European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies
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Edited by:
Sascha Bru
The avant-garde and modernism take centre-stage within European academia today. The experimental literatures and arts in Europe between ca. 1850 and 1950, and their aftermath, figure prominently on curricula, while modernism and avant-garde studies have come to form distinct yet interlocking disciplines within the humanities in recent years. These disciplines take on various guises on the continent. Within French and German academia, "modernism" remains a term rather alien – "die Moderne" and "modernité" coming perhaps the closest to what is meant by "modernism" within the English context. Here, indeed, modernism has acquired a firm place in research, signaling above all a period in modern poetics and aesthetics, roughly between 1850 and 1950, during which a revolt against prevalent traditions in art, literature and culture took shape. Similarly, the term "avant-garde" comes with an array of often conflicting connotations. For some, the avant-garde marks the most radically experimental arts and literatures in modernism from the nineteenth century onward – the early twentieth-century vanguard movements of Futurism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, among others, coinciding with the avant-garde's most "heroic" phase. For others, the avant-garde belongs to a cultural or conceptual order differing altogether from that of modernism – the vanguard exploits from the 1950s onward marking that avant-garde arts and literatures can also perfectly abide outside modernism.
European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, far from aiming to reduce the complexity of various European research traditions, aspires to embrace the wide linguistic, terminological and methodological variety within both fields. Publishing an anthology of essays in English, French and German every two years, the series wishes to compare and relate French, German and British, but also Northern and Southern as well as Central and Eastern European findings in avant-garde and modernism studies. The series gathers the best and most thought-provoking recent research and devotes itself to the study of the European avant-garde and modernism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies promotes interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics, and aims to encourage an interest in the cultural dimensions and contexts of the avant-garde and modernism in Europe. Essays accepted by the editorial board are subjected to blind peer-review by international experts.
Editors-in-chief: Sascha Bru (Leuven University) and David Ayers (University of Kent).
Editorial Board: Jan Baetens (Leuven University), Hubert van den Berg (University of Groningen), Benedikt Hjartarson (University of Iceland) and Tania Ørum (University of Copenhagen).
Advisory Board: Dawn Ades (University of Essex), Wolfgang Asholt (Universität Osnabrück), Karlheinz Barck (Zentrum für Literaturforschung Berlin), Henri Béhar (Paris III, Sorbonne nouvelle), Timothy O. Benson (LACMA), Günter Berghaus (University of Bristol), Stefano Boeri (Multiplicity & Università luav di Venezia), Endre Bojtár (Central European University, Budapest), Christina von Braun (Humboldt Universität), Peter Bürger (Universität Bremen), Matei Calinescu (University of Indiana), Claus Clüver (University of Indiana), Antoine Compagnon (Collège de France), Maria Delaperrière (INALCO, Paris), Pascal Dethurens (Université de Strasbourg), Eva Forgács (College of Design, Pasadena), Hans Günther (Bielefeld University), Cornelia Klinger (Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen), Rudolf Kuenzli (University of Iowa), Bruno Latour (Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris), Paul Michael Lützeler (Washington University of St. Louis), Laura Marcus (University of Edinburgh), Richard Murphy (University of Sussex), François Noudelmann (Université de Paris VIII), Krisztina Passuth (University of Budapest), Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University/University of Southern California), Michel Poivert (Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne), Susan Rubin-Suleiman (Harvard University), Rainer Rumold (Northwestern University), Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris IV, Sorbonne), Brandon Taylor (University of Southhampton), Andrew Webber (Churchill College, Cambridge).
How has the process of globalization shaped artistic practices on the one hand, and art history and theory on the other? The contributions in this volume approach this question from a range of perspectives, taking into account the role of travel, for example, or practitioners’ increasing knowledge of other cultures, art’s increasing awareness of itself as existing on a global level, literary translation, the advance of technology, and the ever-changing grand narratives of art history. As well as reflections on European avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, the collection features discussions of Japan, Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. As a whole, the volume engages with broader current discourses about cultural globalization, and features input from leading scholars around the world as well as some important novel interventions by early-career researchers. The authors not only make a major contribution to the evolution of avant-garde studies, but also offer valuable, original points of view to art history and to the cultural theory of globalization more broadly.
Notions of crisis have long charged the study of the European avant-garde and modernism, reflecting the often turbulent nature of their development. Throughout their history, the avant-garde and modernists have both confronted and instigated crises, be they economic or political, aesthetic or philosophical, collective or individual, local or global, short or perennial. The seventh volume in the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies addresses the myriad ways in which the avant-garde and modernism have responded and related to crisis from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
How have Europe’s avant-garde and modernist movements given aesthetic shape to their crisis-laden trajectory? Given the many different watershed moments the avant-garde and modernism have faced over the centuries, what common threads link the critical points of their development? Alternatively, what kinds of crises have their experimental practices and critical modes yielded? The volume assembles case studies reflecting upon these questions and more from across all areas of avant-garde and modernist activity, including visual art, literature, music, architecture, photography, theatre, performance, curatorial practice, fashion and design.
Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century.
The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as:
· how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity?
· how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present?
· how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?
It has often been argued that the arrival of the early-20th-century avant-gardes and modernisms coincided with an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing. The European historical avant-gardes and modernisms excelled in their attempts to establish the specificity of media and art forms as well as in experimenting with the hybridity of the materials of their multiple disciplines. This third volume of the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies sheds light on the full range and import of this aspect in avant-garde and modernist aesthetics across all art forms and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
The book’s contributions, written by experts from some 20 countries, seek to answer the following questions:
- What sort of objects and material, works and media help us to properly grasp the avant-garde and modernist “aesthetics of matter”?
- How were affects, emotions and sensory and bodily experiences transferred and transformed in the experiment with matter?
- How were “immaterial” things such as concepts of time changed in this aesthetic moment?
- What “material meanings” were disseminated in the cultural transfer and translation of objects?
- How did subsequent avant-gardes deal with the “aesthetics of matter” in their response to historical predecessors?
Regarding the Popular charts the complex relationship between the avant-gardes and modernisms on the one hand and popular culture on the other. Covering (neo-)avant-gardists and modernists from various European countries, this second volume in the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies explores the nature of so-called “low” culture, dealing with aspects as diverse as the everyday and the folkloric. Regarding the Popular charts the many ways in which the allegedly “high” modernists and avant-gardists looked at and represented the “low”. As such, this book will appeal to all those with an interest in the dynamic of modern experimental arts and literatures.
The first volume of the new series “European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies” focuses on the relation between the avant-garde, modernism and Europe. It combines interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics. The essays, written by experts from more than fifteen countries, seek to bring out the complexity of the European avant-garde and modernism by relating it to Europe’s intricate history, multiculturalism and multilingualism. They aim to inquire into the divergent cultural views on Europe taking shape in avant-garde and modernist practices and to chart a composite image of the “other Europe(s)” that have emerged from the (contemporary) avant-garde and experimental modernism. How did the avant-garde and modernism in (and outside) Europe give shape to local, national and pan-European forms of identity and community? To what extent does the transnational exchange and cross-fertilisation of aesthetic tendencies illustrate the well-rehearsed claim that the avant-gardes form a typically European phenomenon? Dealing with canonised as well as lesser known exponents of modernism and the avant-garde throughout Europe, this book will appeal to all those interested in European cultural, literary and art history.
