice of writing poetry under the inspiring warp of films, movie culture, the scenario form and cinema as actual or imaginary apparatus. Poets were struck by the essential feature of cinema--automorphosis—making it the first artificial form capable of reshaping itself like fluids and organic bodies. Far from marginal, cinepoetry forces us to reassess central tenets of modernism and the avant-garde, such as the inception of Surrealism and Lettrism, or the relation of Symbolism to visual technologies. Arguing that the mutation of the Romantic imagination into the ‘imaginary’ was hastened by cinepoetic thought, the book provides a new genealogy for poetry in the age of new media based on what is often lacking in remediation studies: close analyses of a large and diverse corpus of works, and the identification of a specific set of cross-medium operations. This book reconfigures key binaries within the interdisciplinary landscape of today's humanities: the canon and the margins, literature and cinema, text and image, close reading and post-technological hermeneutics, old vs. new media, prose poems vs. visual poems, text-based poetry vs. digital poetry. It also engages with the place of cinema in the thought of Jean Epstein, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault among others.
Tom Walker
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526100566
- eISBN:
- 9781526132321
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526100566.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas ...
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This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas circulating in the magazine X: A Quarterly Review and among the coterie (Patrick Swift, Anthony Cronin and others) involved in its production – with whom McGahern had considerable contact leading up to and following his first appearance in print in the magazine. This context is accessed through fresh archival research, including drawing on some previously un-discussed correspondence between the editors, and their patrons and contributors. This is also aligned to broader theoretical and historical perspectives on the relationship between the abstract and the actual within visual and literary modernism, as well as the post-war fate of modernism and the avant-garde.Less
This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas circulating in the magazine X: A Quarterly Review and among the coterie (Patrick Swift, Anthony Cronin and others) involved in its production – with whom McGahern had considerable contact leading up to and following his first appearance in print in the magazine. This context is accessed through fresh archival research, including drawing on some previously un-discussed correspondence between the editors, and their patrons and contributors. This is also aligned to broader theoretical and historical perspectives on the relationship between the abstract and the actual within visual and literary modernism, as well as the post-war fate of modernism and the avant-garde.
Ignacio Infante
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823251780
- eISBN:
- 9780823252831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251780.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different ...
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This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different avant-garde groups in Paris (cubism) and in Madrid (ultraísmo) during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Although it partly emerged as a poetic correlative to the avant-garde revolution brought forth by such cubist painters as Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, Huidobro’s poetry is rooted in what constitutes primarily a romantic conception of the poetic word as endowed with a productive force to re-create itself infinitely and, consequently, to bring about a radical transformation of experience. Working with different approaches to avant-garde poetics developed by critics such as Peter Bürger and René de Costa, the chapter focuses on Huidobro’s long prose poem composed in 1928 and published in Madrid as Temblor de cielo (1931) and in Paris as Tremblement de ciel (1932). I show here how Huidobro’s crucial bilingual poem narrativizes his avant-garde theory of poetic language as a planetary quest for the aesthetic ideal of becoming that Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called, in reference to the poetics of Early German romanticism, the “literary absolute.”Less
This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different avant-garde groups in Paris (cubism) and in Madrid (ultraísmo) during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Although it partly emerged as a poetic correlative to the avant-garde revolution brought forth by such cubist painters as Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, Huidobro’s poetry is rooted in what constitutes primarily a romantic conception of the poetic word as endowed with a productive force to re-create itself infinitely and, consequently, to bring about a radical transformation of experience. Working with different approaches to avant-garde poetics developed by critics such as Peter Bürger and René de Costa, the chapter focuses on Huidobro’s long prose poem composed in 1928 and published in Madrid as Temblor de cielo (1931) and in Paris as Tremblement de ciel (1932). I show here how Huidobro’s crucial bilingual poem narrativizes his avant-garde theory of poetic language as a planetary quest for the aesthetic ideal of becoming that Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called, in reference to the poetics of Early German romanticism, the “literary absolute.”
Anita Patterson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781942954286
- eISBN:
- 9781786944177
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781942954286.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The essay cluster brings together leading Eliot and modernist scholars to commemorate the centenary of the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Together, they reexamine the ...
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The essay cluster brings together leading Eliot and modernist scholars to commemorate the centenary of the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Together, they reexamine the circumstances surrounding the poem’s original publication, recontextualize its allusions, and reconstruct its reception over the past century. Patterson examines the American roots of Eliot’s ironic love song, often considered through the lenses of European poetry and philosophy. Dickey returns to the poem’s early reception to challenge the now established narrative that “Prufrock” shocked early readers, showing how often his contemporaries associated the poem with Decadent or Aesthetic precedents. Ricks returns to the poem’s first publication in Poetry Magazine to understand how the poem’s first readers would have encountered the text and how this context would have mediated the reader’s experience. Cuda situates Eliot’s poem vis-à-vis current discourses on late modernism and demonstrates how lateness and belatedness feature centrally in the poem. Finally, Schuchard examines Eliot’s literary and religious allusions, showing that his allusive method is in full force even in his first poetic masterpiece.Less
The essay cluster brings together leading Eliot and modernist scholars to commemorate the centenary of the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Together, they reexamine the circumstances surrounding the poem’s original publication, recontextualize its allusions, and reconstruct its reception over the past century. Patterson examines the American roots of Eliot’s ironic love song, often considered through the lenses of European poetry and philosophy. Dickey returns to the poem’s early reception to challenge the now established narrative that “Prufrock” shocked early readers, showing how often his contemporaries associated the poem with Decadent or Aesthetic precedents. Ricks returns to the poem’s first publication in Poetry Magazine to understand how the poem’s first readers would have encountered the text and how this context would have mediated the reader’s experience. Cuda situates Eliot’s poem vis-à-vis current discourses on late modernism and demonstrates how lateness and belatedness feature centrally in the poem. Finally, Schuchard examines Eliot’s literary and religious allusions, showing that his allusive method is in full force even in his first poetic masterpiece.
Christopher Rosenmeier
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748696369
- eISBN:
- 9781474434805
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696369.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on the 1930s New Sensationist (xinganjuepai) writers Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, whose works are shown in later chapters to have influenced the subsequent literary scene. They are ...
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This chapter focuses on the 1930s New Sensationist (xinganjuepai) writers Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, whose works are shown in later chapters to have influenced the subsequent literary scene. They are seen here as an avant-garde group that wrote works in opposition to the overall direction of the contemporary literary field. Through close analysis of a number of short stories, the chapter demonstrates how these authors constructed hybrid works that incorporated tropes and stereotypes from popular literature, legend, tradition, literature and myth. By combining the real with the otherworldly and the imagined, these authors rejected realism and the politicisation of literature promoted at the time by the League of Left-wing Writers. The chapter also establishes aspects of these writers’ works that are used for later comparison.Less
This chapter focuses on the 1930s New Sensationist (xinganjuepai) writers Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, whose works are shown in later chapters to have influenced the subsequent literary scene. They are seen here as an avant-garde group that wrote works in opposition to the overall direction of the contemporary literary field. Through close analysis of a number of short stories, the chapter demonstrates how these authors constructed hybrid works that incorporated tropes and stereotypes from popular literature, legend, tradition, literature and myth. By combining the real with the otherworldly and the imagined, these authors rejected realism and the politicisation of literature promoted at the time by the League of Left-wing Writers. The chapter also establishes aspects of these writers’ works that are used for later comparison.
Christopher Rosenmeier
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748696369
- eISBN:
- 9781474434805
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696369.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The popular literature of the 1940s often crossed boundaries between the popular and the elite as well as between modernism and romanticism. New positions became possible in the literary field, and ...
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The popular literature of the 1940s often crossed boundaries between the popular and the elite as well as between modernism and romanticism. New positions became possible in the literary field, and writers like Xu Xu and Wumingshi exemplify these trends. They appropriated styles and tropes from earlier modernist writings in Chinese literature, thereby creating hybrid works that were among the most popular of the age. This chapter compares the writers covered in this study in terms of their depiction of modernity, narrative style, representation of the supernatural, and position in the literary field. Overall, the differences are found to outweigh the similarities, but the comparison highlights how various themes were adopted and adapted into popular literature of the 1940s from the New Sensationist writers of the preceding decade, showing their lasting impact.Less
The popular literature of the 1940s often crossed boundaries between the popular and the elite as well as between modernism and romanticism. New positions became possible in the literary field, and writers like Xu Xu and Wumingshi exemplify these trends. They appropriated styles and tropes from earlier modernist writings in Chinese literature, thereby creating hybrid works that were among the most popular of the age. This chapter compares the writers covered in this study in terms of their depiction of modernity, narrative style, representation of the supernatural, and position in the literary field. Overall, the differences are found to outweigh the similarities, but the comparison highlights how various themes were adopted and adapted into popular literature of the 1940s from the New Sensationist writers of the preceding decade, showing their lasting impact.
Catherine Hindson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474408912
- eISBN:
- 9781474445030
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474408912.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of the performance of a piece of avant-garde drama to highlights the prominent role of women in theatrical culture at the time, as both dramatists and ...
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This chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of the performance of a piece of avant-garde drama to highlights the prominent role of women in theatrical culture at the time, as both dramatists and actresses, and the professional opportunities that were then opening for them. It also shows the importance of a growing celebrity culture, and the complexity of the interactions between theatre, politics, religion, gender and theatrical production. It shows that even avant-garde theatre, concerned with such archetypal fin-de-siècle concerns as the occult and mysticism, were still deeply implicated in, and made possible by, a growing leisure industry.Less
This chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of the performance of a piece of avant-garde drama to highlights the prominent role of women in theatrical culture at the time, as both dramatists and actresses, and the professional opportunities that were then opening for them. It also shows the importance of a growing celebrity culture, and the complexity of the interactions between theatre, politics, religion, gender and theatrical production. It shows that even avant-garde theatre, concerned with such archetypal fin-de-siècle concerns as the occult and mysticism, were still deeply implicated in, and made possible by, a growing leisure industry.
Boris Groys
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231146180
- eISBN:
- 9780231518499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231146180.003.0013
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
This chapter examines Jean-François Lyotard's theory of the sublime. In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant defines the sublime as follows: “That is sublime which even to be able to think of ...
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This chapter examines Jean-François Lyotard's theory of the sublime. In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant defines the sublime as follows: “That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.” According to Kant, sublime events are inverted readymades transported from art into life. It is precisely this double coding of sublime images that gives us the chance to fear and enjoy them at the same time. In his treatise “The Sublime and the Avant-garde,” however, Lyotard has tried to interpret the sublime not as a recognition of art in life but rather as a recognition of life in art—not as an artistic sign that threatens our lives but as a sign of life that threatens the institution of art. According to Lyotard, the avant-garde demonstrates that “It happens” because it shows that under different circumstances “It” might possibly stop happening. Thus, finitude and the eventful nature of time become evident to the observer in a shocking manner.Less
This chapter examines Jean-François Lyotard's theory of the sublime. In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant defines the sublime as follows: “That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.” According to Kant, sublime events are inverted readymades transported from art into life. It is precisely this double coding of sublime images that gives us the chance to fear and enjoy them at the same time. In his treatise “The Sublime and the Avant-garde,” however, Lyotard has tried to interpret the sublime not as a recognition of art in life but rather as a recognition of life in art—not as an artistic sign that threatens our lives but as a sign of life that threatens the institution of art. According to Lyotard, the avant-garde demonstrates that “It happens” because it shows that under different circumstances “It” might possibly stop happening. Thus, finitude and the eventful nature of time become evident to the observer in a shocking manner.
Nathan Waddell
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748647316
- eISBN:
- 9780748684380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647316.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In ‘Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club’, Nathan Waddell explores Ford’s post-war revisiting of the pre-war avant-garde party scene in his ...
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In ‘Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club’, Nathan Waddell explores Ford’s post-war revisiting of the pre-war avant-garde party scene in his reconstruction in The Marsden Case (1923) of a staging of an ombres chinoises at the Cabaret Theatre Club. The Club’s performance space, the Cave of the Golden Calf, fostered part-public, part-private activities away from a dismal ‘above-ground’ where ‘people were disagreeably odd and wearisome things had to be accounted for’. Ford’s return in The Marsden Case to an early modernist scene of revelry and hedonism is, in Waddell’s account, not so much a ‘frivolous avoidance of […] political anxieties’ as the recalling of a cultural era ‘whose cosmopolitan and intellectual underpinnings might point the way for a directionless post-war modernity’.Less
In ‘Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club’, Nathan Waddell explores Ford’s post-war revisiting of the pre-war avant-garde party scene in his reconstruction in The Marsden Case (1923) of a staging of an ombres chinoises at the Cabaret Theatre Club. The Club’s performance space, the Cave of the Golden Calf, fostered part-public, part-private activities away from a dismal ‘above-ground’ where ‘people were disagreeably odd and wearisome things had to be accounted for’. Ford’s return in The Marsden Case to an early modernist scene of revelry and hedonism is, in Waddell’s account, not so much a ‘frivolous avoidance of […] political anxieties’ as the recalling of a cultural era ‘whose cosmopolitan and intellectual underpinnings might point the way for a directionless post-war modernity’.
